Fellowship Spotlight: FamiliaFund

“FamiliaFund didn’t begin as an effort to increase representation in venture capital,” says Magda Guillén Swanson, founding co-GP of FamiliaFund. “It began as a response to a structural failure in how early-stage capital is designed.”

After years working across global capital markets, philanthropic finance, and the venture ecosystem, Guillén Swanson saw the same pattern repeat itself: the earliest checks — the ones that determine which founders ever enter the venture pipeline — are governed by incentives that prioritize familiarity, speed, and pattern recognition over long-term value creation. The result is not just exclusion, but systemic inefficiency: promising, revenue-generating companies stall long before traditional venture capital ever evaluates them.

At the same time, the definition of who can be a founder is changing rapidly. Advances in AI have dramatically lowered the cost, time, and technical barriers required to start and scale a company, allowing individuals and small teams to build viable businesses earlier, faster, and with fewer traditional credentials. This shift is expanding the universe of potential founders just as existing capital structures remain optimized for a far narrower past reality.

FamiliaFund was created to address that mismatch at its root. Rather than attempting to “fix” venture capital through incremental inclusion, the fund is designed to re-engineer the first layer of the capital stack itself: rewiring how risk is priced, how capital enters the system, and how value is recycled over time. If successful, this model is intentionally portable: a blueprint that can be replicated by other historically underserved communities, regional ecosystems, or sector-specific networks seeking to unlock early-stage innovation without compromising discipline or returns. The ambition is not to build a one-off fund, but to demonstrate a new architecture for how early capital can work across communities, markets, and generations.

Making Venture Work for Everybody

FamiliaFund is a spinoff fund of LaFamilia Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by VC investor and social entrepreneur Cheryl Campos, that’s working to close the resource gap for Latine founders by bringing together and activating the largest community of Latine venture capitalists in the U.S. and across Latin America. In 2021, a group of 6 Latine MBA students at Stanford Graduate School of Business – including Campos – launched VCFamilia to serve their own unaddressed needs. “They didn’t have anywhere to hang out or meet other students from similar backgrounds and share mentorship, job, and investing opportunities,” Guillen Swanson explains. “They started VCFamilia, and it grew like wildfire in its first year because nothing like it existed at the time. Within a year, venture-backed founders approached them to say they wanted access to VCFamilia or something like it.” FounderFamilia came as a response to this request, before the third and most recent piece of LaFamilia Foundation, AngelFamilia, a peer mentorship-focused network for Latine angel investors.

As she describes the different elements of LaFamilia Foundation’s work, Guillen Swanson clarifies, “LaFamilia’s mission is not just about community and education. It’s also about access to capital. We feel strongly that the venture industry is at an inflection point. We’re starting to see what happens when the industry creates a model that favors itself,” she says, “and that is hugely detrimental to innovation.” 

She points to recent data shared by Pitchbook, indicating that over 50% of all venture capital in the first half of 2025 went to just 12 firms, and the top 30 firms got 74% of all funds. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy where the ‘brand-name’ funds are getting to fundraise and see all the deals. We’re just systematically leaving out so many people.” After years of focusing their efforts on trying to better facilitate access to funding for those that the industry does not favor, LaFamilia knew they wanted to take a more direct approach. “FamiliaFund came together because we realized that the most effective way to facilitate access to funding,” Guillen Swanson reflects, “was to have a dedicated pool of capital available for these first checks in order to superpower everything else we already had in the works – all 3 LaFamilia communities – in the ecosystem.” 

An Eye-Opening Journey

Guillen Swanson grew up on the border of Texas and Mexico in the Rio Grande Valley. “It’s historically been a pretty impoverished place,” she says, “but that being said, I was always surrounded by entrepreneurs and got to see so many of them find their path – often without access to resources, networks, mentorship, or traditional capital, and often in the face of outright prejudice and discrimination.” 

Seeing the creativity that the people around her employed left an impression. Following in their footsteps, she forged her own ambitious path, ultimately ending up at Harvard University, against the odds, before working on Wall Street in New York and London. She later worked in Latin America in the mortgage and consumer credit markets as an analyst.

