Kim Folsom has a sports-car theory of entrepreneurship. Starting a company is exciting, she has said, until the maintenance bill arrives. The long hours and risk can make ownership considerably less glamorous than the brochure suggested. Some people hand back the keys. Folsom kept buying cars.
By 2012, she had already built four businesses. Three years later, she would start Founders First Capital Partners, her seventh venture, bringing a technology entrepreneur’s experience to a less fashionable corner of finance: service businesses with actual customers, actual employees, and difficulty persuading somebody to fund their next stage.
There is a particular absurdity in having a business that works and still struggling to find money to grow it. Folsom has made that gap her occupation. Based in San Diego, she is Founders First’s founder, chairperson, and CEO. Her proposition begins with an observation that can disappear beneath startup excitement: a company can deserve investment without promising to become the next household-name technology platform.
The Brownie troop before the boardroom
Folsom’s account of her early leadership begins well before a term sheet. After her family moved from Philadelphia to San Diego, she persuaded her younger sister to join Brownies with her. Looking back when she was recognized by Girl Scouts San Diego in 2024, she connected that experience to learning entrepreneurship, public speaking, competition, and the possibilities of working with other girls.
Her father, Kenneth Bernard, also figures in her account of how she learned to lead. She has described him as a community organizer who encouraged her ambition and taught her to connect ownership with opportunity for other people. That family example helps explain why the vocabulary of her later career includes both enterprise value and community.
In 2024, Girl Scouts San Diego named her one of its five Cool Women honorees. The celebration also recognized 50 Emerging Leader Girl Scouts in grades 10 through 12. Folsom had once recruited her sister into the organization; now she was among the adults showing younger members where their own leadership might lead. A long career occasionally supplies a pleasing bit of symmetry.
Instructions included
Folsom graduated from San Diego State University’s College of Business in 1990. Her education combined information systems with economics coursework; she later earned an MBA from Pepperdine. It is a useful pairing for someone whose work would involve understanding both how systems function and who gets access to them.
Her operating career included SeminarSource and DriveCam, the vehicle-video business now known as Lytx. She also founded ShowUhow, which offered a practical answer to a familiar consumer problem: the product has arrived, but understanding what to do with it is another matter.
ShowUhow made instructional videos accessible through product barcodes and QR codes. By spring 2012, it was working with 22 industry companies, including Panasonic, Olympus, and Seagate. Its more than 1,500 videos had been viewed by over three million consumers. The products ranged from baby cribs to home theater equipment. Few startup pitches have such an immediate domestic test: can the customer put the thing together?
Her subsequent ventures included REEL Qualified and Manhattan Street Capital. Across those businesses, the recurring concern was practical: make a product useful, reach customers, and turn an idea into an operation that can sustain itself.
A seventh company, a different customer
The decision to build her own businesses had also been a response to frustration. Working in fields dominated by men, Folsom watched male colleagues receive chances to lead operations that she wanted herself. Entrepreneurship gave her a route to responsibility she was having trouble securing inside somebody else’s company.
By the time she established Founders First in 2015, she had experienced the work of raising money and growing organizations repeatedly. The new company brought that experience to owners often distant from traditional capital networks: women, people of color, military veterans, LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs, and businesses in underserved communities.
The customer she describes already has something to build upon. There are sales to examine, an operating business to understand, and a next stage to finance. The challenge is how to reach that stage while retaining ownership and developing the management capacity to handle growth.
In a 2020 SOCAP profile, Folsom said the interest behind this work reached back to fifth grade, although assembling the experience to launch Founders First took another 40 years. Childhood enthusiasm had acquired a fairly substantial apprenticeship.
“I’m motivated by solving problems.”Kim Folsom
The money follows the receipts
Founders First uses revenue-based financing, alongside other lending products. Under the revenue-based approach, a business repays financing through an agreed share of revenue until a predetermined repayment cap is reached. The investor does not buy an ownership stake. Revenue therefore becomes part of the repayment mechanism, while the founder retains equity.
That structure matters for service companies, which may have customer relationships and predictable income without the physical assets that make a conventional lending application easier. It also creates a reason for the financing partner to care about how the business performs after the money arrives.
