RareBreed Ventures First Annual Meeting was a Vibe and so Much More
Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent, and warn the opposed. — Whitney M. Young Jr.
On August 18th, 2023 RareBreed Ventures hit a milestone. We held our first annual meeting.
Typically at an annual meeting a VC firm updates its investors, Limited Partners known as LPs, on the fund and its investments. Partners and their teams often share key metrics, introduce new/key hires, share lessons learned, shifts in strategy, and market insights. They can also include panels/fireside chats and showcase some of their portfolio companies.
Annual meetings are a slightly more in-depth quarterly business report with an audience. It’s your classic, long, business update meeting.
If you know me or RareBreed Ventures, you’d know that we are far from your classic venture firm. We are authentic to who we are as a firm and how we invest at all times. This authenticity showed up in how we planned and executed our annual meeting.
We made it a two-part event.
Part 1 was similar to your traditional annual meeting and was intended for LPs and a few of our VIPs.
Part 2 included our community at large.
Below is a portion of the invite we sent out for the event:
RareBreed is hosting an Annual Summit, inviting LPs, VCs, and founders to get updates on the Fund, what we’ve learned, where we’re headed, and to learn from RareBreed founders and experience Baltimore (Yes! We will have crabs)
*Note: this is a two part event
From 10AM — 12PM @ Brown Advisory will be closed room LPs and VIPs only
From 12PM — 630PM @ Patterson Park will be outdoor entertainment, food, fun, and additional programming Feel free to bring family and friends Dress comfortably.
That’s right, the second half of our annual meeting was a family-friendly cookout with panels and programming at Patterson Park
The goal was to be authentic to ourselves and stand out, which we did. In his LinkedIn post, Wolf Starr wrote about our annual meeting after getting his invitation:
We cannot fix old problems without new solutions. McKeever (Mac) Conwell,II and the team at RareBreed Ventures have given us a peek into the future of Venture by building better chairs around broken tables.
Find the full post here:
That was some pretty high praise to give even before attending the event!
After Wolfe’s post went out, I was quietly freaking out and questioning if we were doing too much and being too different. But, in the end, we felt it was important to stay true to who we are as a firm.
We had to do it our way, the RareBreed way!
With that, we pushed forward and on August 18th, 2023 we had our big two-part annual meeting and the video below shows you how it went.
The first half was great. We got to give our fund updates with a few panels and fireside chats at Brown Advisory’s headquarters in Baltimore City right on the water.
One of the coolest things we did was make a limited-edition coffee table book that displays the dope founders we invested in for our LPs. Putting it together gave me and the team time to reflect on the fact that we’d fully deployed Fund I. We had invested in 47 companies in 30+ verticals in 17 states, and 4 countries, creating a truly diverse portfolio!
Then we got our guests on buses and took them to Patterson Park in Baltimore City for lunch. We had cookout staples like burgers and hot dogs, vegan food from local restaurant Gangsta Vegan, and sandwiches and wraps from our portfolio company, Breadless. And of course, you can’t have a cookout in Baltimore without blue crabs (with RareBreed branded mallets)!
It was cool to see our kids running around, laughing, and playing while enjoying sandwiches and wraps from Breadless (who said kids don’t like to eat healthy?)
It was also fun to see my friend and Kauffman classmate, Mike McCauley, being taught how to eat a Maryland blue crab from my mother of all people. Below is that moment captured by one of our RareBreed founders, Roberto Inetti of Roboamp.
After lunch, we held five outdoor panels at the park. I have to admit, it went better than I could have hoped for.
We had a day full of amazing information and a lot of fun. There were so many highlights, it was incredible!
Some founders made connections with other VCs, while others founders made big announcements. Some even gave out samples of their products.
Our portfolio company, Rebundle, had a hair braider at the event demonstrating the greatness of Rebundle’s plant-based braiding hair as seen in the video clip above.
We had the privilege of having my good friend, Associate & Regional director at Howard University and PNC National Center for Entrepreneurship, Johnny Graham, Ph.D., as a speaker followed by a musical break led by him on the trumpet. This moment was a perfect example of how we are all more than just one thing (he killed it y’all.)
All the while our kids played in a bounce house, enjoyed face paint, and ate good food.
We had an ambitious plan for the day and thankfully, we pulled it off. The RareBreed authenticity that I’ve been talking about throughout shined through in the feedback I got from our attendees:
I spoke to one of our speakers who is an LP at a fund of funds that goes to a ton of annual meetings. When he and I talked, he was trying to find the right words to describe the day. He struggled to come up with what to say and landed on “it was just a vibe.” Now that’s dope.
A friend of mine who is a corporate leader, pulled me aside and said “This is what happens when different people get into positions of leadership. My team and I are going to be rethinking our corporate annual meeting because why not make it fit our culture.”
The last comment I’d like to share came from a friend’s teenage daughter who told her mom how cool the companies were and how diverse the event was. She mentioned how comfortable she felt in our environment. Now my friend’s daughter is finding interest in venture capital for the first time which is hilarious because my friend is a VC too. That young lady will be a RareBreed fellow one day for sure.
All in all, it was an incredible day and I hope it lived up to Wolf’s expectations.
With our first annual meeting behind us, we are excited for our second which will be on Jul 12, 2024. If you’d like to join us in Baltimore, we’d love to have you for a day of RareBreed startups and updates, networking, good music, good food, and a lot of fun. Click this link to request an invite.
See you there.