Betsy Fore, BUILT ON PURPOSE: Discover Your Deep Inner Why and Manifest the Business of Your Dreams

[1:25]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zippymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zippy owens. Betsy Forr is the author of Built on Purpose: Discover Your Deep Inner Why and Manifest the Business of Your Dreams. Betsy is the founding partner and managing director of Velveteen Ventures, investing in solutions for children and the planet for the next seven generations. Betsy has two decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur and investor. She is a three time founder and CEO, having built multi million dollar companies in the categories she invests in. She is the first Native American to raise a Series A funding round. In addition, Betsy is a co founder and board member of nonprofit Natives Rising. Natives Rising is one of the largest communities of indigenous technologists and founders with members representing over 100 tribes. She is also a clinically trained NLP practitioner and coach. She works with founders on how to rewire one's brain to think positively and build from their creator mindset. Betsy's accolades include Forbes 30 Under 30, Entrepreneurs 100 Women of Impact, Chief's 50 Top Executive Women in the New Era of Leadership, Cosmopolitan's new C Suite twenty twenty four, and Blueprint Capital Advisors Power 100 asset manager honoree in Venture Capital 2025. Betsy's greatest accomplishments are her children. She builds from her love for family and her ancestors of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and is determined to make an impact for generations to come. Welcome, Betsy. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked. I am so excited to discuss you, your career, your advice, and all the nuggets that you infused your book with. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. So I want you to tell everybody in general what your book is about, and I've already read your bio. But there's one thing that I cannot stop thinking about, which you said in the book, which is that in our life, we get about four thousand weeks to make it count. Yeah. And that's, you know, assuming you live a long full life. I was doing the math and I was like, well, maybe I have two thousand weeks. I don't know. I'm like almost 50. So that just reframes how little time we have and how we have to live with purpose, manifest all the things that we want,

[4:18]Betsy Fore: just really hone in on all. So anyway, thank you for that. I haven't stopped thinking about it. Yes. No, absolutely. It does really put life in perspective. And I think my life was thrown into perspective at a very young age when I experienced senior death car accident at the age of 15. And it reframed my entire mindset around each day being precious and trying to build for in the way I was raised that believing that my I'm the answer to my ancestors prayers, Building for those next generations was really instilled in me like that everything I did, I wanted it to create a ripple in this life. And so you'll see from my career journey that I've done many different things and it was a nonlinear path, but one thing that was a through line were my values. And I realized that this is something that we all have, of course, within us, but how you harness that to build successful multimillion dollar companies. I'd never read about anything like that before. And when I'd first pitched the idea to my ex boss, the founder of Calm, the meditation app, I said, you know what you've done for meditation by bringing it to the masses and making it less woo and accessible, I want to do for manifestation because I believe we're all builders at heart. We're all, we all have that ability to dream something into reality. Right. And we have that creator spirit in us, but it's about approaching it from a state of abundance and a mindset of abundance. And so really the book is around those processes that kind of get you there right to this point of living in that sort of versus a scarcity, but an abundance mindset. So happy to dig in with you more here and yeah, really, really excited to bring this to market that just launched, and we're already a USA TODAY bestseller. Yay. Congratulations.

[6:00]Zibby Owens: That's amazing. Oh, that's wonderful. I really got so much out of the book in so many different ways. But wait. Can we go back to your car accident? I know you wrote about it in the book, and you talked about the metal rod in your leg and your Yeah. How you crushed your heel and that you eventually ran a marathon with your mom, which is, like, so moving. But you didn't go into detail about what happened or anything like that. Could you just share a little and then later, you talked about being in a coma. So can you just tell me more about the whole experience, if you don't mind? Yes.

