F&F Ventures | Investment Thesis & Preferences

01Investment Thesis

Deal flow starts in the room, not the cold inbox. F&F backs founders it already knows from Founders & Funders events, investing where its involvement can directly move revenue, customers, or relationships.

Exclusion Criteria

Not a fit for founders without a validated revenue signal or where the firm's operator bench (commerce platform, distribution, event network) can't materially move outcomes.

02Investment Team

JE

Jeff Erickson

Founder & General Partner

AS

Adam Shaw

Co-Founder & General Partner

JT

Jian Tam

General Partner

CY

Christopher Yang

Venture Partner (President, SHOPLINE)

IE

Inger Erickson

Co-Founder, Founders & Funders

PH

Patty Hernando

Operations & Relationship Manager

03F4 Research Brief

F&F Ventures Research

Investment Thesis

F&F Ventures is the venture capital arm of Founders & Funders, a relationship-driven events and community platform founded in Utah in 2019 by Jeff Erickson (with Inger Erickson helping scale it as CEO) and later co-run with Adam Shaw. The fund's stated belief is that deal flow should come from trust built in a room, not a cold inbox: "If we cannot move the needle on revenue, customers, or relationships, we do not invest." F&F backs founders directly, co-invests alongside other funds, and supports operations through purchase-order financing when it helps a company grow. The thesis centers on consumer goods and physical-product companies, with technology investments following through the same event-driven deal flow.

Sector Focus

The fund is explicitly consumer-goods and e-commerce focused: direct-to-consumer brands across food and beverage, personal care, apparel, and consumer hardware. Its anchor structural partner is SHOPLINE, a global commerce platform (700,000+ merchants) whose co-president, Christopher Yang, sits on F&F Ventures' investment committee. Portfolio companies migrate to SHOPLINE and receive a dedicated solution engineer plus reduced processing fees as part of the investment.

Stage Focus

Pre-Seed through Series A, per the firm's own framing: "early enough for us to matter, late enough to show traction."

Check Size

General Partner Jeff Erickson has publicly described check size as flexible, roughly $100K to $3M per company (LinkedIn, June 2026), consistent with a $10M debut fund spread across a growing portfolio of 13+ companies.

Lead Tendency

Unclear from public sources whether F&F typically leads. Language on the site emphasizes "co-investing alongside other funds" as a core mechanic alongside direct backing, suggesting a mix of lead and follow depending on deal.

Recent Activity

F&F Ventures formally launched its $10 million debut e-commerce/CPG fund on August 31, 2026, in partnership with SHOPLINE, after informally previewing the fund's focus at its own Salt Lake City VC ReversePitch event on August 19, 2026. The fund was already actively deploying pre-launch, including a July 2026 investment in NoLimit, a San Francisco sports-tech startup building AI-powered compression apparel with embedded medical-grade sensors. The firm is currently raising a second, $100M Consumer Goods & Tech fund, which GP Adam Shaw has described as structured around shorter liquidity cycles than a traditional 10-year fund, so portfolio companies don't need billion-dollar outcomes to return capital to LPs. The firm also commits 2% of the fund and 2% of carried interest (GP and LP) to impact-oriented "economic-growth opportunities."

Portfolio Highlights

Direct investments include Protein Waffles (co-founded by GP Jian Tam, an eight-figure DTC waffle brand), NoLimit (AI-powered smart athletic apparel), See Sea Jewelry, Link Luggage, OnGo Energy, G-Box Freeze Dried Candy, Mom Ease Solutions, and Board Budder (eco-friendly ski/snowboard wax). No exits reported yet; the venture arm is less than a year old as of this research.

Team

Jeff Erickson, Founder & General Partner — Started Founders & Funders eight years ago (2019 in Utah); scaled a consumer brand to eight figures before selling to a private equity firm; 40+ angel investments including early involvement with Carta.
Adam Shaw, Co-Founder & General Partner — Grew a medical-supply/physical-product company from zero to $18M in two years as a BYU student; management-consulting background restructuring procurement for major REITs; based in Jersey City, NJ.
Jian Tam, General Partner — Two prior e-commerce exits; co-founder of Protein Waffles, an eight-figure retail-distributed CPG brand; 20+ years in consumer packaged goods.
Christopher Yang, Venture Partner — Co-President of SHOPLINE (the fund's venture partner and commerce-platform anchor); sits on F&F Ventures' investment committee.
Inger Erickson, Co-Founder — Founded and exited an Inc. 500-ranked company; active angel investor; built marketing/lead-gen engine behind Founders & Funders' national scale.
Patty Hernando, Operations & Relationship Manager — Coordinates team, events, and partner relationships.

Decision Process

Investment committee: the three General Partners (Erickson, Shaw, Tam) plus SHOPLINE co-president Christopher Yang as Venture Partner on the committee.

Founder Preferences

Explicitly stated on site: passionate and obsessed, clarity and focus, strong execution, coachable, self-aware founders; businesses with early revenue or validated demand, a clear path to scalable revenue, high-margin or high-velocity models, and strong unit economics.

Geographic Focus

US-national, sourced through Founders & Funders' event network (300+ events across 12+ cities and 4+ countries over eight years), with particular density in Salt Lake City/Utah (where the org was founded) and New York (where multiple GPs are based).

04Selected Portfolio