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.…
Reinventing a legacy business starts with figuring out what people actually loved about it. When David Rawlinson took over Qurate Retail in 2021, he inherited QVC and HSN, two brands built around television shopping just as consumers were moving to…
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.…
