Fireside | Path to Sustainability: Who Supports the Supporters?

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Though you met Thalee DeVries earlier, I'd like to give just a bit more background on why she's so so well suited to serve as the Associate Administrator and Head of the Office of Investment and innovation, leading SBA's portfolio of private investment partnerships and innovation funding programs, including the Small Business Investment Company Program, or sbics, and the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs, SBINR and STTR America's seed fund, and of course SBA's innovation ecosystem support Organization Development Programs, the Growth Accelerator Fund Competition, and the Federal and State technology partnership program. Ms. DeVries comes to the SBA after a private sector career in the asset management and defense industries, and she served in leadership and executive roles while at T. Rowe Price, Greenspring Associates, Trail Mix Ventures, and sotera defense. Ms. DeVries holds advanced degrees from Georgetown University, Northwestern University and Wake Forest University and she's a native of Chicago, but now lives with her husband and two daughters in Maryland. Welcome back, Bailey.

Jennifer, thank you for that kind introduction. It's amazing to work with you and I'm just so excited about our focus on the importance of ecosystem development and having you as the leader of our ecosystem development organization that we have established within in the Office of Investment and Innovation. Your work is so critical. As they always say, anything great that we accomplish, we never accomplish alone. So the relationships and the connective tissue between the entrepreneurial support organizations and the innovators are just so critical and aligning the support of our organization with the private sector is incredibly important. So I am so thrilled that our first session to kick off the ESO Summit is this fireside chat with two incredible women who are rowing in the same direction with us and have been doing so for a very long time. For them to share their amazing experience and perspective so we can draft off of the experiences that they've had and their key learnings. So it's such a pleasure that I'm excited to introduce our guests and have this great conversation. So with that, pleased to introduce Ali Burns. Ali serves as the CEO at Village Capital and she brings more than 16 years of experience working with entrepreneurs and innovators at the intersection of technology and social change. She has also held positions at Discovery, AOL and Atlas Venture, among others. And also joining us today is Kelly Burton. Kelly is a political scientist, serial entrepreneur and change agent who leads with passion, purpose and vision. She is the CEO of Black Innovation Alliance, a national coalition made up of 65 black led organizations which support more than 300,000 innovators of color across the country. So welcome Allie and Kelly.

So with that, great.

So with that, I'm going to go ahead and get our conversation started because I have a feeling there is a lot of great insight that you're going to share and I want to make sure we maximize our time together. So pleased to kick off things with this discussion, which is all about connection and partnership. I'd like us to start by just having you share a bit about each of your organizations individually and also how you met.

I'll go first, I'll jump in and I'll kick it to Allie. So thank you so much, Bailey, for that introduction. Black Innovation alliance is a national coalition of innovator support organizations, or ISOs. And these are organizations that support tech founders, business owners and creative technologists who are working with emerging media. Today there are 89 organizations that are a part of Black Innovation alliance. They're in 33 cities across the country and support approximately 300,000 entrepreneurs and innovators of color. So for us at BIA, our work is really about creating the sort of ecosystem that is necessary for black innovators and entrepreneurs to thrive. And so I will, I will kick it over to Ali and then maybe we can talk a little bit about how we met.

Thanks, Kelly. So I'm Ali Burns, CEO of Village Capital. We're an organization that's focused on unlocking capital for, and I mean both social, financial and other types of capital for early stage entrepreneurs who are solving major problems, environmental, economic and social challenges. And what underlies all of our work is a lens of equity. We're really focused on identifying and supporting those entrepreneurs who have been historically excluded from the early stage investment ecosystem and completely underestimated, which is really how Kelly and I ended up meeting. We've been doing work in the inclusive entrepreneurship space collectively through other endeavors as well. And so we knew Kelly and some of the other folks that came together to create bia. Right around the time we were thinking about how to evolve our own work in supporting entrepreneur support organizations. And so it was really perfect timing to develop co develop the resource program, which I know we'll talk about later and collaborate in a, in a new way as BIA was really emerging as a startup organization and Village Capital had been around for just about a decade at the time that we met. So Kelly, feel free to fill in any gaps I've missed there.

Yeah, it was kismet that you all had this concept that you had worked through and we were just kind of coming online and the team reached out to say we're working on this thing and we think that there's alignment. Can you check it out? Let's have a conversation and see where it goes. And now we're two cohorts in and thinking through long term sustainability of the effort. So it's been an exciting journey.

So exciting. I mean, you have an incredible partnership. You know, today is so much about learning and sharing insights. You know, as I mentioned before, we want to be able to draft off experience and be able to speed up things for many other organizations. So could you expand a bit on how the partnership has evolved over the course of running these two cohorts of the resource program and anything that you've learned so things to take away from those experiences. So that way other organizations who might want to collaborate in a similar way may be able to draft off that information.

Sure.

