Adam Shaw went from an 11-year-old paintball hustler to co-founder of F&F Ventures. He and Jeff Erickson are scaling Founders & Funders into a four-part venture platform betting on consumer goods, e-commerce and authentic relationships over billion-dollar valuations.
Salt Lake City, Utah — August 28, 2026
Adam Shaw was 11 years old the first time he restructured someone else's business model. Working as a paintball referee outside Portland, Oregon, for about five dollars an hour, he did the math on what the range was charging customers and made his boss an offer: skip the wage, pay him ten dollars for every person he brought in instead. Bring ten friends, paintball's free. Within weeks, Shaw says, he was out-earning the owner.
"I learned that drive of figuring it out for yourself," Shaw said. "Really thinking strategically, and utilizing people and working with other people to benefit them."
That instinct — find the margin, build the relationship, bet on yourself — has carried Shaw from Woodland, Washington, a small town an hour's drive from Portland, through a medical-supply company he scaled as a college student from zero to $18 million during the pandemic, a management-consulting stint that helped restructure procurement for a group of major REITs, and now into the role of co-founder and partner at Founders & Funders, the Utah-born venture and events company he now runs alongside Jeff Erickson.
Learning the value of money early
Shaw's account of his childhood is less a straight line than a series of side hustles stacked on top of each other. Money, he said, was never abstract growing up; it was something he had to understand early, in part because he took on more responsibility at home than most kids his age. By eight or nine, he was already looking for ways to earn his own money. By 13, he was running an Amway operation out of his parents' living room, pulling in teachers and gym acquaintances for pitch nights. By 16, he had enrolled in college classes, largely online, so he could keep building.
"I always had this drive of getting to know other successful business owners," Shaw said, "even when I had no entrepreneurs in my family." He took a job at a golf course as a teenager, he said, specifically because it put him in daily contact with business owners he wanted to learn from.
A brain injury reshaped part of that path. Shaw described a ruptured brain concussion from his years playing football, basketball and wrestling that pushed him toward golf instead. He later served a mission in Taiwan, where he became fluent in Mandarin, a skill that would shape the international-trade instincts he'd bring to his first real company.
Zero to $18 million during COVID
Before he set foot on Brigham Young University's campus for its global supply chain program, Shaw had already identified an opening: a pandemic-driven shortage of medical supplies. He built factory relationships in China, then cold-called Army and Air Force procurement offices directly, working with Salt Lake City's Procurement Technical Assistance Center to get set up on SBA.gov for government contracts. What started as $2,000 and $5,000 orders grew into a company that did roughly $18 million in revenue within about two years, built on a team split between Los Angeles and a factory operation in China.
He was doing it while still enrolled at BYU. "I'd finish a test, fly to New York City," he said. "Everyone is on their own journey. But for me, college was not a time to be social. It was a time to build."
The company eventually sold to a larger East Coast medical distribution company. Shaw doesn't describe it as a triumphant exit. "It wasn't a great exit," he said. "But I learned a lot from what not to do."
Underneath the hustle was a fear he says took years to name out loud: that people would discount him once they learned his age. "My biggest fear was people asking me, 'When did you graduate college? How old are you?'" Shaw said. "If they find out how old I am, they're going to look at me differently. If something goes wrong, they're going to blame my age, not the situation." He now says that fear was self-imposed, and that the people who cared about his age were, by and large, people he didn't want to do business with anyway.
A costly partnership, and a decision not to fight it
In 2025, Shaw discovered that a business partner had been misrepresenting company finances and diverting funds, leaving Shaw owed close to seven figures. He and his wife weighed suing. Instead, they prayed, fasted, and decided to walk away, taking a handful of employees with them and betting on a fresh start rather than a legal fight.
"I think where you put your time is really important, where you put your focus is really important," Shaw said. "If I put all of my energy into suing this person, it would have drained me. I would have wasted so much time on this thing that I didn't even know the outcome of. Instead I took that energy and focused on positive things."
That decision sent Shaw and his wife on a stretch that included stints in Dubai, Hong Kong, China and Miami before they landed, deliberately, in Utah — a market Shaw had wanted into for a while, largely because of one person: Jeff Erickson.
The Founders & Funders origin story
Shaw's entry point was almost incidental. A friend, Kalvin Richan connected him to Erickson, and Shaw attended a Founders & Funders event at Kiln Lehi during Silicon Slopes Summit week. "This is exactly what I want," Shaw said. "I want to build relationships." He set up a lunch with Erickson for the following week — then had to reschedule at the last minute when he and his wife learned they'd need to be at an ultrasound appointment instead. Erickson's response: come to the office anyway, or just grab pizza. They ended up at Slackwater Pizzeria with Erickson and his wife and business partner, Inger.
Founders & Funders had started as something closer to a side project. Erickson, early at e-signature company eShares, and later Carta, had launched the event series in part to help drive sales for the company, pairing venture capital investors with founders in a room. Inger Erickson later stepped in as CEO and helped grow it into a structured event series with sponsors and a system behind it.
Coming in as a full partner, Shaw began by bringing his own team over to help scale and restructure operations. Inger and Jeff trusted Shaw to come in full time and take over operations, allowing her to step back from day-to-day operations. Shaw made his own condition clear to Erickson at the time: if he was coming on full-time, Erickson needed to as well. Erickson left his role at Forecastr to do it.
