In the mid-1990s, there was a fairly standard route into the music business: get signed, let a record label fund and distribute your music, and hope it could get you in front of a national audience. Jay-Z tried that route.…
Jessica O. Matthews had a celebrated invention, media attention, and a compelling social-impact story. Then she spent $150,000 raised from friends and family on an effectively unusable prototype: a four-pound version of the energy-generating soccer ball that had put her…
America had roughly 201,000 Black-owned employer businesses in 2023, generating $249 billion in annual receipts. That was a significant expansion from 2017: the number of Black-owned employer firms increased by about 62% over six years. Yet Black entrepreneurs still owned…
Raising capital nearly broke Jewel Burks Solomon. She was a Black founder trying to get into rooms that weren’t built for her, watching good companies get passed over because investors couldn’t see the opportunity. That frustration eventually became a strategy.…
A warm introduction can move an investor email from an overcrowded inbox to the top of the stack. But lacking a venture-capital network is not the same thing as having no route to capital. For Black entrepreneurs, that distinction matters.…
