Kathryn Finney is the founder and CEO of Genius Guild.
JAS PHOTO 2013
Serial entrepreneur Kathryn Finney believes that the universe gives you signs. For the better part of a decade, the former founder of The Budget Fashionista harbored the idea for a business creation platform focused on Black entrepreneurs. After spending the spring of 2020 helping Black-owned businesses secure PPP loans, and seeing the news of George Floyd’s killing six blocks from where she attended elementary school, Finney felt one such moment. The result: a new project called Genius Guild that is part incubator, venture studio and fund.
The company emerged from stealth on Monday, as first reported in last weekend’s Midas Touch newsletter, and is looking to use its three-pronged approach to help build a community that allows everyone to win while propelling Black entrepreneurs forward. Finney, who was a member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Obama administration and later a general partner at the Harriet Fund, says that the first thing Genius Guild is looking to do is create resources and thought leadership content focused on Black innovation. Finney adds that the new organization is diving in with a new podcast called “Build The Damn Thing.”
“We use a venture studio model because it’s sustainable for founders of color, and Black founders,” Finnery tells Forbes. “It’s not just a money problem, it’s not just a knowledge problem, it’s all those things together and a bit of it is also having discussions related to our culture.”
Genius Guild is also raising a pre-seed focused venture fund that will invest in companies incubated within and outside startups. The entity, dubbed the Greenhouse Fund, will invest $75,000 to $250,000 into companies with at least 50% Black ownership in areas like fintech companies aimed at redistributing wealth and startups looking to build more sustainable environments for marginalized groups or help them build community. Finney says the fund will also make a number of small LP commitments in Black-owned venture funds. The entity has raised $5 million so far, toward an undisclosed target, from backers including Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, Barbara Clarke’s Impact Seat, First Close Partners, law firm Lowenstein Sadler and angel investors like Andrew Bosworth.
Barbara Clarke, the founder and president of the Impact Seat, says she was interested in Genius Guild, even before the company had really formed. “When Kathryn left digitalundivided (a nonprofit she founded in 2012 focused on investing in diverse communities) I said, ‘Well you got to tell me whatever you’re doing next,’” Clarke says. Genius Guild also fits into the Impact Seat’s thesis of investing in diverse and often excluded entrepreneurs. Clarke says what really sold her on the idea specifically was the strategy. “I like their holistic approach,” she says. “I think Genius Guild is firing on all cylinders. By centering on [Black entrepreneurs] they are bringing all sorts of resources to bare.”
Finney says the fund is on its way to be oversubscribed and she’s already turning away potential investors, which is typically unheard of for a Black entrepreneur. “Being a Black woman and being able to say ‘I don’t need your money’ is a pretty powerful thing,” she says. The Genius Guild has made a handful of investments into undisclosed companies including one making a popular beauty product more sustainable and a startup looking to increase mental health services aimed at the Black community.
Genius Guild is launching after nearly a year of racial reckoning and social justice movements in the U.S. and beyond. Despite calls to diversify venture capital last year, only 3% of the $147.6 billion invested went to Black-founded companies according to the U.S. Census. The industry is starting to show signs of progress though with two notable fundraises closing last week including Harlem Capital, a Black-owned firm that invests in diverse and women-led companies raising $134 million, and Black-owned MaC Venture Capital raising $110 million for its inaugural fund. “Everytime I have self-doubt or ask myself if I’m doing the right thing, something happens, not necessarily a tragedy, but something reminds me this is what I need to be doing,” Finney says.