I can start with a little bit of the history of how we got to that call that we made to Kelly to say, hey, we have this thing we're working on and let's collaborate to share a little bit of history of how we even got to supporting other ESOs. So of course, Village Capital is an ESO. Ourselves, we've been supporting, we've supported 1500 entrepreneurs over the last 12 plus years and we've learned a lot of lessons along the way. But we were getting a lot of calls from local ecosystems saying, hey, would you bring a village Capital program here? And so we launched something called VLCAP Communities that was really about how to help individual entrepreneur support organizations or ecosystem builders bring in the most contextualized version of our own curriculum into their communities. And we learned a lot from that initiative and particularly we're interested in ways we could help build capacity. And to your point, Bailey, about speeding things up, how could we speed things up for some of these local ecosystem builders based on our own experiences and frankly the things that we've done wrong, as well as how could we use our national and global presence to be a facilitator to social capital, just like we're working to unlock for entrepreneurs, for these entrepreneurs to support organizations to create faster connections to funders and other resources that they need in order to build their own, which they're building a business as well, build their own businesses. And so we, we created and iterated on this initiative for a couple of years and recognized that one of the biggest needs within the United States was really to focus on these incredible ecosystem builders that are sitting at local and regional level, know their communities exceptionally well, but sometimes don't have the visibility or Amplification that they need in order to get again access to the resources that they need. So as we were seeing this dynamic come together, we said we really want to focus an initiative that is to support these local ecosystem builders led by and focused on supporting entrepreneurs who are from these historically excluded backgrounds. Black indigenous people of color and women led businesses as well, and particularly the intersection of both. And so we reached out to bia. We knew they were forming as an organization and thought that there would be an incredible collaboration. Had a huge amount of respect for Kelly and the team that she was pulling together. And so that's how it started. Kelly, I don't know if you want to start with the how it's evolved and I can jump in.

Sure. You know, I think it's really important to mention that we called out the elephant in the room from like the very beginning. There is this kind of long standing challenge within the space where white led organizations will receive resources to implement programs and communities of color. And oftentimes those programs don't turn out so great because they don't necessarily have the cultural competency and the context necessary to execute those programs well. And so kind of going into the conversation we said, okay, so how can we not, how can we not replicate what we are already seeing out there in this space and make sure that this is a very kind of reciprocal and generative partnership that really centers racial equity? And so we, like, we started with that conversation like in an ideal world, in a really healthy collaboration between an established white led organization and a startup black led organization, like, what could this partnership look like? And we started with, I think it was a statement on racial equity to explicitly say, like when we say we are filtering this work through a racial equity lens, what does that mean? What does that look like? How are all the ways that this could go left and how do we get ahead of that? For us, getting ahead of that meant saying, let's always keep channels of communication open. Let's expect that we're going to experience conflict at some point in this collaboration. Let's just expect it so that when it shows up, we're not shocked or surprised. We can access that open channel of communication to really talk through what the challenges and obstacles are. And so at various points where we were experiencing difficulties, we were able to say, okay, can we pause and just recalibrate to just ensure that we're still aligning with who we said we were going to be as a collaboration, as a partnership at the outset of this venture. And so, Ali, maybe I'm happy to kick it to you to maybe lift up some specific ways that that is kind of played out.

Yeah, I think it's such. First of all, Kelly is my conflict management guru. I have such respect for the way that you proactively think about how to navigate that. And I think that it is a really important thing to say transparently in any partnership. So as the folks who are participating in the summit are thinking about collaborations, knowing that like it's not going to be perfect and that's okay. And so that was such an important thing that, that we brought to the table together to say this is not going to be perfect. We're going to learn and have touch points along the way to examine where something might be challenging. So, so the way that the partnership has evolved from a programmatic standpoint is that we also. So we started with sort of taking a cohort based model and that's still the, the basic model that we're using, a cohort based model, sort of an accelerator for accelerators and developing a curriculum based on what we thought was most appropriate for these organizations. And I think we learned a lot in the first, first go round from the entrepreneur support organizations in terms of their specific needs and maybe some of the things that they didn't need our support on and really tried to zero in when we evolved to the next program on things like fundraising and operations, which were clearly the. And building a business model, which were clearly the needs. And then figuring out which of our organizations brought the expertise and experience to the table and not just saying just because VLCAP has done these things or BIA is doing these things like who on our teams can we really leverage in order to bring the right expertise and experience to each of the programs. The way that we're evolving now is that we actually decided not to launch a third cohort right away after the first two cohorts and actually to take a moment and say, what have we learned? How can we continue to build support for the 23 organizations that have already participated in the resource program? How do we better assess and meet their needs? Because there aren't a lot of long tail support programs either for entrepreneurs or for these esos. And how do we create an institutional foundation for future cohorts? And I really have to give Kelly the acknowledgment for really thinking about how do we make sure that we are not running too fast, but also meeting the needs of these many, many organizations, as BIA's research has shown, that are coming online month over month, really so that's programmatically how things are evolving.

Wonderful. I just have to commend you both for the intentionality and thought, as they say. Right. An ounce of planning saves a pound of pain later. So that intentionality and planning can pay off dividends. But also just the recognition and also creating the space for just diverse ideas, which often leads to sometimes disagreement.

Right.

But disagreement doesn't necessarily mean conflict. You can disagree and you can do it with dignity and respect. And if anything, those disagreements are often what causes us to innovate and have better ideas. It's something that we encourage on our team for everybody to speak up and have a voice and to challenge, challenge ideas and love that you are fostering a culture within your partnership where that can happen, because that just pushes us forward. So really, really great to hear that there's so much that you have accomplished. And Ali, I do want to turn to you for a second and talk about the fact that Village Capital was a winner of the Small Business Administration's Growth Accelerator fund competition in 2016. Commend you on that. And you have a unique way of determining how startups in your accelerator cohorts get funded. Could you talk a bit about that and how that has also evolved since that award in 2016?

Yeah. Well, I will say that this prompted me to go back into the vault and I found a video that we had actually put together to support our application for that award. And it was fun to kind of go.