“That experience, as it would be for anybody, was transformative and eye-opening,” Guillen Swanson emphasizes. “To come from where I came from and get to work in the capitals of finance, not only in the U.S. and London, but also all over Latin America, gave me an opportunity to see what capital can do and what sophisticated capital markets can mean, for entrepreneurs in particular.” 

Since that time, she’s worked in a number of different roles, including working for a Seattle-based technology investment fund that was started by the former CTO of Microsoft, which gave her an intimate understanding of the startup ecosystem. “I wanted to take all of my expertise and contacts in the financial services space and translate that into an impact role,” she shares. She didn’t know exactly what it would look like, but it led her to join the team at one of the largest DAFs in the U.S.

Using DAFs as a Tool for Impact

While there, Guillen Swanson built a product development and innovation practice from the ground up. She joined at a time when the company was seeking to use the DAF structure to provide more innovative solutions for their clients who were more impact-oriented than ever before. “That experience really made me appreciate the power of the DAF structure to unlock capital for philanthropic and impact purposes.” 

This work sparked an idea – she wanted to use a DAF to set up a venture fund in support of the Latine community. When she crossed paths with Campos, she found alignment. Campos had recently won Stanford GSB’s Impact Leader award, and she was using her prize money to kickstart an idea that happened to overlap with Guillen Swanson’s vision. “She described what I had been thinking about,” Guillen Swanson says. “Totally independently, we arrived at a very similar concept. We decided to work together and make it happen.”

She and Campos started working on figuring out how they could best bring their vision to life. “We didn’t want to just replicate what was already out there, we wanted to build out and test something new and purposeful for founders and funders.” To this end, they landed on a DAF-based strategy. “We plan to make it a venture fund seeded with philanthropic capital.” This structure, though a bit more complicated, facilitates FamiliaFund’s ability to accept traditional philanthropic capital in addition to funding from LPs seeking a return. Leveraging the DAF structure also allows FamiliaFund to capture and continually reinvest returns from the fund. Paired with innovative financing instruments that generate revenue for the fund earlier than traditional VC fund cycles, “we’re hopeful about what we can do as those returns multiply over time,” Guillen Swanson says. “We’re shooting for a billion over the next 10 years.”

An Ecosystem Approach

“Before launching the fund, we looked at the whole venture ecosystem and asked where the biggest gaps were and where we could add the most value,” Guillen Swanson shares. What they clearly saw was that entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of their journey are unable to grow their businesses to the next stage to get on the radar or be eligible for venture funding. Because of these findings, FamiliaFund is investing in those earliest stage founders. “We’re focusing on pre-seed and seed stage founders who haven’t broken into the ranks of venture capital-eligible investments. We want to be those first checks that get into founders’ hands.” 

They think of this early-stage investment as empowering the entire ecosystem in a couple of ways. “First, we’re giving founders a running start and that ability to get on base,” Guillen Swanson says. “We’re from a community that hasn’t historically had the resources to provide that capital for them organically. We want to be the perpetual rich tío that these founders can call.” They’re also delivering on a big part of LaFamilia Foundation’s mission, which is to unite VC and angel investors from Latine backgrounds and create space for them to build connections, community, and investment opportunities. “By making one set of initial investments in these founders,” she explains, “we’re actually empowering both sides of the equation – both the founders and the funders.” 

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

While her co-GP grew up with exposure to the world of venture capital, Guillen Swanson leveraged her time in the VC Include Fellowship to get a thorough crash course on the foundational education needed to succeed in VC. “There’s so much we need to think about, but the way everything was broken up thematically and programmatically really helped, and we also got a little inside baseball in terms of what we need to worry about most,” she says. “The way they structured the program and made every piece of the body of work very digestible and manageable. It’s given me a blueprint.”

The unique format of FamiliaFund was particularly interesting to the VC Include team, and we felt that our network of impact-focused LPs and creative capital allocators would be great advocates for the evergreen-fund that Magda and her team are building. We know that she will make the most of her newfound blueprint, and we can’t wait to see what more she’s able to accomplish with FamiliaFund.