Emerging VC Talent: Edition 12, Natalie Poston

January 27, 2025

By Juliette Richert
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Welcome to my monthly interview series on emerging VC talent! We talk everything from gathering insights on emerging industries and tech, to venture dynamics, to career-best practices.
In this edition, I interviewed Natalie Poston, Senior Associate at Motley Fool Ventures. Motley Fool Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund powered by The Motley Fool's brand, investing approach, and communities.
TL;DR: Key Takeaways
Hot take: Restaurant work should be mandatory because it teaches customer empathy, resilience, and an owner’s mindset faster than almost any other early job.
Best practices: The strongest founders obsess over learning. Testing channels, owning mistakes, and evolving quickly instead of pretending the path was linear.
Setting up for success: Founders who pair real or lived-adjacent founder–market fit with strong brand storytelling and community-building create outsized leverage long before scale.

Get The Artemis Fund’s stories in your inbox.

Juliette: Could you introduce yourself and Motley Fool Ventures?
Natalie: I’m a Senior Associate at Motley Fool Ventures. We invest $1-$2 million in late-seed and Series A companies. We’re pretty generalist but spend a lot of time in fintech, future of work, and digital health.
We’re not a traditional CVC. We have a separate fund structure, but we do get all the benefits of being part of The Motley Fool, which includes deep experience in consumer finance. Many people on our team actually come from the parent company, which creates a lot of value for portfolio companies. In my role, I’m very focused on investment work and bringing more great companies into our pipeline.
Juliette: What’s a hobby you have now, and does it tie to your work?
Natalie: Peloton. I really love how Peloton builds community. In a live class, thousands of people are on the leaderboard, all going through the same intervals at the same time. It reminds me a lot of being a founder. You want a community of people who are doing it alongside you.
Great investors build communities that their founders can lean on. Great founders seek that out too. No one does it alone. Techstars was that for me as a founder, and now I give back as a mentor.
Juliette: What was your very first job?
Natalie: I was a waitress at a Coney Island in metro Detroit during high school. And if anyone’s familiar, Coney Island isn’t just a diner. It’s a very specific kind with a strong Greek influence. Chicken pitas, Greek salads, saganaki flaming cheese. It’s very Detroit. I go every time I’m back.
My hot take is that restaurant work should be mandatory for teens. You learn customer service, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, and relationship-building, including both short-term interactions with every customer and long-term relationships with regulars. There’s performance under pressure, and there’s an owner’s mindset. You’re basically responsible for your own P&L.
I also loved that time plus hustle equaled money. How much I earned was directly related to how hard I worked and how I showed up. I did that all through college until I got my first job in PR.
Juliette: And what were you doing before this?
Natalie: Before Motley Fool Ventures, I was a founder. I co-founded a company called JoyLet, which was a baby gear rental membership and gear guidance platform for parents.
The easiest way to describe it is “Rent the Runway for durable baby gear.” So things like bouncers, bassinets, strollers, stuff parents usually only need for three to six months. The kind of stuff that’s really expensive, it takes up a ton of space, and then you have to figure out what to do with it when your kid grows up.
Most people are familiar with rental for travel, but we focused on in-home rentals. Parents would rent instead of buy. And the value prop was really around convenience, sustainability, and storage for parents.
I started the company with one of my classmates from Georgetown, Ali. We launched in DC, expanded to Baltimore, went through Techstars New York, and then we had an exit in fall 2024 when we were acquired by GoodBuy Gear. They’re a secondhand and open-box return logistics platform for manufacturers focused on the baby industry.
Juliette: You also started your career in marketing and CPG, right?
Natalie: After undergrad, I spent about 10 years in integrated marketing and PR in Chicago, focusing on CPG. My clients included Hershey’s, State Farm, Unilever, P&G, and Kimberly-Clark – literally everything from insurance to toilet paper.
I had many really interesting experiences throughout that journey. I did everything from writing really nuanced crisis communications messaging and protocols to big experiential activations. There was even a summer when I was on tour with New Kids on the Block, and we were taking over stadiums and putting Continental toilet paper in every single one. That was a massive, massive undertaking.
Juliette: How did you make the jump from marketing into venture?
Natalie: As my career evolved, I became more interested in corporate social responsibility, including how companies communicate their impact and how they can have a greater effect on the world.
Toward the end of my marketing career, I got kind of frustrated. We’d present ideas that required clients to change operational practices, and we’d just get told, “No, stay in your lane. Focus on marketing.”
And I remember thinking, okay, maybe I don’t actually understand business. Maybe I need to go to business school and really understand the business case for impact.
That’s what led me to Georgetown for my MBA. I went in thinking I’d do CSR or some kind of impact role. VC was not on my radar at all until I went to a career seminar and started learning about it. Then I realized how aligned it was with my goals because there’s almost no bigger lever for impact than funding early-stage companies.
From there, I was really off to the races trying to pivot into VC. It was a big pivot, PR to VC, but Georgetown had a lot of infrastructure that made it possible. The first thing I did was join the entrepreneurship and VC club. Then I got really involved with the Venture Fellows program, which provides an opportunity to intern with a VC fund for a year.