[6:29]Betsy Fore: Yes. So my entire sophomore year of high school, I was bedridden. I was in a coma for the first part after the accident. My the doctor said if I survived, I'd never walk properly again. I wasn't driving. It was a car accident with a friend when somebody came and they were going 70 miles an hour and ran a red light into my side of the car as we were turning left. I don't remember much, right? Because I was, of course, at that point immediately during glaucoma, had the bones coming out of my skin and everything from my left leg. Had over 30 five internal pelvic injuries, so I couldn't sit up for months. Said that I might not be able to have children and everything is a gift at this point. It's all such a blessing because there were so many unknowns at that point and at such impressionable age. But I just remember thinking when I, you know, the hardest part for me was seeing my parents devastated faces, right? I was their only girl, the oldest. I have one younger brother. But I think, you know, after that point, it was just a pivotal moment in my journey. Think anyone that's experienced a near death, you know, a near death experience can attest to this where you feel like you've been given that second chance on life, right? And so for myself, was, yeah, learning how to walk again. The limp never really goes away that I have in that left leg, but I'll tell you, most people wouldn't know it, right? That there's that metal rod there. And the biggest, most amazing moment that I'd had, as you mentioned, was when I was able to train with my mom. And it was a decade after the accident that we actually finished the Memphis marathon together, all 26.2 miles holding hands through the finish line in tears, never dreaming when this all happened that that could even be possible. But the goal of what I'm trying to achieve with this book is that actually really anything is possible. It is about your mindset and the reframe to overcome these things. The huge unlock for me was when I discovered the kinesiologist David R. Hawkins, if you've read any of his books, Letting Go and Power versus Force. But he literally overcame things within himself as well, needing to be on the healing journey mentally, just by unlocking these higher states of consciousness. And so I'm a deep believer having experienced it firsthand myself. I didn't even realize it was manifesting at the time when I was doing all these things now decades ago, right? Or even younger than that as a child, believing that I could build something out of nothing. My dad's a motocross racer and I just remember tinkering with him in the garage all growing up thinking, Yeah, if I can dream it, I can build it. The same way he was making these eclectic Harleys and different bikes and stuff. So I think about how, yeah, so many people call it different things. Right? I was just on stage with Andrew Huberman this last weekend at the Eudaimonia Conference, a healthcare summit in Palm Beach, and he was talking about doing visioning exercises and visualizing. It's the same thing. We're talking about the same thing with manifestation. I think that with manifesting, you deeply believe that there is another higher force that's willing and ready to pick you up and say yes to you on your journey. Because anything you put out there in terms of your energy, the universe has to say yes to it coming back at you. And so that's why it's like the most, yeah, kind of amazing gift when you realize this unlock because you can put out that good energy into the world and have it all come like flowing back in abundance. And it's about approaching life with the give and what's the gift that I'm offering as well. But yeah, I think it's interesting because some people would have thought that that was just a major setback in my life. Actually, has been just such a gift, right, like having gone through that accident. And I think about how it made me who I am. Wow. That's beautiful and so moving and powerful. Oh my gosh. I have to say, I already have, like, drank in the Kool Aid of the manifestation

[10:25]Zibby Owens: philosophy. I totally believe in all of that. And, you know, I I don't I don't even know if I've talked to anybody about this, but I was so desperate to be an author before I had a book published that I would just, like, fantasize slash visualize my name in the same font in the Publisher's Marketplace announcements section. I'm like, one day, it will be my name in there. One day. And I just, like, wouldn't give it up, and I just kept, like, putting it out there. And I'm like, let's get let's see what happens. I'm just gonna keep doing what I do, and hopefully, it'll come back. Anyway, so Yeah. So I believe, and I've seen this work. I've seen I just keep getting examples of what you're saying, like, in practice. But for the person out there who's a little bit skeptical and being like, yeah, yeah, I keep wanting things and they never happen or whatever, and I put out good and nothing comes back to me, or how do you translate that manifesting into something that anyone can adopt and believe in?

