Two CMC graduates made the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Kevin Lynch ’17, founding investor with MGV, and Miriam Cruz ’15, co-founder of Agni, were selected among the top young entrepreneurs in North America in the categories of Venture Capital and Food and Drink, respectively.
Miriam Cruz ’15
Co-founder of Agni
Miriam Cruz discovered her true passion while working for a global nonprofit in New York that supports founders trying to scale their business. She was working with food and beverage founders.
“That was my introduction to that world,” she says, “and I just fell in love with it—everybody has a connection to food; it’s deeply rooted in our traditions and the ways that we thrive and engage. I love that food is a shared centerpiece in all of our lives.”
She combined her passion for the food and beverage industry with a personal interest in healing foods to launch Agni with Astrid Schanz-Garbassi in 2019. Agni works with Medical Advisors and chefs to create healing foods—nutrient-rich teas, cookies and seasonings—to support women’s health, including menstrual cycles, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause.
Having raised $5 million from investors such as Greycroft and Shields Capital, Agni now sells its products online to more than 10,000 customers. Cruz thinks the company’s efforts over the past year may have gotten her noticed by Forbes for the 30 Under 30 list.
“We’ve worked really hard over the last year to get this sort of brand awareness,” Cruz says. “It’s just a small group of us women working on this, so this sort of recognition felt like a major milestone.”
When Cruz met her co-founder, Schanz-Garbassi was working on an earlier version of what became Agni. Cruz was personally interested in the idea of healing foods because she had struggled since childhood with a range of symptoms, including severe allergies, eczema, and debilitating stomach pains. “I found that nutrition continued to be the tool that had the biggest impact on my recovery.”
Now, Cruz loves everything about her work. “I get to learn every day and no two days look alike,” she says. But she especially enjoys being able to help other women through their health journeys. “Hearing from other women where their support is lacking and what we can do to step in and help is why we built this and what keeps us going.”
Given her CMC education, Cruz is not surprised she ventured into entrepreneurship. “There's an entrepreneurial spirit that lives at CMC. I definitely think that my PPE foundation of problem solving and approaching every challenge from several angles really supports me in my day-to-day today.”
Cruz has some advice for current students: “Pursue what interests you the most at CMC. It can be intimidating when your friends are pursuing one path or one major and it’s not the one that really speaks to you. Follow your gut; it’s pointing you in that direction for a reason.”
Kevin Lynch ’17
Founding investor, MGV
A friend from CMC submitted Kevin Lynch’s name to Forbes, but he was still surprised when he got the news that he made the 30 Under 30 list. “I’m honored to be included alongside impressive young investors. It shows that I'm on the right track career wise, and more than anything else, it’s a reminder there's a lot more hard work to come.”
Lynch is a founding investor at Bay Area-based MGV (Maschmeyer Group Ventures), an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in emerging enterprise software companies and helps build and scale their go-to-market operations. He is an investor in companies like Modern Health, Origin, and Leap. He believes some of his early investments, like Modern Health, caught the attention of Forbes. “It was helping expand access to mental health benefits for employees of large companies, which was relatively new when we did it and now is thankfully becoming much more commonplace.”
At CMC, Lynch majored in economics and immersed himself in the tech community as much as possible, working with CMC’s Randall Lewis Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and participating in networking treks through the Soll Center for Student Opportunity. Beyond the academics and extracurriculars, the greatest part of his CMC experience was being exposed to people with different backgrounds and viewpoints.
“Claremont was able to teach me a lot more about the world than I thought it would,” he says. “Through the Athenaeum and class speakers, you get to engage with people outside of what you’re considering career-wise, outside your life experiences to that point, and expose yourself to viewpoints and topics you never knew existed.”
Lynch has fond memories of Professor Cameron Shelton, with whom he took classes in macroeconomics, and Professor Jon Shields, who helped him think about historical issues from opposing perspectives. He also found a variety of “strong mentors” at CMC: Michelle Chamberlain, Vice President for Advancement and Student Opportunities, and John Faranda ’79, Ambassador-At-Large, taught him the value of building long-term relationships.
Lynch got his first taste of the venture capital world through an internship—as part of CMC’s Silicon Valley Program—at CrunchFund (now Tuesday Capital), an early stage fund started by two CMC alumni, Patrick Gallagher ’93 and Michael Arrington ’92.
Lynch worked closely with Gallagher and Partner Prashant Fonseka ’12 for just over two years. “I loved working with their incredible founders, getting to jump from company to company to help them solve big early scaling problems.”
He decided to launch MGV after meeting his partner, Marc Schröder. “He is a fantastic mentor not only to me, but to all the founders we work with. We’ve built a strong foundation on which we’re launching the next stage of MGV.”