Portrait No. 001
Jennifer Mathisen
Founder
KiDSiE & MomFounder Collective
KiDSiE is a sustainable outlet for premium children’s brands, reselling retailer returns and surplus stock that would otherwise be destroyed. We turn waste into revenue while making high-quality products accessible to families at up to 50% off. I started KiDSiE after discovering warehouses of nearly-new goods being written off while parents like myself struggled with rising costs. With a background in sustainability I saw a systems failure and built infrastructure to fix it. --- MomFounder Collective is a curated in-person community for mothers building companies in the Bay Area. We create powerful, high-caliber rooms where ambition and motherhood coexist - without apology. I co-founded it after building businesses both before and after children and experiencing the isolation, bias, and invisible load firsthand. With less than 2% of VC funding going to female founders, visibility and leverage matter.
In her words
“I co-founded it after building businesses both before and after children and experiencing the isolation, bias, and invisible load firsthand.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Building a business while raising two young children and more recently across two countries (London, UK and San Francisco) has been the most defining chapter of my life. With KiDSiE, we pivoted from a peer-to-peer platform into building circular infrastructure for major children’s brands - we tackled the messy, unglamorous reality of retailer returns, surplus inventory, and bulky logistics. We’ve secured national brand partnerships, achieved B-Corp certification, and raised venture capital in a landscape where less than 2% of VC funding goes to female founders. Behind that growth were warehouse setbacks, cash-flow pressure, long enterprise sales cycles, and rebuilding networks after relocating to the Bay Area while leading a UK-HQ business. As a mother, I’ve pitched while pregnant, taken investor calls between school runs, and navigated the quiet bias that questions whether ambition and caregiving can coexist. That pressure has sharpened me. I now build companies with discipline, systems thinking, and the conviction that scale and motherhood are not mutually exclusive.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I’m obsessed with fixing systems that quietly waste value - whether that’s physical goods or human potential. In retail, millions of perfectly usable products are destroyed every year while people struggle with rising costs. KiDSiE exists to make circularity commercially inevitable -turning inefficiency into revenue and access into opportunity. But I see the same inefficiency in entrepreneurship. Ambitious women, and mothers are building serious companies with less capital, less visibility, and fewer power networks. MomFounder Collective exists to close that leverage gap. Both are rooted in the same thesis: value is often overlooked not because it’s weak - but because systems weren’t designed to recognize it. I’m driven by redesigning broken systems, where inefficiency hides opportunity. I don’t build around trends but instead infrastructure that shifts outcomes.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Thirty years from now, I want circular infrastructure to be standard - not innovative. It should feel outdated to destroy usable products or ignore embedded value in supply chains. I also want women building companies to operate with full access to capital, networks, and scale, without having to justify their ambition. If I’ve done this well, I won’t be remembered for a single company. I’ll be remembered for helping redesign systems so more value compounds - economically and generationally. The legacy I care about is this: my children, and theirs, inherit industries that are more efficient, more inclusive, and structurally better designed than the ones I entered.