[11:20]Betsy Fore: Yes. Absolutely, Zibby. And I think that's so right where you can think about something and that you can you can, you know, visualize it, like, till you're blue in the face. But if you don't have what I call the affirming actions, the things that actually back it up, that's actually what founders have in spades. Honestly, they're almost too they're too much of the doers, to a fault, right? Where it's like, do, do, do, let's put out the fires. Let's let's break it. Let's like, you know, feel fast and all the things. And so I think from a founder perspective, it's more of like taking stock and and sitting and sitting back and really, really trying to visualize and think through these things. I always say that the pitch deck is like your vision board, right? Because you are in initial days, like trying to, you know, build something that really doesn't exist yet, right? In some way, shape or form. And so People can do that in terms of their lives, in terms of what they're hoping to achieve with their life, not just what they want to build in terms of business. For myself, it was the journey that I went on founding my nonprofit Natives Rising after building those two multimillion dollar companies, the first Fitbit for Dogs and then Tiny Organics, which I grew to over 13,000,000 in revenue in the first twenty four months just on direct sales alone, so pent up customer demand. All three of my babies have grown up on Tiny now and they do love vegetables because of it, so I do think it's a winning combination there what we built. But when I left that company to remain on the board, and I talk about all this in the book too, I founded my nonprofit Natives Rising with a woman who's Pomo. Her homelands are SF, Silicon Valley originally, and she had created the largest group of native technologists with our members representing over 100 tribes. I wanted to do this for native founders, right? To actually get the kind of life changing grant that I got to get my start, was a 50 ks grant. And they went on to raise tens of millions, you know, and then eventually becoming the first Native American to ever raise a series A round of funding. What we found out through this process, Danielle Forward and I, is that the greatest impact we were making wasn't the number of indigenous women graduating with STEM degrees or even the number of native founders being funded, but it was the healing retreats that we put together for these mainly indigenous women that come around a circle. We do hold ceremony, but we also do these practices and the processes that I teach in the book. Danielle and I, through this process, became NLP practitioners, neuro linguistics programming, so that we were literally putting a neuroscience lens on everything and the science that backs up what we already knew to be true around how your neurons fire, how you can rewire, where your attention goes, energy flows, all of these things. And it was just this incredible moment where Danielle and I had already kind of been doing these things and didn't know it was called manifesting until we studied NLP and got into the nuts and bolts on the science side, all it just all makes sense. Right? And I talked about that a lot in the book, but we would do things like you were just talking about Zibby, where we would put we would cut out like a photo of ourselves standing on the steps of the White House with Deb Holland, for instance. Right? And like, this is going to be real. And then that very next year, Deb Haaland wrote Danielle a happy birthday card, right? And like knows that Natives Rising exists and we're doing the thing and all of that too. And we've been connected with her. So I think about moments where I had thought with my second company, Tiny Organics, I had envisioned who would be my absolute dream partner in this work. It would definitely be the former First Lady, Michelle Obama, had created the Veggies Early and Often campaign when she was in the White House a decade prior when I was building this, so Partnership for a Healthier America. Well, we actually did partner with her. So her Veggies Early and Often campaign, we were able to form her founding board for that. And we were meant to be on stage together in March 2020, but of course the pandemic derailed that one. But that was a dream that I'd held in my mind's eye like, Oh my goodness, Michelle Obama, the queen, right? Like that she wants to get veggies fed to children at the earliest days. Like that's who my dream partner would be. And then here it came to be. I mean, it's because I put myself in the right places where I knew, Oh, her team is showing up. I'm going to be talking about what I'm passionate about. But the way that I tell folks to do it through the process I present in the book is that it's about discovering your deep inner why, which we all have, and it's based on your values. I give a list of about 40 different values. Seven of those are the grandfather teachings from my tribe, the Anishinaabe. I'm Turtle Mountain Chippewa. It's things like love, bravery, humility, and dozens of others in there that you can choose from that you prioritize in your life at this point, and that you latch onto those five values. Then the idea is not to just say them or to have them on a wall somewhere, but actually to embody them because they're feelings, and you have to feel it to reveal it, so embody those values. One of the first processes that I teach in the book is called anchoring, where you can come into that state that you're looking to embody and it's actually based on your values. So let's say what my state I'm hoping to embody is courage. Well, I need to think back now at one of the many, many times that I showed bravery or courage throughout my life. There would be many moments that I could kind of think about and it would take a moment to sort of process. And then once I latch onto one of those moments, I then try to conjure up every detail that I can remember. What the temperature was like. If this feeling had a color, what would it be? Thinking of all the different modalities around that particular value in terms of embodying the feeling and then doing that for about three to five minutes of just closing my eyes and combing through every detail of that experience when I did feel brave. And then the moment when that feeling's at its peak, put your thumb and your forefinger together to really capture, that's when it can sink into your systems and it can actually be a place that you come back to again and again in the future, is when you can tap into it through anchoring. And this is just one of the many processes that I share in the book, but it's about embodying those feelings. That's actually the energy that manifests. That's what attracts everything back, towards you, and it's based on your values. Wow.