Folsom’s ambition extends beyond making an alternative available to a small circle of borrowers. She wants this kind of financing to become a mainstream option for businesses that struggle to fit familiar funding categories. The wider argument is about ownership: when a founder can grow without selling a stake, more of the eventual enterprise value can remain with the person who built it.
The model still involves repayment. Its appeal depends on the business and the terms. Folsom’s contribution is to widen the conversation about what a fundable company can look like.
A cheque needs a supporting cast
Capital arrives on a date. The work of running a larger company continues afterward. Folsom has built education, advice, and connections into the Founders First approach because the demands change as a company’s revenue grows. Managing the next million requires decisions about people, operations, sales, and financial discipline.
Founders First CDC, the affiliated nonprofit she founded, supplies another part of that infrastructure. Its current programs include funding-readiness education, leadership development, and a FastPath accelerator for growing business-to-business companies. The Passport offerings range from self-paced lessons to programs with advisers, accountability sessions, and financial tools.
There is a reason those details sound less cinematic than a funding announcement. A customer acquisition funnel or a financial statement analysis is usually encountered at a desk, without applause. Yet these are the tools that can help an owner make use of money once it is available.
Folsom’s experience also reaches into education outside the firm. She taught entrepreneurship and business strategy at National University, served as a university trustee, and helped establish a STEM and robotics enrichment program for underrepresented schoolchildren. The work addresses different ages, but repeatedly returns to access to knowledge and opportunity.
Finding the people who could say yes
Building a financing company required financing of its own. In March 2021, Founders First announced an initial close for a $9 million Series A led by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Surdna Foundation. That investment supported the company’s expansion and the deployment of a separate $100 million credit facility from Community Investment Management.
Those are two different jobs for capital: supporting the platform that does the work, and supplying the credit it can extend to businesses. Confusing the two makes a large number sound impressive while obscuring what it actually does.
Other participants included the Kauffman Foundation through the Capital Access Lab Fund at ImpactAssets, Living Cities, Spring Point Partners, the Impact Seat, and Lindmor Foundation. The group brought together institutions interested in both financial outcomes and broader access to opportunity.
Folsom also pursued advice with an entrepreneur’s willingness to ask. She has recounted approaching Kevin O’Leary after a speaking engagement, first requesting a quote for a press announcement and then asking him to advise the new company. He agreed, she said. The sequence has a certain efficiency: secure one yes, then see whether a second is available.
The quieter scoreboard
A financing business needs a scoreboard, and Folsom’s includes what happens inside the companies it supports. Founders First’s early impact reporting tracked revenue, additional income streams, capital raised, and job creation. An executive summary covering the first half of 2021 recorded 417 jobs created by member businesses, with 52 percent classified as premium-wage jobs.
That emphasis changes the unit of attention. The funding announcement belongs to the financing firm. A new job belongs to somebody else’s working life. A durable customer contract can give an owner room to hire or plan. For Folsom, the enterprise and its surrounding community are connected through these ordinary business decisions.
Recognition has followed the company’s own growth. Founders First appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2023, 2024, and 2025; its 2025 rank was 1,081. Folsom was named to Inc.’s 2026 Female Founders 500 list for providing capital and practical support to small businesses in underserved communities.
Her monthly writing for Inc. stays close to the problems owners actually encounter: payroll tax liabilities, lost credit lines, and planning for uncertainty. The subjects are a reminder that entrepreneurship produces paperwork as reliably as inspiration.
A seat where the questions get larger
On January 1, 2026, Folsom joined the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Community Advisory Council. The council brings the Bank information about economic developments in its district, with particular attention to underserved and lower-income communities. Her appointment adds a small-business operator and financing practitioner to that conversation.
It is a broader setting for questions she has been asking through Founders First: which businesses can obtain capital, what prevents them from growing, and what changes when their owners get both financing and useful support? The scale of the room changes; the underlying businesses still have to meet payroll.
Folsom’s career has included products, fundraising, teaching, and the patient assembly of relationships. Her seventh company draws those experiences toward an owner who already has customers and wants to do more with the business they have built. There is ambition in that picture, even when it comes without a spectacular valuation. For the entrepreneur counting receipts and considering a first management hire, growth is already quite an adventure.
Keep the conversation going
Explore Folsom’s work, writing, and conversations.