Margaret Coblentz

Starting business school five months after giving birth to your third child might be overwhelming — and perhaps a nonstarter — for many prospective students, but Margaret Coblentz was undaunted.

When she entered Stanford GSB, Coblentz had already launched and grown Frances Austen, a luxury cashmere clothing company, then sold it, and had begun investing in other businesses, all while raising a growing family. Her secret power, she says, is knowing what she wants and mapping a detailed route to achieve it.

“I’m very focused around what’s important and what’s not,” says Coblentz, co-founder of Capital F, which makes pre-seed and seed investments in technology companies across health, digital commerce, and consumer technology. “I set goals, figure out how to achieve them, and stay super-disciplined on that path — which makes me sound like I’m not a very fun person, which I think I am — but that’s how I applied and got into the GSB.”

That hyperfocus has defined Coblentz’s career, which began in retail and e-commerce merchandising, and enabled her to juggle family and career. Now, the San Francisco resident taps her personal and professional experience to advise startup founders and raise capital with her investment fund, Capital F — which she co-founded in 2023 and has just celebrated a milestone of its own.

You started in retail merchandising. What drew you to that field?

After I graduated from college, I did a brief stint in consulting, and I liked the quantitative piece and thought, if I could do something that involved one of my other key strengths, creativity, that might be a really interesting career path. In retail merchandising, you get business ownership and responsibility at a very young age. You’re responsible for delivering performance, and it’s very cool if that feeds your soul, which it did for me.

And then you pivoted from retail executive to founder.

I had scaled the e-commerce side of a retailer [Charlotte Russe] from $20 million to almost $100 million in revenue. I had just reached a point in my career where I was ready to try a riskier pathway with the skills I had developed. I wanted to work through the process of what it was like to start a business, and part of it was the ambition to create something new.

Frances is my middle name, and Austen is for Jane Austen. I didn’t want to put my name on it because I knew that I eventually wanted the business to be acquired. Part of the reason I did not raise capital was my thesis, based on the market at the time — which ultimately proved correct — that the best pathway to build a business like this was to bootstrap it for growth. It was very capital-efficient, and I was able to get it acquired, which was a good outcome.

How did you apply what you had learned to angel investing?

I had started angel investing in 2018, and so by the time Frances Austen was acquired in 2021, I’d built a track record of investments that indicated I had a strong ability to identify and support companies that were on the pathway to success.

I was also a founding member in 2019 of a group called The Council Angels, which has a couple hundred angel investor members all over the country. I became part of some amazing female founder communities and realized that there was a really interesting opportunity at the early stage.

If you had deep, deep, deep operating experience, you could have a lot of edge in identifying people who had the capability to become great operators and identifying business models that had a lot of potential to grow. That investment thesis is what I honed and worked on before deciding to attend the GSB.

Given your experience and success, why was Stanford GSB your next step?

I wanted to make an investment in myself, in more formal education. And I wanted to figure out: Was I going to join a VC firm? Was I going to start a VC firm? Or was I going to continue doing angel investing and advising? At the GSB, I focused on those three areas. I took all the classes offered around venture capital and investing.

How did you make that work with an infant, two very young children, a husband with a consuming career, and a commute from San Francisco to Palo Alto?

It started with my whole family and our nanny being completely on board. As I was making the decision about whether to accept my place at the GSB, our nanny said, “I will come early. I will stay late.” The foundation that allowed it to happen was that everyone on my little home team was aligned.

The next piece is that I’m very disciplined and very goal-oriented. I was focused on what I wanted to get out of the year and said no to a lot of things that I’m sure would have added richness to my life and would have been great experiences, but I was extremely clear about my priorities. Having a super-clear framework for why I was going to the GSB helped me get the most out of it.

After graduating from Stanford GSB, you co-founded Capital F, which invests in innovative digital companies targeting women. Why that focus?

Women control 85% of consumer spending, and we really look at health and wellness, an area where consumers have historically been underserved. At one of our portfolio companies, Xella Health, CEO Kelly Lacob, MBA ’20, is building a platform for women’s reproductive health. Women’s reproductive ability is highly heterogeneous, but there is very little ability for women to find out what their ability is until they want to try to have children. It’s really a black box.

This is a great example of backing a founder early with this deep expertise in her field and the passion to build something new but also with the skill set and the team to tackle this challenging problem.

How do you assess whether someone will be a successful founder?

There are two core traits we always look for. One is the ability to take feedback, because when you’re investing at the earliest stage, oftentimes, they have yet to have undergone a pivot. They have yet to go through a tough fundraising round, and they haven’t had to make tough decisions about layoffs. So it’s important that they are able to listen to different points of view and engage in that feedback.

The other piece that’s really important is being able to execute at a certain velocity. They have to be able to take in information and then make smart decisions. It’s a very GSB characteristic. We love to get feedback because we all know that it helps make us better.

What types of support do you find help startups find their footing?

I have coached founders through their first firing. We have just placed an incredibly experienced CMO with one of our portfolio companies, and it’s someone who would never have joined a seed-stage company — except that she met the founders and became sold on their vision, and we helped bring that partnership together. Human capital is such an important part of any business, but particularly at the early stage, so we’ve stepped in and supported our founders.

Capital F just notched a milestone: launching its first fund.

It’s very exciting. The last two years have been historically bad times to raise a first-time fund, and we’re thrilled to succeed in this market. It’s a testament to knowing that setting goals and working to achieve them happens over a long career path. Spending time at the GSB, you’re able to build perspective on what a long career could look like. That’s very motivating, building on my operating experience, my angel investing experience, and the time I spent at the GSB working on this thesis. It has all come together nicely.

What aspects of your Stanford GSB education do you continue to draw on?

My most-used class at the GSB is definitely Glenn Kramon’s Winning Writing. I have used those skills on an almost daily basis. As amazing as AI is — and it can really help you with your writing — the skills that Glenn teaches in that class are still highly relevant to making your writing an effective carrier of your message.

Joe Piotroski’s class on valuations was so good. He teaches with such passion and helps bring financial statements to life. Part of what I loved about the class was that because I’d had such deep experience operating, I was able to bring a lot of that insight to the financial statements. Our final project was a report on [ecommerce company] Rent the Runway, and I have to say, our analysis was spot-on.

And it was incredible to meet someone like Anne Beyer, an amazing professor who also has young children. It was really wonderful to get to know her because it was not the norm for the folks at the front of the classroom to be women with young children.

What are you optimistic about?

There’s so much potential out there in the world. In general, people really want to do the right thing and be good, and there are incredible people out there building companies that are going to make our lives better.

Photos by Josh Edelson