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[19:51]Zibby Owens: I know. Oh my gosh. But moving on, though, because there's so much I so many other things. You said at one point in the book, which made me feel good because a lot of what I do doesn't scale. You said every founder should start with something that doesn't scale. Talk about that. Absolutely.

[20:06]Betsy Fore: Yes. So I'll tell you when I was first starting out with that, with the Fitbit for dogs after I had built with the founder of Calm the Meditation app, his previous company in London, I, I hacked together, at a hackathon one weekend in Shoreditch, the first Fitbit for dogs. There wasn't one on the market yet. I did it for my dog who was a bit overweight at the time. He just turned 14. This is when he was about one years old. And I thought I could extend his life by up to two years if I can get him down to his goal weight. And so the work that I did with this device, everything did not scale, right? So even the way I went to market, it was so obvious to me that I would launch at Harrods and this would be like sort of a custom bow tie for your dog. I actually, I plated it 24 carat gold. The Bluetooth connection, it was hard to get at that point, but that was for the Harrods exclusive, right? That we did in the penthouse. And I mean, that's definitely not scalable doing those sort of one off things, but it got us the attention we needed and garnered us that kind of that reputation of being associated with almost a luxury item at that point, right? To then roll out to Story in Manhattan to Colette for Paris Fashion Week when they were still around. And then we went into every Bloomingdale's, eventually getting to mainstream where we launched every Petco in North America. And then when we launched every Best Buy in North America, I actually took whiskey in a car ride with me to everyone that I could hit up in Canada to to show to show people who were selling the bow tie on the floor, on the on the Best Buy sales floor. This is the dog that inspired it all. I mean, that is totally not as scalable. Right? We were trying to pop into every Best Buy and say, look at this point of sale display, the video, he's there in the video, this is the dog. Right? And yet those moments, because they had such high touch points for those people who were actually the ones selling the bow tie and this whole new category within Pet Tech at the time is what made it where we received millions in POs, right? Because we got these companies so excited just from me and my dog telling our story and kind of trying to drive to these different ones. Even now with the book, right? If ever I'm going by, like, I'll be in Atlanta tomorrow and driving by some great bookshops here, It's like, I'll pop in. I'll talk to the owner or the salespeople there about my new book, Built On Purpose. And so we'll just chat around exactly like you and I right now. But it's those little moments that even if you touch a few lives that actually compound into the big thing, it's all the small things that make a life. So I think about that a lot with my next company, Tiny Organics. When we first started out, it was with a 100 founding families in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I was based at the time. I sent one email to the Park Slope parent group, got hundreds of inbounds, head to cap it at a 100 within two hours because everybody wanted this product for their babies. There was no whole organic baby food offering at the time. Was mainly purees or there was nothing like vegetable forward at that moment when we launched and definitely not frozen, which was the next best thing to fresh as we were delivering it. And so with these unmarked cups of Tiny, we didn't even have the branding on it yet or anything. This was pre pandemic of course, but the parents came out to meet us over a dozen times to try to help us create those hero products that we launched without the gate. And then they told Tin of their friends, who told Tin of their friends, and that's actually what grew it organically into the over 13,000,000 in revenue on direct sales alone, not on retail, on actually this kind of word-of-mouth. I always say there's no more viral word-of-mouth than that of a mom who's convinced. And they were totally convinced that this product worked for them. That initially you would think, how with a 100 families are you going to build something that's like a VC backed rocket ship? Right? And it's like, it starts there. It absolutely starts with the first 10 or the first 100. Right? And then it just grows and grows. And so I talk about finding your hundred first believers in the book and how important that is to do things that do not scale.

