My Next Move: Base10

Today I’m thrilled to share that I will be joining the venture firm Base10 to lead operations for the Advancement Initiative, their new $250M fund with the mission of aligning the success of top tech companies with wealth generation for Black Americans. I’ll be wrapping up my time at Echoing Green this summer after two incredible years, and joining the Base10 team in the fall.

A few months ago Adeyemi Ajao, Base10’s co-founder and managing partner, reached out to me to share the idea for the Advancement Initiative. The central thesis was simple: A fund that unlocks access to wealth generation for the Black community by providing key Black-serving institutions with subsidized access to top venture deals. He described a fund that would have HBCUs as LPs and a fee structure that would underwrite wraparound services to connect participating companies with top HBCU talent. The hypothesis was that this structure would provide a win-win: Companies would build a more diverse cap table and talent pool, and HBCUs would grow their endowments and bring additional opportunities to their graduates.

I’d known Adeyemi for years -- as a business school classmate, an investor in the startup I joined after graduating, and a mentor for students with Code2040. I knew that he was an outstanding builder. But through the process of exploring the idea for the Advancement Initiative, I realized that we share more than just intersecting careers. We have many shared values, and a shared belief that there are opportunities to use some of the prevailing models of capitalism to distribute, rather than consolidate, wealth. The Advancement Initiative is an experiment in using venture capital as an engine to get wealth into communities that typically would not be able to access these private markets. The AI asks the question: What if when a tech company went public, the Black community benefited? 

With Code2040, Tristan Walker and I set out to build bridges between overlooked and undervalued individuals and communities and some of the most high-impact companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. Code2040 disproves the myth that the talent isn’t out there, and shifts the responsibility for an overwhelmingly white (and male) talent pool back from the individual to the institution. As a result, Code2040 is a game changer for participating Black and Latinx students when it comes to access and income.

This is critical, but of course there’s more to the ecosystem than jobs. Getting Black-led and Black-serving institutions on companies’ cap tables means ownership. And when that ownership pays off, it means opportunity: HBCUs participating in the AI will be creating thousands of scholarships with the money they make from their investments.

I’m thrilled to have the chance to build out the Advancement Initiative, to provide new avenues for wealth generation for Black institutions and by extension the Black community, and to explore the idea that -- across many issue areas -- venture could be a vehicle for capital distribution rather than capital consolidation. 

All that said, it is difficult to leave Echoing Green! Although I’ve only been on the EG team since 2019, I’ve been part of the Echoing Green family since 2013, when I became a Fellow for my work launching and running Code2040. Echoing Green was my happy place during the most stressful parts of being a founder. When I moved home to New York in the summer of 2019, EG’s President Cheryl Dorsey was the first person I called for career advice. By the time I left her office, we’d begun to hatch a plan whereby I’d join the 30+ year old social innovation fund for two years to help refine the operating model in order to usher in a new phase of impact and growth. 

Little did I know that six months into my term, just as we were beginning to redesign core elements of our operating model, I’d have two of the biggest whiplash moments of my career. In March 2020, COVID-19 forced us into survival mode: We reoriented all our work to shift our operating model to virtual, to accommodate a stressed and mourning staff, and to support our 800+ social entrepreneurs globally who were reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

Two months later, the murder of George Floyd triggered a new phase of mourning -- and then forced us into growth mode. Echoing Green had been doing racial equity work for nearly ten years despite little interest from most funders. In summer 2020, thanks to years of tireless work by countless activists and organizers, we as a country finally reached a tipping point where that indifference became unacceptable. Suddenly the racial equity work that we at EG had long known was necessary to do was now also seen as necessary to fund. 

To support our racial equity work, we launched a Racial Equity Philanthropic Fund in the summer of 2020. We raised $50M for the fund as of April of this year, allowing us to underwrite three years of racial equity-focused programming and partnerships globally. Building on this momentum, Echoing Green will engage new corporate and philanthropic partners to help advance racial justice globally.

It’s hard to leave Echoing Green at a time when the organization is poised for so much growth and impact. But I’m so thrilled to be stepping out of my role at a moment of strength and momentum. And I know that, as a loyal Fellow, I’ll always be part of the Echoing Green family, contributing in other ways to the organization’s impact and success.

So thank you to my beloved EG team -- especially Cheryl and Sharyanne -- and thank you to my soon-to-be Base10 Team -- especially Ade and TJ. I can’t wait to see what’s to come on all fronts!