Happy Women’s History Month! Throughout the month of March, we’ll be featuring Q&As with a few of the inspiring female founders in our portfolio. In this series, you’ll hear first hand about their entrepreneurial journeys – the challenges, the wins, and the lessons learned along the way. First up, we’re thrilled to share this Q&A between Kathleen and Samantha Rose, Founder and CEO of Endless Commerce.
I met Samantha last fall and immediately was impressed. She was a 3x founder and her first company, a one piece spatula, grew to tens of millions in revenue and was sold to a larger retailer. She started another company, a 3PL, to better understand how they work, which gave her incredible insights into founding Endless Commerce, a seed stage company, building an operating system for brands going omnichannel. Samantha is the best person in the world to build this company after spending the last 15+ years in the space and seeing all the challenges for brands as they scale. I’m so excited to have Samantha in the Pear portfolio and share more about her background.
Can you tell me a little bit about your journey to becoming an entrepreneur?
I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur — I set out to solve problems. My first company, GIR, started because I was frustrated with every spatula in my kitchen. That led to a Kickstarter, which led to a full-blown kitchenware brand. From there, I built Voltaire, a smart coffee platform, then Mvnifest, a full-stack product development and 3PL partner, and later Hologram Capital to invest in emerging consumer brands.
The common thread? Operations. Scaling brands exposed all the bottlenecks in commerce — product development, supply chain, fulfillment, sales channels, and systems. At every stage, we had to cobble together software that barely worked for omnichannel growth. That’s why I founded Endless Commerce. It’s the platform I wish we had while building and scaling brands — an operating system that bridges the gap between spreadsheets and bloated ERPs, built for teams actually running the business.
So, my journey wasn’t about deciding to be a founder — it was about constantly running into problems and deciding to fix them.
What’s a big or surprising lesson you’ve learned as a woman in tech? What advice do you have for women in their professional journeys as entrepreneurs?
One of the most underrated skills for women in tech—and in business in general—is financial literacy. You don’t need to be a CFO, but you do need to understand how money moves through your company. Why? Because numbers tell the real story, and the people who control the numbers control the decisions.
When I started out, I saw too many founders (especially women) defer to others when it came to financials — whether it was an investor, a co-founder, or an accountant. The problem? If you don’t speak the language of finance, you can’t advocate for yourself. You can’t negotiate the right deal. You can’t spot when something isn’t adding up. And worst of all, you lose leverage.
So my very best advice is to own your numbers. If finance feels intimidating, start small. Read a book. Take a course. Ask the smartest finance person you know to explain things over coffee. The more fluent you become, the harder you are to manipulate, the stronger your decision-making, and the more confident you’ll be in any room — whether it’s with investors, executives, or your own team. Master the numbers, and you’ll never need permission to lead.
Have you had any unexpected champions or mentors along the way? How did they support you?
Some of my biggest champions have been operators — supply chain experts, finance leads, engineers — people deep in the trenches who saw firsthand what I was building and vouched for me.
A mentor once told me: “The best deals happen before they’re deals.” That advice has defined the way I approach business. Instead of chasing investors or partnerships when I need something, I focus on building relationships early. That’s how I’ve met some of the best collaborators, investors, and customers of my career — by showing up, solving real problems, and letting the results speak for themselves.
What’s one myth about entrepreneurship (or fundraising) that you’d love to debunk?
That fundraising = success.
Raising capital is a tool, not a trophy. It’s a means to an end, not the goal itself. Endless Commerce raised a seed round because we’re building a complex product that requires upfront investment, but my previous businesses were bootstrapped and profitable. Both paths can work, but too many founders conflate fundraising with validation.
Success isn’t about how much you raise — it’s about how well you execute. I’ve seen brands raise millions and still implode because they didn’t have a clear path to profitability. I’d rather back a founder who can turn $1 into $2 than one who can raise $10 million and burn through it without a strategy.
What do you think needs to change in the startup ecosystem to better support women founders?
We need more women controlling capital. Full stop.
There are plenty of great initiatives to support women founders — grants, accelerators, pitch competitions — but the biggest impact comes from who writes the checks. When more women are in decision-making roles at VC firms, PE funds, and investment committees, it changes the pipeline. It shifts what gets funded and who gets a seat at the table.
Beyond funding, we also need better operator-to-operator networks for women. The best advice I’ve ever received has come from other founders and operators who’ve been in the trenches. We need more spaces where women can openly share the tactical side of scaling — everything from negotiating manufacturing contracts to structuring a term sheet — without the performative “female founder” narrative overshadowing the actual work.
What’s next for Endless and why are you excited about your space and your team?
Endless Commerce is just getting started. We launched our closed beta in early 2024, onboarded 30 paying design partners, and hit $200K ARR in 10 weeks. Now, we’re expanding beyond early adopters and scaling toward a general release.
What excites me most is how much white space there is in commerce infrastructure. The tech stack for growing brands is still a mess — siloed data, fragmented systems, bloated software. We’re rebuilding it from the ground up, using AI-powered workflows and generative UI to make commerce operations seamless.
And our team? We’ve been on the other side of this problem. We’re operators who’ve run brands, built supply chains, managed fulfillment, and dealt with all the complexity firsthand. That’s what makes Endless different—we’re not building in a vacuum. We’re building the system we wished we had. And we’re doing it at a moment when the entire commerce landscape is shifting.
I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be working in this space.
Thank you, Sam. We’re so thrilled to be on this journey with you. As Women’s History Month continues, we look forward to sharing more stories from our incredible female founders and celebrating their achievements in building long-lasting companies.