Kwame Anku is CEO and chairman of Black Star Fund , an early-stage innovation fund based in Sacramento . Anku previously cofounded and served as principal of Black Angel Tech Fund , launched in 2016 to provide venture capital for Black technology entrepreneurs . Anku , a graduate of Stanford University , is a mentor of Founder Institute Sacramento and on the advisory board of the Sacramento State Carlsen Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship . Comstock ’ s spoke to Anku about his fund ( which plans to close at $ 12 million in May ) and the importance of investing in Black entrepreneurs .
Tell me about your background and how you got into investment work . There ’ s a lot there , but let me start with the chapter that will be helpful in 2015 . I graduated from Stanford back in ’ 94 . I think the importance is I was there at the time of the dawn of the internet . The guy who created WhatsApp ( Brian Acton ) was in my class , the guy who created Yahoo , Jerry Yang , was two years ahead of me . Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn was a year behind me . But , in 2015 , I was actually working with ( the musician ) Prince ; I was doing a lot of different things with him , including helping develop his first mobile app , as well as leading a national organization called # YesWeCode , which was focusing on getting African American young people involved in technology and getting jobs in coding .
I was at a summit for African American Stanford alumni in Atlanta , and we were talking about the lack of diversity in technology . At the time , tech companies had been reporting that less than 2 percent of employees across the board were African American . So there was a real kind of an outcry . What do we need to do ? How do we put some pressure on these companies to change the hiring practices ? I was on a panel that basically said we should do the same thing that our classmates did ( who ) created all this technology : We should focus on aggregating capital and investing that into creating new companies , as opposed to putting pressure on existing companies that don ’ t have the representation that we want to see . From there , a group of Stanford alumni created the first fund I ever did , which is called the Black Angel Tech Fund . We launched it in 2016 , and I ran that fund for two years . …
Then I started my own fund , which is Black Star Fund . But a lot of the influence that I had , in terms of that mentality , really came from being a fan of Prince and working with him because he was just so adamant around ownership , and you can ’ t influence corporate culture from the outside . The real way to create transformation is not to figure out how to infiltrate the corporate culture but to invest and create a corporate culture .
In terms of addressing this 2 percent problem among tech companies , by investing and creating this new culture , in doing so , does that end up influencing the corporate culture that already exists ? Yeah , we ’ re seeing it now . When you dial the clock back and go back to 2015 , there was no fund in the whole country that was focusing on Black tech entrepreneurs . That ’ s not 1995 , 1975 ; that was literally six years ago . … You look today and see all of the funds that exist that didn ’ t exist back then , that are now getting millions and millions and millions of dollars to invest in diverse founders — in the corporate culture that you ’ re referring to — being part of that process and making those investments . I ’ ll give you an example . Bank of America just announced a $ 150 million commitment to 40 different funds that focus on diverse founders . That ’ s as mainstream and as corporate and as conservative of an industry as you could possibly get . … I ’ m intimately connected to that process because I helped to architect the first investment they did in Grand Rapids ( Michigan ) for a fund that I consult for called the New Community Transformation Fund .
What we charted out … and were pioneering in the space in less than six years is having a profound effect . Now granted , you had George Floyd and you had the ( social ) unrest , but we ’ ve had those kinds of incidents more times than any of us would like to deal with . But they ’ ve never spawned billions of dollars of capital investment in for-profit investments to be able to create social change — that we ’ ve never seen before . So what changed ? The police brutality didn ’ t change . The social unrest didn ’ t change . The desire to do something didn ’ t change . The commitment to dollars didn ’ t change . What changed is them saying , we ’ re not just going to put this in community organizations ; we ’ re not just going to make charitable contributions . We ’ re going to make for-profit investments in instruments that will create wealth to close the wealth gap .
We were pioneers and starting to say , look , the problem we ’ re facing is not just health disparities or quoteunquote economic disparities or even social injustice . The problem is that when communities don ’ t have capital , they don ’ t have power . We ’ re serious about creating change . We ’ ve got to be dealing with the power gap . And the only way you can deal with the power gap is from an investment standpoint .
If you look at Google or Apple or Hewlett-Packard or Facebook , you ’ re talking about something that started with two people or four people and ultimately created hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of wealth . How did you go from two to 100,000 employees ? How did you go from two to 20,000 employees ? How ’ d you go from no money to billions of dollars in market cap ? It all started because a few people put together $ 100,000 to $ 500,000 to help them get started . So if you replicate that same
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