We worked with an experienced serial entrepreneur who was looking to use his cumulative knowledge, experience, and connections to build a lasting legacy — empowering historically marginalized and underrepresented communities to build wealth, power, and legacies of their own.
Fractional COO for a Venture Builder Firm
- Management Consulting, Venture Capital
- , Startup
- , Fractional COO, Management, Strategy
The Challenge
During the COVID pandemic and after George Floyd, there was a growing awareness of the disparity in opportunity for marginalized communities in the US – particularly with venture capital and the fact that there were unprecedented amounts of capital flowing into the industry, with ever larger funds and startup valuations, yet the amount of money and opportunities for women, BIPOC, and other underrepresented communities was virtually unchanged. There was plenty of interest and indeed, billions of dollars pledged to rectify this disparity, yet at the end of the day, the money and opportunities somehow never reached these founders. It turns out that despite their good intentions, most companies didn’t have the right connections, nor the structures in place to direct their capital and resources to them. The challenge was to develop a strategy to help connect these sources with the founders and startups that could use their help — while still protecting their agency and ability to grow as they saw fit — and then to develop the team and processes to execute the strategy.The Solution
Working with the founding team, we formulated a unique value proposition and helped develop a strategy for achieving our goals. We then crafted a pitch deck to articulate it to potential investors. We established a system of processes to help run the business, manage client services, handle project management and execution, and drive business development. Alongside this, we led on team recruitment, onboarding, performance reviews, and evaluations.The Outcome
After a year of operations it became apparent that the scale of what we were trying to do was bigger than even the fund we were raising ($100M). For the size of the problems we were trying to tackle, even the largest fund wouldn’t be enough. TBS developed a Nurtured Ecosystem strategy that draws on our team’s network and operational expertise to bring multiple entities together in public-private collaborations that can use the strengths of each to address these societal-level problems. We now work with top-tier organizations including national banks, insurance companies, private equity firms, and government agencies — as well as not-for-profits such as the US Chamber of Commerce — to build systems that work on societal-level problems like affordable housing, student debt, and generational wealth-building for historically disenfranchised communities. One of our partners, Google Products for Good, where we are working to help with the digital transformation of black-owned banks, has increased our funding by 10X to $20 Million to expand our mandates to other black-owned businesses.“Alex was new to the cc industry and quickly got up to speed. He worked onsite and had direct client interaction. Alex has a professional attitude and asked appropriate and challenging questions about the work streams he is involved with. He is able to take input from different stake holders and use that to adapt the project plan to make the end product more robust, adaptable and usable as well as complete the project on time. “
– Sharad D.
“TBS were proactive in thinking about ways to maximize the value of their work, doing a thorough, timely job in the process. I would be happy to engage them again.”
– Cordell H.
“Excellent feedback and insights on our proposal strategy and content.
Helped us hone our message. Will hire again!.”
– James D.