[23:53]Zibby Owens: Wow. Love that too. I keep saying wow. I'm sorry. I shouldn't. No. No. No. You are this, like, uber brilliant entrepreneur with such a work ethic and so much conviction in what you do. I love the story you told in the book of going and waiting for your who the man who became your boss. You just sat there. You went five times and just sat in the waiting room like it was a movie or something where you're just like, I'm not gonna give up. I'm gonna get fifteen minutes of this guy's time. And then you eventually meet him, and he's like, what do you want your title to be? You're amazing. Which is obvious from talking to you for thirty seconds that your brain is just like next level. So here you are now in the book world, which has its strengths and minuses. I'll just throw that out there. How are you approaching a book release with the entrepreneurial spirit and brilliance that you have?

[24:38]Betsy Fore: So I'm really viewing this as the gift. Right? I mentioned it earlier, but I I believe that founders or people in general, you know, we all have something to offer the world and we all have something special, right? That is uniquely ours that we've experienced in some way. And so really pondering that as you look into the deep inner why and the values work and everything in the book, I think when I thought about how could I translate the gifts that I had learned or these skills that I had gained as well from being a founder over those past almost two decades, I would get founders I invest in now asking, what's the blueprint? How'd you do this? Was sharing all the spreadsheets and ways that I had, you know, or I talked to them about the ways I went through these processes and different mindset shifts and reframes. But I thought what if there was a way that I could actually bundle that up? It really was a blueprint. Then when I looked into the market, it was over 90% actually of the next generations are wanting to be creators or founders. And it's like, what does that look like to be an entrepreneur if you don't really know what you want to build yet, right? Or you're just figuring it out. And I thought this is a great place where people could build it from something that lasts from their values, right? And that can be the purpose is the thing that the thread that you weave in throughout your whole career, no matter what you're doing. And so I think that, yeah, in terms of where me building for like the next seven generations and where I hope that this is going in the book world is just that if I could affect even just the founders that I get to invest in or my community, right? The native founders I work with at my nonprofit as well, that for me that's big enough, right? Like that's the work of a lifetime to get to be able to pass on this knowledge and to dedicate it to my children and share a little bit of my story as well. I think about yeah. I hope that it's something that that is a memento, right, that would be passed for generations.

[26:30]Zibby Owens: And so what is next for you? What problem of the of the world are you trying to solve? Like, what what

[26:38]Betsy Fore: what's next? Yes. I mean, it's a pretty big one. So we're trying to protect those next generations in our planet through my venture capital firm, Velveteen Ventures. So I named this after the plush rabbit that my grandmother had given me when I was five years old, that I believed if I loved him enough, he'd be real. But that's what founders wake up and do every day. Right? And I wanted to let them know, I'm alongside you for that journey. Also believe and it can and will be real what they're building. So we've just made our third investment. We're still very new out the gate, but we invest in healthcare mainly on the pediatric side of the house, in mental health, in climate. So we actually, my partner, another indigenous woman, Carla Brolier, grew up in rural Alaska, where she saw the permafrost melt firsthand. She dedicated her entire life to fighting climate change, set up seven climate funds, the most recent one for Von Chanard of Patagonia, where he said, I wanna give up all my revenue from the clothing company Patagonia to the Earth. Can you help me figure out what that looks like? And so she built the Patagonia Purpose Trust and then spun out the Home Planet Fund, which deploys to indigenous tribes globally. And now she's joined forces with me on Velveteen to get to do this work. It is such a labor of love. It's something that we believe in so deeply, but we're not an impact fund. We actually are a proper ROI driven venture capital firm. However, we do plan on making a massive impact for generations come. So we hope this is the legacy work that we get to continue to do, and it outlives us. Betsy, I'm so impressed.

[28:05]Zibby Owens: Built on purpose. So helpful. You're such a dynamo. I'm so glad our paths have crossed in the world. So maybe it was meant to be. We'll just say that. And hope we can stay in touch and know that you've really impacted me with some of the things in the book, they will stay with me and encourage me as a founder, as a mother, as a person, and I really appreciate it.

[28:33]Zibby Owens: Yeah. You too. Take care. Bye bye. Take care. Thanks. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.