Community Newsletter #63
The messy, honest, necessary side of building, a fireside feat. Paige Hendrix Buckner, CEO of All Raise, and more happening across the community this month.
Hey team! 👋
June is here and team G&W is getting ready for World Cup ⚽️ 🏆. Tell us: who are you rooting for?
Meanwhile on the work front, great conversations and a few deadlines worth knowing about. Here’s your roundup.
🔎 TLDR
🔥 Upcoming Fireside chat with All Raise’s Paige Hendrix Buckner: The State of Play for Female VCs
🎤 Leslie's Women Who Lead Summit talk challenged aspiring founders to start before they're ready
🎥 Recap: No Filter with Charlie O’Donnell — what VCs actually think
💡 Latest Venture with Leslie: Seattle Mourns, or, A Note on What Endures
💸 Grants & deadlines closing soon
🔥 The State of Play for Female VCs feat. Paige Hendrix Buckner, CEO of All Raise
Don’t miss our upcoming fireside with one of the sharpest voices in venture. Paige Hendrix Buckner is the CEO of All Raise, the influential non-profit whose mission is to accelerate the success of women and nonbinary investors in venture capital. She’s bringing all of it to our community for a candid, no-filter conversation on the real state of play in 2026.
This one’s for founders, investors, and anyone who believes the future of venture should look different than its past.
📅 June 25 | 11 AM PT | Virtual
🔗 Register HERE
🎤 Bet on Yourself: Watch Leslie’s inspiring talk at the Women Who Lead Summit
Last week Leslie took the stage in Seattle, and she didn’t hold back. Her talk was part personal story, part objection handling, part rallying cry.
Betting on yourself isn’t one big dramatic moment. It’s a decision you make one day, and the day after that, and the day after that. She shared stories of founders who googled their way to their first product, sold macarons to friends before quitting their day job, and built companies that help families through their worst moments — all of them committed to figuring it out.
She also said the quiet part out loud: it’s hard to keep going. Her advice for founders is: don’t quit when it gets hard. Quit when the hard is not worth it.
The full talk is worth sending to every woman in your life who’s been sitting on an idea.
🔥 Recap: Fireside Chat with Charlie O’Donnell
No Filter: What VCs Are Really Thinking
VC and author Charlie O’Donnell came to our fireside with one agenda: to tell founders what VCs won’t say to their face. Let’s just say the zoom room got uncomfortable… in the best way possible.
🎥 Watch the full recording here
📖 Read the recap in our blog here
A big month across the portfolio. Here's what's happening.
Seven Starling is expanding into menopause mental health care. Women are likely to experience depression during this life transition — yet less than half know that menopause can affect mental health at all. Same clinician-led model, same referral pathway, now covering every season of a woman's life.
mPathic launched mPACT — a clinician-built framework that benchmarks how AI models perform in high-risk conversations. Suicide risk, eating disorders, misinformation. Avoiding harm isn’t the same as providing real support, and no model consistently meets the clinical standard quite yet. mpathic is making those gaps visible and fixable.
it's electric is on a tear. One month, two cities! Philadelphia just signed on for 1,000 Level 2 curbside chargers across all 18 city planning districts. And in DC, they were selected to deploy the city's first solar-powered curbside chargers at public libraries.
Agave Health is opening the waitlist for Rose — an AI companion built specifically for the ADHD brain. Built from thousands of real coaching interactions, Rose helps you start when you're stuck, stay accountable, and know when to bring in a human. Early access opens this summer - join the waitlist here.
🚀 Open roles across the Portfolio
Good roles, great teams. Know someone? Send them this.
Bigger Picture — Freight Implementation Specialist. Tackling one of the most complex, least visible problems in global logistics.
mpathic — Multiple open roles at a company that just hit a serious growth inflection.
Goodword — Join the team building a smarter, more human layer of social software.
Source — AI-native operating system for commercial construction - multiple open roles
Rosie — Infrastructure for flexible, on-demand childcare and household support → Head of Engineering · Founding Product Designer
Seattle Mourns, or, A Note on What Endures
This week’s Venture with Leslie is different. No frameworks, no fundraising tactics. Just something worth sitting with.
Reflecting on the loss of two local business leaders, Leslie offers a reflection of what matters. Two men in the prime of their lives, both mainstays of their community. And the tributes that followed weren’t about their accomplishments, they were about who they were. The lives they touched. The seats they gave to others. The way they made people feel.
In a business culture that rewards achievement, it turns out character is what people actually remember.
It’s a short read. The kind that stops you in your tracks for just a minute.
💸 Grants & Accelerators Roundup
We update the Founder Hub frequently with grants, accelerators, fellowships, and programs that move founders forward. Here's a few that are closing soon.
She Builds — SheBuilds is a 48-hour online hackathon where women come together to turn ideas into real, working products Apply by June 2
Famous Amos Ingredients for Success — $150K in capital awards, mentorship, and resources for early-stage Black business owners. Apply by June 2
Impact Catalyst — Non-dilutive seed funding for early-stage life science startups. Apply by June 12
MassNextGen — Non-dilutive grant + lab bench + investor showcase for life
science startups. Apply by June 12
Cartier Women's Initiative — Annual international program for women-led businesses with strong social or environmental impact. Apply by June 16
That's a wrap for #63. See you out there. 👋
Graham & Walker is an early-stage venture fund backing extraordinary founders and ideas that break the mold.