Focal Teams Up with Marquee Equity to Power the Future of Gen Z Media and Community Engagement
In a world where Gen Z is constantly online yet increasingly disconnected from their surroundings, Focal is pioneering a new kind of digital experience rooted in relevance, locality, and real-world connection.
Founded by Jakob Klinenberg in Eugene, Oregon, Focal is a location-based, AI-enhanced, social news app with a completely customizable interface that helps connect Gen Z to what's happening around them — a live layer of local culture, events, and experiences all focused around a specific location. No doom-scrolling. No noise. A fully immersive tool to help Gen Z connect to their community.
'Partnering with Marquee Equity has been an incredible experience and has made a complex and overwhelming process into something clear, manageable, and effective,' said Jakob Klinenberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Focal. 'They've opened up our outreach and connected us with a broad network of investors we likely wouldn't have been able to reach on our own.'
As Focal gears up to launch, Marquee Equity has been instrumental in supporting its fundraising journey, not just with capital access but with the right investor alignment. Leveraging a network of over 32,000 global investors, Marquee created a curated outreach plan targeting Gen Z-focused consumer tech VCs, digital media, and engagement funds, as well as angels and family offices aligned with youth wellness.
'Focal is solving a deeply human and timely problem, helping Gen Z re-engage with the real world in a way that feels fresh and relevant,' said Nikita Garg, Director at Marquee Equity. 'We were excited to help build investor momentum around a product that's as culturally relevant as it is technically sound.'
With investor conversations already underway, Focal is focused on expanding its reach, enhancing product features, and forming partnerships with communities and college campuses nationwide.
As the digital landscape shifts toward wellness, sustainability, and meaningful engagement, Focal stands out for its clarity of purpose. With Marquee Equity by their side, they are now positioned to scale that vision with speed and precision.
About Marquee Equity
Marquee Equity is a fundraising enablement platform designed to take the guesswork out of raising capital. Whether you're a pre-seed founder or a post-revenue scaleup, Marquee helps you connect with thousands of aligned investors, fast. From creating compelling pitch materials to running personalized investor outreach campaigns, Marquee supports founders end-to-end. With a global network of 32,000+ investors and a client base spanning 60+ countries, Marquee has quietly powered hundreds of fundraises behind the scenes, bringing capital access, strategy, and dealflow into one seamless system.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
30-year-old worth $700,000 shares 4 spending habits she avoided in her early 20s: 'I don't have any regrets'
Personal finance consultant Michela Allocca made some financial sacrifices in her 20s, and she has no regrets. At age 30, Allocca has a net worth of more than $700,000 according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. In her experience, you sometimes need to make temporary sacrifices to stay grounded financially, even when it feels like everyone else is spending, she says. "We act like not having these things in our early 20s means we're never going to have them," says Allocca, the Chicago-based author of "Own Your Money." But often, "they're status signal things," rather than things people "genuinely and sincerely care about," she tells CNBC Make It. Holding off on certain expenses early in her career helped her stay on track financially, Allocca wrote in a recent LinkedIn post that detailed four financial habits she avoided in her own early 20s. Here are those habits, and what she did instead: The social pressure to travel in your 20s can be strong, whether to become more worldly or simply because it seems like everyone else is doing it, says Allocca. Many young people take big trips right after college, often with little thought about whether it's affordable because they believe, "well, money will always come," she notes. Even a budget-conscious trip can cost $1,000 to $2,000, an expense that's particularly hard to justify early in your career when you're earning a low salary, says Allocca. A single trip can cost as much as an entire month's rent: Gen Z spends an average of $1,600 per month on rent, according to data published in January by credit firm Allocca was 22 and earning $60,000 per year in Boston, flights in particular felt expensive relative to her income, so she focused on taking affordable, domestic trips, she says. While she began taking bigger trips by her late 20s — including a recent visit to Japan — she says they were planned and budgeted for well in advance. While she now travels on her own terms, she says it's "both normal and OK" for people in their 20s to hold off until they can afford the expense. "If I am going to go on a vacation, it has to be something that I actually want to go on, not because I'm feeling pressured to go somewhere," she says. Whether it was sharing one bathroom with three other roommates or moving back in with her parents during the Covid-19 pandemic, Allocca chose not to live alone for most