Speaking

1. Smart marketing wins over investors

Best fit audience: startup founders looking for funding

Laurel Mintz runs an award-winning marketing agency, Elevate My Brand, where she has worked with hundreds of brands in all fundraising stages. Learn from a marketing and now VC expert on how to optimize fundraising efforts through strategic marketing techniques. Topic objectives include:

• Creating and messaging to funder personas
• Leveraging online and offline marketing touchpoints
• Controlling brand narrative on search for investors

2. Captivate investors with your elevator pitch

Best fit audience: startup founders looking for funding

Investors look at thousands of pitch decks. So, how do you stand out? Learn how to present yourself and your idea with a pitch deck that wows investors. Topic objectives include:

• Incorporating form and functional deck design elements  
• Understanding how to create impactful data points and charts
• Learning powerful presentation skills and post-meeting etiquette 

3. Investing beyond your portfolio

Best fit audience: new and seasoned VC investors

Your investment portfolio may be diverse in terms of sectors or assets. But are you funding diverse founders and ideas? Learn how your money can impact social and environmental crises and make larger returns at the same time. Topic objectives include:

• Discovering the importance and impact of generational wealth
• Ascertaining key figures about diverse teams and leaders
• Understanding the quadruple line impact of ESG-focused businesses and funds

4. Better than a Birkin

Best fit audience: new and seasoned VC investors

With the Great (Women’s) Wealth Transfer underway, now is the time for women to shift their financial mindset and redirect wealth from luxury goods to impact investments to create sustainable generational wealth. Topic objectives include:

• Conversing women’s money stories
• Understanding impact investing
• Learn how to earn while investing

5. Money Is a Commodity. Operators Aren’t: Why Founders Are Ghosting Brand-Name VCs

Best fit audience: new and seasoned VC investors

Capital has been commoditized. With money available everywhere, a fund’s name on the term sheet no longer closes the deal — operational firepower does. This session unpacks why founders are increasingly walking past tier-1 brands in favor of operator-led, ops-value-add funds that show up on marketing, GTM, and scaling. It explores what the commoditization of capital means for how funds compete, win, and defend ownership in a market where the check is the least interesting thing an investor brings. Topic objectives include:

• Understanding why capital is now table stakes and operational support is the real differentiator

• Discovering the marketing and GTM capabilities founders weigh most heavily when choosing investors

• Learning how brand-name funds are losing competitive rounds — and what they’re doing to adapt

• Gaining a practical lens for assessing whether a fund’s “value-add” is real or rhetorical

6. Value-Add Is a Lie — Unless You Can Prove It: Building Ops Funds Founders Actually Want

Best fit audience: new and seasoned VC investors

“Value-add” has become the most overused and least substantiated phrase in venture. Founders have heard it from everyone and trust it from almost no one. This session separates the cliché from the real thing, laying out how operator-led, ops-value-add funds build provable, repeatable support systems — especially in marketing and GTM — that founders actively seek out. It’s a candid look at what genuine operational value requires, and how funds that deliver it are pulling ahead. Topic objectives include:

• Learning why founders have stopped believing generic “value-add” claims
• Understanding the difference between one-off favors and a real operational support system
• Discovering how to build and staff a marketing/GTM offering founders will choose you for
• Uncovering proof points and metrics that turn “value-add” from a pitch line into a moat

7. The New VC Power Move: Be the Operator in the Room, Not the Check in the Deck

Best fit audience: new and seasoned VC investors

Founders no longer pick investors for capital — capital is everywhere. They pick for who shows up after the wire clears. This talk argues that operational capability, especially in marketing and go-to-market, is the defining edge reshaping which funds win and which get left out. Drawing on the rise of ops-value-add funds, it lays out how being the operator in the room — not the biggest check — is rewriting the rules of competitive deal-making. Topic objectives include:

• Shifting from capital-as-differentiator to operations-as-differentiator, and what’s driving it
• Understanding why marketing/GTM expertise is the highest-leverage value-add a fund can offer early-stage founders
• Exploring how operator-led funds structure their teams and offerings to deliver real, repeatable support
• Gaining practical signals founders should look for — and that funds should build — to prove operational value

Want Laurel to host a new or original topic for your event? Contact us and let us know.