I Started College at 16, Then Became a Yoga Teacher. Here’s How My Unconventional Journey Led to $100M.

Key Takeaways Gilbreath drew on her lifelong passion for healing to start two businesses.

Her experiences as a CPG founder motivated her to become an angel investor for other brands.

Here’s how taking the path less traveled set Gilbreath up for entrepreneurial success.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Genevieve Gilbreath, co-founder and general partner of Springdale Ventures, a CPG venture capital firm focusing on early-stage brands. Gilbreath co-founded the Austin, Texas-based fund with fellow operator-turned-investor Dan Graham in 2019. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Image Credit: Springdale Ventures. Genevieve Gilbreath.

I started college super young — I was 16. I was already young for my grade in high school, then got tired of high school so I finished early. In 1991, I started at Baylor University, where I was an art and anthropology major. I was always fascinated by how humans heal and how they use plants to heal. That’s been a lifelong passion of mine and eventually motivated me to start a business.

After some more twists and turns, I left Baylor and enrolled at Pacific University as a fine arts major. I graduated from there in May 1995. I went on to graduate with a master’s degree in medical anthropology at Baylor University. Then I worked as an adjunct professor at Baylor, and a couple of years later, completed a yoga teacher training program and started teaching yoga and doing independent health consulting on health, wellness and stress management.

Fast forward to 2004 — I traveled to India for three months. I studied and taught yoga there.

Starting a B2B supplement business with friends

Soon after, I started a B2B supplement company with some friends. We’d moved to Hawaii because of that passion for herbal supplements and how people use plants and culture to heal. That’s how I got into the consumer products industry in the first place — that passion. We bought plants from local farmers and would process them over in California. We never raised capital, but the business was paying all the bills. I ended up moving back to India and made orders from the back of a rickshaw.

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