of her 20s. "I was able to continue to save, on average, about $1,000 a month because I wasn't dumping all my money into rent. And that actually really helped me get ahead" on investments, she says. Social media can create unrealistic expectations for what early-career earners can afford, says Allocca. In large cities like San Francisco or New York, residents need to earn more than $100,000 annually to keep rent below the commonly recommended 30% of their budget, according to a Zillow report published in May. "I feel bad for Gen Z, because their perception of what's normal at their age is so warped," she says. "There's all this [online] pressure for young people to live in a high-rise or live alone in these major cities, and it's just not reasonable." At age 27, Allocca finally decided to live alone in a nicer apartment with more space and amenities. She needed a home office, and by that point, knew her income could support a roughly $1,000-per-month rent increase without derailing her financial goals, she says. Allocca took a minimalist approach to her wardrobe in her early 20s, often buying the same pieces in different colors and sticking to a few signature shades so everything was easy to mix and match, she says. She shopped mostly at inexpensive stores like Primark and Old Navy, she adds. "When you have a general color scheme, you can match your clothes easier," says Allocca. "It also helps eliminate the paradox of choice." Her approach kept her clothing costs low. "I wasn't prioritizing shopping as part of my budget," Allocca says. "If I did need to buy something, I was going to those really inexpensive stores so I could get the least expensive version possible." Today, she uses the same principles for what she calls a capsule wardrobe of "elevated basics" — versatile pieces that work with most of what she already owns, she says. She's now more willing to spend money on better quality that she knows will last for years, she adds — like a roughly $450 cashmere sweater that's currently the most expensive item in her closet. In her 20s, Allocca avoided spending on things she could easily do herself. When her walk to work was about 30 minutes, she'd make the trip on foot rather than paying for a ride or public transit, she says. "I didn't take any unnecessary Ubers, I never ordered delivery," she wrote on LinkedIn. Many people justify convenience purchases by thinking "my time is so valuable." Allocca didn't see it that way, she says: "The time that I was saving, I wasn't doing anything valuable with it. So what difference does it make if I spend the 10 extra minutes to go walk and pick up my dinner?" She only ordered out from restaurants within walking distance, she notes. "If I'm not willing to go pick it up, then I'm not ordering it out, I'm cooking at home" she says. "To me, it's creating some parameters around, 'Is this reasonable?'" Even today, Allocca rarely allows herself to pay for convenience, and only in "extenuating circumstances," she says — like paying for delivered groceries after coming home from a long trip. By consistently avoiding most convenience costs, from rides to delivery fees, she says she's freed up around $200 per month. When paired with her low rent, that money "made a big difference" in her ability to save in her 20s, she says. And while she sacrificed some comfort in her 20s, "when I look back at all of these things, I don't have any regrets," she says.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Self-made multimillionaire behind $4 billion Skims empire says she was ‘using AI like a 42-year-old woman'—until Mark Cuban gave her a wake-up call
Self-made multimillionaire Emma Grede has built billion-dollar brands with the Kardashians (including shapewear and clothing brand company Skims), sits on the board for the Obama Foundation, and has just teamed up with tennis champion Coco Gauff on a mentorship campaign with UPS. But while scaling businesses and mentoring others come naturally to her, Grede admits she needed a mentor moment of her own when it came to artificial intelligence. And that moment came courtesy of fellow Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban, Grede exclusively tells Fortune. The British-born entrepreneur Emma Grede, best known as the founding partner of Kim Kardashian's $4 billion shapewear empire Skims and the CEO of denim brand Good American, has built a reputation on spotting cultural shifts before they hit the mainstream. When her and Khloe Kardashian's Good American denim line dropped, it made $1 million on day one, making it the biggest denim launch in apparel history. Grede has helped redefine inclusion in retail and became the first Black female investor on Shark Tank—all before turning 45. Now she's bringing that same playbook to small businesses through a new UPS campaign alongside tennis star Coco Gauff. The initiative sees Grede mentoring creators of emerging female-led brands and offering one-on-one coaching to help them scale. But while mentoring others comes naturally to her, Grede admits that when it came to AI, she was the one who needed a pep talk—and fellow Shark Tank star Mark Cuban was the one who gave her the push to come to grips with the new technology. In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Grede talked about an episode of her hit podcast show Aspire that hadn't aired yet, where the two sat down and compared their AI usage. 