San Francisco · Founder, operator, investor
Amy Errett found the beginning of her fourth company in a place where grand business ideas rarely announce themselves: the hair-color aisle. The shelves offered an old bargain. Spend heavily at a salon, or take home a generic box and hope the shade on the cardboard had a decent relationship with reality. Errett had spent years learning to notice such compromises. She knew markets, she knew consumer behavior, and, after sitting on both sides of the financing table, she knew when an industry had become too comfortable with its own inconveniences.
Her route there was splendidly indirect. She began in banking, founded the financial-services consultancy Spectrem Group, sold it, and moved into E*Trade’s senior ranks. She later ran Olivia, a travel company serving lesbian customers, where she worked to turn a travel business into a broader lifestyle company. Then came Maveron, the consumer-focused venture firm associated with Howard Schultz, where Errett opened and led the Bay Area office. By the time she returned to operating, she was not a beauty insider. She was something more dangerous to an established category: a practiced outsider with a long memory for how customers behave.
The useful miss
One clue arrived as a mistake. While at Maveron, Errett passed on Dollar Shave Club. Watching the company grow left her with a sharper question: what recurring consumer ritual for women was waiting for a modern product and a direct relationship? Hair color fit. It was large, habitual, personal, and oddly impersonal in the way it was sold.
Errett started conducting wonderfully low-tech research. Over dinner, sometimes after a couple of glasses of wine, she asked friends whether they colored their hair. The conversations exposed a category full of private improvisation. People were spending time and money on a routine that involved uncertainty at every turn: which shade, which formula, which instructions, which result. The opportunity was not merely to ship another tube. It was to replace guesswork with guidance.
She left Maveron with an orderly off-ramp and founded Madison Reed in 2013. The name came from her daughter. In one telling of the origin, Madison asked whether her mother was going to go do the thing she kept discussing. There was both challenge and permission in the question. A venture firm can make a founder exquisitely fluent in reasons to wait. A child is more economical.
Every career starts and ends with people.Amy Errett, Thirty Minute Mentors
The missing middle
Madison Reed began with a direct-to-consumer model, personalized color recommendations, access to colorists, and formulations made in Italy without several ingredients common to traditional products, including ammonia and parabens. The promise combined professional help with the convenience of home. It was neither salon nor supermarket. The company wanted a third category, then had to teach customers that the category existed.
The online quiz made a notoriously subjective choice more legible. A subscription made the recurring ritual easier. Colorist consultations added human judgment where software reached its limits. Errett’s investor training helped with the economics, but her operating instinct supplied the more important idea: the product was not only what arrived in the box. The product was confidence before opening it.
Then the supposedly digital brand started opening doors. Hair Color Bars gave customers a place to buy the product and receive professional application. Retail partnerships put Madison Reed on familiar shelves. The company that began by bypassing conventional retail became omnichannel, not because the first thesis had failed, but because the customer’s problem had more than one shape. Sometimes a quiz is enough. Sometimes a person wants a colorist standing nearby.
This is the quiet sophistication inside the model. Digital tools can narrow uncertainty, retail can create discovery, and a physical service can build trust. Each channel has a job. The internet does not win by making the room disappear; it wins by sending the right person to the room with a better idea of what she wants.
Five words, no wallpaper
Before Madison Reed sold its first tube, Errett wrote down five values: love, joy, courage, trust, and responsibility. Corporate values often arrive late, after the lawyers and before the lobby signage. These arrived early enough to be inconvenient. They were meant to govern choices, not congratulate the company for choices already made.
That distinction became visible in 2020. As salons closed and at-home demand surged, the company retrained 100 employees from physical locations to handle customer service rather than simply discarding the knowledge and relationships they carried. At one point, Errett said, Madison Reed was selling a box every five seconds. Operationally, it was a supply puzzle. Culturally, it was an audit.
Errett’s language about leadership is notably personal. She talks about “finding your genius,” by which she means identifying the work that comes naturally and accepting the work that does not. Her own answer is breaking difficult problems into parts and gathering people who can solve them. It is less a mystical gift than a method of assembly.
The notion explains the strange usefulness of her career. Banking supplied financial fluency. Spectrem supplied the founder’s eye. E*Trade supplied scale. Olivia supplied community. Maveron supplied a panoramic view of consumer companies and the capital required to build them. Madison Reed demanded the whole untidy bundle.
I am not flexible, I am resilient and agile.Amy Errett, The Kara Goldin Show
The founder and the funder
In 2018, Errett formally joined True Ventures as a venture partner while continuing as Madison Reed’s founding CEO. The dual role suits her biography. She has lived the pitch from both chairs, understanding the spreadsheet’s insistence and the operator’s reality. At Maveron, her investments included General Assembly, Lemon, Everlane, and Flywire. At True, her focus remains consumer and ecommerce companies.
The relationship between those roles can be usefully circular. Current operating work prevents investing wisdom from becoming antique. Investing offers a view of patterns beyond one company. Founders receive advice from someone who still has to take her own advice to work the next morning. The arrangement does not simplify the calendar, but simplicity has never been the governing aesthetic here.
Her public service has followed a similar thread of institutions and opportunity. Errett has held nonprofit and academic leadership roles, including work with GLIDE and the University of Connecticut Foundation. She remains conspicuously loyal to UConn, where she studied liberal arts and competed as a student athlete, before earning her MBA in finance at Wharton. Her biographies also record horseback riding, fly-fishing, black-diamond snowboarding, wine collecting, and a devotion to the San Francisco Giants. One imagines moderation has occasionally sent a calendar invitation and received no reply.
A fourth act that keeps editing itself
By 2025, Madison Reed said it had served more than five million customers and operated nearly 100 Hair Color Bars. In 2026, Inc. recognized Errett on its Female Founders 500, citing the brand’s partnership with Ulta Beauty Mexico and a nearly 40 percent increase in Color Bar memberships. At SXSW that year, Errett described a daily mantra: “I get to do this.” Gratitude, in her telling, is not softness around the work. It is the reason to meet the work fully awake.
She has accumulated the conventional markers along the way: recognition from Inc., CEW, the San Francisco Business Times, Wharton, Fast Company, and Ernst & Young. Yet the more revealing artifact is the continuity between the dinner-table questions and the current company. Madison Reed still lives or dies on whether it can make an intimate, recurring decision feel less lonely.
Errett’s story offers no clean myth of the born founder springing complete from a dorm room. It offers something more hospitable. Experience can compound. A mistake can improve the next question. A company can change its channels without losing its promise. Values can be verbs. And a fourth act can contain material gathered during the first three, including the scenes that once looked like detours.
The hair-color aisle was overlooked precisely because it appeared settled. Errett saw the irritation under the routine. Then she followed what she calls the “trickle of water”: curiosity moving toward the gap, finding the low place, refusing to stop at the shelf. The result is a company named for the daughter who helped nudge her toward the work - and a founder who built her sharpest idea after already having several lives in business.