The Minnesota Home-Field Advantage: Mary Grove on building coast-to-coast VC from the mid-west

In this episode of No Operating Manual, Erin O'Brien talks with Mary Grove, managing partner at Minneapolis-based Bread and Butter Ventures, an early-stage firm investing in digital health, enterprise SaaS, and food tech. Mary traces her path from 14 years at Google, starting on the IPO team in 2004 and later founding Google for Startups. She then moved to the Midwest and a career in venture, first at Steve Case's Revolution and then co-founding Bread and Butter in 2020.

The conversation centers on the firm's "Minnesota home-field advantage" thesis: tapping the country's highest per-capita concentration of Fortune 500 companies; Cargill, General Mills, 3M, Mayo Clinic, through its Innovation Circle, a group of 20 enterprise partners that opens commercial doors for portfolio companies nationwide. Mary explains how those partnerships come together, and shares how industry validation drives dealflow, and describes how she evaluates companies across sectors.

She also shares how fund managers raise capital, what a 10-year fund lifecycle involves, and why pitching LPs resembles a startup pitch. From there, the discussion turns to why "team, team, team" tops her rubric, how she reads red flags in founder dynamics, what makes health tech compelling in the AI era, and her fundraising advice for founders.