Before "Consumer" Was a Thesis
In 2005, Michael Mauze left TSG Consumer Partners and co-founded VMG Partners with a simple, unfashionable bet: that individual consumer brands - not multi-brand platforms, not retail aggregators - were where the action would be. Wall Street was busy with the mortgage market. Silicon Valley was building social networks. Mauze was backing snack bars.
He grew up in St. Louis and New Jersey, played soccer through college at Davidson, then followed a straight-line career into investment banking - PaineWebber, Lehman Brothers, both in the mergers and acquisitions trenches with consumer and retail companies as his beat. He got his M.B.A. from Columbia in marketing and finance, which in retrospect looks less like a credential and more like a blueprint. Consumer. Brands. Capital.
By 2003 he was at TSG Consumer Partners, one of the few PE firms that actually understood what a grocery shelf meant as a competitive asset. Two years later he was done waiting for someone else to build what he had in mind.
There are no straight lines in life. The fog of events and struggles obscures meaning until you're on the other side of it.
- Michael MauzeVelocity Made Good
The name is a sailing term. Velocity Made Good measures your actual progress toward a destination accounting for wind, current, and every variable the ocean throws at a hull. It's a useful metaphor for what VMG tries to do with emerging brands - not just raw speed, but effective speed. Progress with purpose.
VMG planted its flag in consumer CPG before the category became a venture darling. The thesis was founder-first, brand-DNA-obsessed, and stubbornly focused on the long game. While other investors chased the platform play - buy ten brands, bolt them together, rationalize the supply chain - VMG stayed with individuals. Founders. Stories. Specific products that solved specific problems for specific people.
That discipline paid out in a portfolio that reads like a tour of the modern American lifestyle: KIND Snacks, Drunk Elephant, Spindrift, Daily Harvest, Bare Snacks, Justin's, Perfect Snacks, babyganics, Ilegal Mezcal. Over 60 majority and minority investments across food and beverage, beauty and personal care, health and wellness, and pet products. In 2025, VMG closed Consumer Fund VI at $1 billion - the largest fund in the firm's history.
"What we try to do at VMG is really build up that interesting information set that allows us to make very thoughtful and informed decisions as to which brands and which entrepreneurs are going to break through and grow."
Michael Mauze on VMG's information advantageThe firm now has 57 employees and a San Francisco headquarters at 39 Mesa Street - deliberately small. Mauze has talked openly about preferring compact organizations, with round tables instead of conference room hierarchies. The architecture of the office, he suggests, shapes the quality of the conversation.
The Brands
A selection from two decades of consumer brand investing - current board seats alongside notable exits.
Where VMG Looks
The Art and Science of Picking Brands
Mauze draws a distinction between the banker's view of a company and an investor's relationship with a founder. The former is transactional - advise, close, move on. The latter is a bet on a person's capacity to build something that doesn't exist yet into something people reach for without thinking.
His framework for spotting breakout brands starts with information asymmetry. VMG builds what he calls an "interesting information set" - deep domain knowledge in consumer categories, built over years, that lets them pattern-match against founders and concepts before the market catches on. When everyone else sees a hot sauce startup, VMG sees whether this particular founder has the brand DNA intuition to make it a household name.
"They see a niche the rest of us don't see. They bet their lives on it."
Mauze on the founders VMG backsHe is deliberate about the economic cycle question. When asked how VMG performs through downturns, the answer is consistent: stick to your knitting. Certain categories, companies, and brands outperform regardless. Food and beverage. Personal care. The things people buy every week without agonizing. The antidote to uncertainty is specificity.
On LP relationships, he's equally plainspoken. Patience, not persuasion. If a prospective LP is investing time to understand your strategy - asking real questions, showing up to meetings - that's the signal of genuine interest. Chasing the reluctant capital is a waste of everyone's time.
"Try to find that little area that you think could be more expansive tomorrow than it is today."
Mauze on finding investment nichesFrom M&A Banker to Brand Builder
Twenty-plus years of moving further from the transaction and deeper into the relationship.