"I couldn't have come on if it wasn't for Inger and Jeff," Shaw said. "Inger chose to step out of the daily operations of Founders & Funders. I am grateful that she trusted me to step out of the day-to-day of operations, trusted me to come on and be the person that they needed me to be. I take that very seriously."
A shifting Silicon Slopes
The timing is notable. Domo agreed in July to sell its core business to Progress Software for roughly $400 million, and Weave followed with a $650 million take-private deal with Francisco Partners — two long-standing Utah software names exiting the public markets in the same summer. At Founders & Funders' own Salt Lake City VC ReversePitch on August 19, 2026, seven venture firms took the stage to tell founders what they're looking for next, and the pattern that emerged leaned toward vertical, industry-specific AI tools and consumer brands rather than the horizontal B2B SaaS that defined the last era of Silicon Slopes. It's the same lane Shaw and Erickson have staked out with F&F Ventures' consumer-goods and e-commerce thesis. It positions the fund at the center of where several other investors in the room said they were headed too.
A recurring room: the eCommerce brunch
The consumer-goods thesis shows up outside the big ReversePitch format too. Founders & Funders — founded in Utah in 2019 — recently hosted an eCommerce brunch in Salt Lake City on August 19, presented by Shopline, drawing over 60 attendees. Shaw moderated a panel featuring Jeff Durham of Gimme Beauty, Shopline's Christopher Yang, and Jian Tam, with the conversation centering on a theme the firm returns to often: understanding the customer isn't a box founders check once, and it gets harder to skip the deeper a brand moves into retail and e-commerce. The team has described Salt Lake City as one of its favorite rooms to fill, and says it plans to bring more events back to Utah rather than fewer.
Building a four-part company
Under Shaw and Erickson, Founders & Funders has expanded well past its original single event format. The company now describes itself around four connected "engines":
Shaw, Erickson and general partner Jian Tam now run the venture side together. Tam brings e-commerce operating experience, including two prior exits and a current consumer brand, Protein Waffles — a Brooklyn-based, keto-friendly, gluten- and soy-free waffle line sold direct-to-consumer nationwide.
"Venture capital is not just Silicon Valley money and building a billion-dollar company," Shaw said. "There's so many pieces of that. Our mission is providing the tools, the capital and the relationships to increase founders' likelihood of success."
The fund, and the Shopline bet
Founders & Funders' venture arm launched with a $10 million fund anchored by Shopline, the e-commerce platform Shaw describes as a direct competitor to Shopify, with over $4 billion in turnover serving hundreds of thousands of brands, according to Shaw. The firm's investing arm operates under the name F&F Ventures. Shaw and Erickson used their own August 19 Salt Lake City ReversePitch event at HVN to formally announce the fund's focus on consumer goods and e-commerce — a detail that underscores how tightly the events business and the fund are meant to work together. The firm is now raising a $100 million fund, structured, Shaw says, to address a liquidity problem he sees across traditional 10-year venture fund cycles: portfolio companies that don't need to chase billion-dollar outcomes to return capital to LPs.
The investment thesis centers on consumer goods and physical-product companies, with technology investments following through deal flow the firm sees via its own network and event pipeline. A portion of the fund is set aside for short-term financing and purchase-order financing, allowing portfolio companies to fund retail expansion without diluting equity as heavily. Shopline's involvement gives portfolio companies direct access to a dedicated solutions engineer and reduced processing fees, according to Shaw, a structural advantage he argues raises those companies' odds of survival.
The firm has also committed to directing 2% of the fund and 2% of carried interest — both GP and LP — toward what Shaw calls economic-growth opportunities. Shaw cites conversations with one of his most profound early mentors, Eddie Wilson, and his organization Impact Others, as a key influence on that structure.
"Eddie had a big impact on my journey and taught me how important it is to be authentic, the importance of delegation and the value of time. Your focus should be on where you are investing your time, even over money, as it
Wilson was one of the person leaders that I wanted to be. He has always been a visionary and a leader. He has increased my vision about the impact my contributions can have on the world.
Impact Others sources impact opportunities and builds sustainable businesses around the world, with active projects spanning clean water, orphanage support and small-business development in countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Honduras, India, Egypt, Colombia and Thailand.
Redefining the win
Ask Shaw how he measures success today, and the number he used to chase — a billion-dollar private equity company — comes up mostly so he can wave it off. "I don't care about the number," he said. "I want to be a good husband, father, leader while creating an impact."
Shaw and his wife, a fellow BYU global supply chain graduate he credits with getting him through the degree, live in Jersey City with their six-month-old daughter. He describes fatherhood as simultaneously the hardest and most fulfilling thing he's done.
That reframing — success as consistency and authenticity rather than a valuation — is also the note Shaw hits hardest when he talks about mentoring the college students and interns who show up at Founders & Funders events. He said he remembers being the kid in the room who wanted access and didn't have it, and that the firm now deliberately makes space for students and early founders inside the same rooms as its VC partners.
"When I was younger, I always strived to have a mentor," Shaw said. "So it's like, how do we make sure we create a platform that we can help support these people as much as possible, and support these leaders that want to grow?"
Founders & Funders' next Utah VC ReversePitch is scheduled for Salt Lake City on Sep 10, 2025. Learn more at foundersnfunders.com.