I interviewed at a bunch of funds and ended up at Greenspring, which was later acquired by StepStone. They have a really interesting platform: a large fund-of-funds practice, direct investing, and a very active secondary-market strategy. It was a great way to understand VC as an asset class across the entire spectrum.
I started there midway through my first year, worked full-time over the summer, stayed on through graduation, and then joined post-grad. And that was a pretty crazy time, because I was starting my first full-time role in VC while also working on a startup on the side.
We eventually realized we were never going to fully give the company a real shot unless we went full-time. We happened to win a Georgetown alumni pitch competition right around the time we were quitting our jobs in spring 2022, and that gave us the runway to go all in.
Juliette: A lot of young investors talk about wanting to operate to better understand venture. What did being a founder teach you about being an investor?
Natalie: The first thing is definitely empathy. Founders turned investors know what it’s like to be in the trenches, having the weight of the company on you every single day and doing everything everywhere all at once.
No startup journey is perfect from day one. There are inflection points. There are pivots. There are improvements you make along the way. That perspective really changes how you evaluate companies.
And then there are operational insights. I spent my early career at marketing agencies but it is different being in the trenches as a founder. You're responsible for everything, and I built more skills in brand building, marketing, PR, partnerships, and how you show up as a brand.
At JoyLet, that was one of our biggest strengths. People always thought we were way bigger than we actually were, because we showed up in national media all the time. We were quoted in Parents and Babylist, and we won a World Changing Ideas Award from Fast Company.
Knowing how to leverage your story, build your brand, and create that presence that helps you scale, that’s something I bring into investing.
Juliette: Do you think founders spot different attributes in other founders than non-founders do?
Natalie: Yeah, I think so. When you’re a founder, you’re also surrounded by other founders, and you see people going through the same things you are. You’re clocking resilience, perspective, and execution in real time.
Founder–market fit is really important to me, that non-obvious insight that comes from lived experience. I’ve seen founders build solutions for problems they haven’t actually had, and it’s less compelling.
In our case, we weren’t parents when we started JoyLet, but we were both in that stage of life where we wanted to be. My co-founder actually got pregnant and had her first child while we were building the company. As we were researching gear, making recommendations, and talking to parents, we were going through it ourselves. We were very much in the consumer's mind.
Execution matters too. You meet a lot of people who say they’re founding something, but they’re not really moving forward. And then there’s learning. As a founder, you’re constantly learning, constantly getting more efficient.
As an investor, I actually want to hear about mistakes and learnings. You want to back someone who’s coachable and evolving, not someone pretending it’s all been smooth sailing.
Juliette: How does your marketing background show up in how you evaluate companies?
Natalie: I do a lot of B2B investing, so I’m looking at the same core metrics everyone looks at. I’m also trying to understand things like: Which channels are working hardest? What have you tested? What have you learned?
At Series A, you want to see what’s working so you can really pour fuel on the fire.
And even in B2B, there’s a lot you can learn from B2C. Buyers are still people. They’re connecting with your brand. How you show up, how you communicate, how tight your materials are, it all matters.
Juliette: Is there an industry you’re particularly excited about right now?
Natalie: Fintech, especially embedded finance. Embedding payments, lending, insurance, or accounting into non-financial software removes friction and improves user experience. It also unlocks new, high-margin revenue streams. It benefits everyone. Users get convenience. Software platforms monetize more. Financial service providers acquire customers more efficiently.
The moment is ripe. Banks are collaborating with fintechs, people are more financially literate, infrastructure has improved, APIs and data connectivity are better. Add AI to that, and you get hyper-personalization and real-time insights. It opens up a lot of possibilities.
Juliette: How are you using AI day to day?
Natalie: Mostly to reduce admin work and synthesize information faster so we can spend more time on deeper thinking and debate. We use enterprise tools a lot. I’ve experimented with Velvet, which I really like. I’ve used Grammarly forever. Granola as a note-taker is honestly my best friend. It adds so much leverage to the day-to-day.
I’m also experimenting with AI-driven CRMs. I use AI to move faster, take away administrative burden, do deep research where it makes sense, and to push back on my thinking, to give me alternate perspectives I might not have considered.
Juliette: What’s one piece of advice you carry with you?
Natalie: Good investors come from anywhere. When I first thought about VC, I felt insecure about my background. I didn’t come from finance; I hadn’t done deep financial analysis. I came from PR. But the “soft skills” I developed, relationship building, communication, networking, are actually core competencies in venture.
Don’t discount your prior experience. Every diverse experience compounds. I might have discounted those skills early on, but they’re integral to my day-to-day now.
Know an emerging VC talent I should feature? Send me a note on Linkedin.
We believe once in a generation companies will be built by unexpected founders. If that sounds like you, pitch us here!

Newsletter Signup