Happy Monday Everyone -
Memorial Day weekend starts this Friday the unofficial, official start of summer.
Diversity is an important part of Worthy for Thirty. I love speaking with and championing founders who are not only smart, tenacious, and building world-class products and services yet most importantly, serving their communities. As a minority or female founder, they’re taking their profits and reinvesting them back into the communities they serve.
The panelists I had on this episode are also building the bench of future minority and female founders by the work and examples they’re setting:
Kate Brodock, CEO, Switch and General Partner, W Fund was always interested in gender equality along with supporting minority founders. She was able to parlay her experience as an operator into being tapped as CEO of Switch which goes beyond the standard definition of a venture capital fund. It provides founders and investors with resources, accelerators, investing opportunities, and education all built upon a foundation of inclusion.
“I was part of and then for a number of years ran a large global organization that focused on women in technology and entreprenuership. We had about 60 chapters around the world at one point. And in 2016 I was able to actually merge those two kind of parallel paths.” Switch CEO, Kate Brodock
Salim Holder, CEO & Co-Founder, 4th Ave Market, is the largest black-owned Hair & Beauty Supply Store targeting people of color. Salim is using his classical consumer package goods brand management experience to find a way to empower the brands that sell their wares on the 4th Ave Market platform, the consumers who are looking for a high-quality product, while ensuring ensure the money spent on these products are reinvested back into the community.
“I kind of looked at it and said, ‘wait a minute,’ as consumers that are spending $2B a year, we’re being forced to choose between stores that don’t have what we want and stores that don’t want us in there. When we created 4th Ave Market, I started to realize the opporutnity was much bigger than just selling products to our consumers and to community.” - Salim Holder, CEO & Founder, 4th Ave Market
Last but certainly not least by any stretch, I invited past guest Aubrey Flynn, CEO & Founder, GOALS Ventures to discuss how he too is building a sustainable business and technology platform for entrepreneurs who serve underrepresented communities whether that is based on race, ethnicity, veteran status or socio-economic factors. Aubrey is cracking the code on how to teach and use technology with his entrepreneur-customers to shrink the wealth gap in the US.
“We’ve [GOALS Ventures] cultivated a community of about 600 entrepreneurs and brands. Companies like Amazon are part of the network. Influencers like Charles Barkely and his brand, Redmont Vodka, Indigo by Snoop Dogg, Judge Judy, her new show ‘Judy Justice,’ is a part of our network. So really excited to provide digital transformation, and service in the space of social, digital advertising, e-commerce, search engine optimization, and just customer relationship management as part of a software as a service model that you can also do yourself or leverage our team and our concierge service where we’ll come in and do the work for you.” — Aubrey Flynn, CEO & Founder, GOALS Ventures
Click here to watch the whole conversation on YouTube
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