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1985Graduates Davidson College, B.A. Economics. Plays soccer. Meets Alison Hall.
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1988M.B.A. from Columbia University (Marketing & Finance). Joins PaineWebber's M&A group, consumer and retail focus.
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1990sMoves to Lehman Brothers. Advises consumer and retail companies on M&A and capital raising.
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2003Joins TSG Consumer Partners as Managing Director. Gets hands-on with consumer brand private equity.
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2005Co-founds VMG Partners. The thesis: back individual consumer brands, founder-first, for the long term.
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2015Named Chairman of the Board of Trustees at SFJAZZ. Donates $3M to Davidson College - Mauzé Terrace dedicated.
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2019Establishes Mauzé Scholars Program at Davidson College. First cohort enrolls.
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2021Chairs VMG Consumer Acquisition Corp. SPAC - IPO prices at $200M.
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2025VMG closes Consumer Fund VI at $1 billion - the firm's largest fund.
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2026Robin Tsai elevated to Managing Partner to co-lead VMG alongside Mauze. Leadership evolves, thesis holds.
Jazz, Bikes, and Davidson
There are investors who define themselves entirely by their returns. Mauze is not that. The fuller picture includes three decades of jazz attendance, a chairmanship at one of the country's premier jazz institutions, a $3 million gift to his alma mater, four sons including one adopted from Ghana, and a cross-country bicycle odyssey conducted one week per year over five years.
That last one deserves a closer look. Over five years, Mauze pedaled 3,400 miles across the United States in one-week increments, tracing a route through personally meaningful geography: his birthplace in Missouri, where his parents met, North Carolina where he met Alison Hall and got married in the Davidson College chapel. The trip wasn't a stunt. It was a deliberate act of looking back at the connective tissue of a life while moving forward on a bicycle.
3,400 Miles. Five Years. One Week at a Time.
Mauze traced a cross-country route through his own biography - St. Louis, where he grew up; Missouri, where his parents met; Davidson, North Carolina, where he met Alison and married her in the college chapel. One week per year. The whole thing took five years. As of late 2025, he was reportedly planning another cross-country ride.
At SFJAZZ, he served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees from 2015 to 2018, and has remained on the board since. He and Alison have been regulars at jazz clubs for 30 years - not as patrons performing cultural duty, but as genuine devotees. He reads biographies and non-fiction for the same reason he attends jazz: improvisation within structure is the model.
At Davidson, the philanthropy goes beyond the $3 million building donation. The Mauzé Scholars Program endows scholarships for students from diverse backgrounds, with internship pipelines and connections to the broader consumer and financial services ecosystem Mauze has spent his career building. His wife Alison, also Davidson class of '84, became the first woman to chair Davidson's Board of Trustees and co-chaired a capital campaign that exceeded its $425 million goal by over $100 million.
Small Tables, Honest Rooms
VMG's offices have round tables. This is not an accident. Mauze has described the preference for small company environments - companies where you know everyone, where the architecture of the daily meeting room signals equality rather than rank. He's built VMG intentionally to stay human-scaled even as the assets under management have grown.
On the team side, the January 2026 elevation of Robin Tsai to Managing Partner is a case study in how Mauze thinks about succession. Rather than holding the reins, he created a structure where VMG's next chapter has a co-pilot. The announcement landed alongside promotions of McConnell Smith to General Partner Consumer and Angad Hira to Partner, CFO, and COO - a whole layer of leadership deepening simultaneously.
"I really want individuals to represent themselves and to be themselves, because one of the jobs of an investor here is to connect and build trustful relationships."
Mauze on VMG's team cultureFor aspiring investors, his framework is sequential: build foundational knowledge first - in a specific sector, with real rigor - then leverage it during a creative phase when the right opportunity materializes. Growth investing in consumer brands wasn't a recognized asset class when he was at Davidson studying economics. But the foundation he built in consumer M&A was exactly the right substrate when the category finally arrived.