'I was already kind of getting there, but if I'm really honest, that episode where we really delved into AI gave me a new urgency around how I use AI,' she recalled, adding that Cuban had a staggering 60 AI apps on his phone. 'Yeah, he gave me a kick.' As soon as the recording wrapped up, she said that she started looking into AI courses at the Wharton School and Harvard for this fall. 'I need to figure this out, because I'm using AI like a 42-year-old woman,' Grede candidly admitted while laughing. Grede gave her staff a cash bonus for using AI—long before she realized she was behind Grede isn't completely new to AI. In fact, she was ahead of the curve when it came to encouraging AI adoption within her companies. 'About two years ago I put a note out in my office giving a cash bonus to anyone that uses AI in their work,' she explained, adding that the incentive was a big hit—especially with the marketing and finance teams. 'It changed the office. It changed the way people presented their work. It changed the way people did their work.' But as her Gen Z and thirtysomething staff embraced experimenting with ChatGPT and other new AI launches at the time, Grede admitted that she perhaps leaned too heavily on them. It meant that until recently, she's been using AI more as a search engine and leaving her staff to handle the rest. 'I was like, Emma, you need to sort that out.' It comes as many other CEOs are scrambling to appoint AI leaders, future-proof their business, and brace for change. Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates says AI is moving at a speed that 'surprises' even him and that even if workers learn how to use the latest tech tools, they may still find themselves out of a job. Meanwhile, an ex-Google exec says CEOs are currently too busy 'celebrating' their efficiency gains to see they're next on AI's chopping board. But she's not using AI to make her more productive As one of America's richest self-made women—with a reported net worth of nearly $400 million and at least four major businesses to her name—Grede is clearly ruthlessly efficient. But in her eyes, AI isn't about squeezing even more productivity from her day. 'I'm probably the most productive person in the world. I don't know that I can be that more productive,' she said, noting that her time is mostly spent making high-stakes decisions—not executing tasks. 'There's no amount of AI that can help me with that.' But where it can help, she said, is in making smarter strategic choices and reshaping how she leads. 'I think it's a reframing of how we're going to do things,' Grede added. 'So much of my job is about making really big bets and decisions. And so if I can put data in places to optimize that decision making, I think that that's probably where I'm going to be using it most. 'When you start to think about my role as a merchant and as a planner, it's really those things that I think are going to fundamentally shift.' In her podcast episode with Cuban, which has since been released, the television personality and Dallas Mavericks owner had a stark warning for founders who don't embrace AI: 'You're f–ked…That's like saying, back in the day, 'I don't need to use a PC, I don't need to use the internet. I don't need a cell phone.'' He added, 'If you're an entrepreneur, or want to be an entrepreneur, start playing with it to get a sense for how it works, how to prompt. It becomes like having an entire staff of 1,000 business professors.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
One-third say family's finances have worsened: Survey
About one-in-three U.S. adults say their family's finances have gotten worse in the past year, while another 40 percent said it roughly stayed the same, according to a new poll. The latest Yahoo Finance/Marist Poll survey, released Monday, found that 33 percent of U.S. adults said their family's finances have deteriorated in the last year. Another 27 percent argued it has gotten better while 40 percent stated that their family's financial conditions stayed the same. Older generations, nearly four-in-ten of Gen X and 35 percent of Baby Boomers, are more likely to say their finances have gotten worse. Roughly 29 percent each of millennials and Gen Z said the same, the poll shows. Nearly half of households, 47 percent, who are earning below $50,000 annually, said their finances are declining. Twice as many male respondents, 36 percent, said their finances have gotten better over the past year compared to 18 percent of women. Around 45 percent of adults said the cost of living in their area is either not very affordable, 36 percent, or not affordable at all, 9 percent. More than half, 55 percent, said their area is affordable — with 11 percent of respondents saying 'very' affordable and 44 percent choosing just 'affordable,' according to the poll. Men, 60 percent, are more likely than women, 50 percent, to think that the cost of living in their area is either 'very' affordable or just affordable. Around half of Americans are at least somewhat satisfied with their savings. Roughly another third, 31 percent, said they are very dissatisfied or completely dissatisfied with their savings levels. Another 18 percent were somewhat dissatisfied, per the poll. The Yahoo/Marist survey was conducted from June 13-17 among 2,575 adults. The margin of error is 2.1 percentage points.
