On this episode of the Startup of the Year Podcast, we hear an interview with Kathryn Finney that took place at SXSW. Kathryn is a longtime community contributor and she is the Founder and Managing General Partner of Genius Guild, a Chicago-based venture fund that invests in scalable businesses led by Black founders using innovation to build and promote healthy communities. She had a new book published last summer titled, “Build The Damn Thing: How to Start a Successful Business if You're Not a Rich White Guy,” that made the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list in its first week of release. Check out the book today at: https://a.co/d/6usDLzd 

We also again mention an event that we have coming up on May 15 - 18, the SBA will host the second America’s Seed Fund Week. This series of virtual events connects startups and small businesses working on advanced technologies to the country’s largest source of early-stage funding. America’s Seed Fund serves as a springboard by providing over $4 billion in funding to early-stage startups and small businesses each year as innovators take their technology from R&D through to commercialization. Check out more about the event and register today at: https://www.americasseedfund.us 

Lastly, we again shine a spotlight on one of the startups from our community and that company is PayBee, which  is an all-in-one fundraising events platform built for nonprofits hosting events in any format. Paybee’s event features provide you the ability to streamline your fundraising event planning, executing and follow-up using cutting edge technology tools. Go to https://www.paybee.io to learn more!

We invite you all to join our community today to access the support, expert advice, and resources you need to elevate your startup by going to: www.est.us/join  

Thank you for listening, and as always, please check out the Established website and subscribe to the newsletter at: www.est.us

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Startup of the Year helps diverse, emerging startups, founding teams, and entrepreneurs push their company to the next level. We are a competition, a global community, and a resource.  

Startup of the Year is also a year-long program that searches the country for a geographically diverse set of startups from all backgrounds and pulls them together to compete for the title of Startup of the Year. 

The program includes a number of in-person and virtual events, including our annual South By Southwest startup pitch event and competition. All of which culminate at our annual Startup of the Year Summit, where the Startup of the Year winner is announced, along with an opportunity at a potential investment.

Established is a consultancy focused on helping organizations with innovation, startup, and communication strategies. It is the power behind Startup of the Year.  Created by the talent responsible for building the Tech.Co brand (acquired by an international publishing company), we are leveraging decades of experience to help our collaborators best further (or create) their brand & accomplish their most important goals.  Connect with us on Twitter - @EstablishedUs and Facebook - facebook.com/established.us

The story of Genius Guild, the power of investing in Black entrepreneurs, and the importance of sticking to your core values.

In "Black Muse," the season finale of Build The Damn Thing, serial entrepreneur Kathryn Finney is joined by guests to discuss black excellence, entrepreneurship, and investing.

Featured Ep.8 guests: Renee Wittemyer | Brian Aoaeh | Michael Dyer | Cheryl Contee | Geri Stengel | Sharmayne Lueiza Munoz | Barbara Clarke | Teresa Chahine | Jeffrey Robinson 

Choosing yourself isn’t always easy. But after eight years leading digitalundivided -- an organization that she founded to help Black and Latinx women tech entrepreneurs get the mentorship and support they desperately needed -- Kathryn had to do just that. She chose herself, and her sanity, and decided to walk away from the business.

Innovation and the goal of disrupting the industry isn’t just about the work, it also requires a significant emotional lift that many don’t anticipate.

In this episode of Build the Damn Thing, Kathryn openly shares the financial challenges of building DID, why the first cohort was -- in her words, a “hot mess” -- how they “blew things up” to make things better and how initial support from a city or community doesn’t always guarantee ongoing support. She also reveals the impact of building her business while starting her new journey as a mom -- a reality many women entrepreneurs have to face.

The lessons in the episode will help you understand how to take a step back, honestly evaluate where things are in your business (and your life), and when it might be time to courageously let go and make a fresh start.

Quotes from the show:

“What struck me about the no’s is that they felt weak… You had to wonder if the space was really ready for the work that [DigitalUndivided] was doing and for the work that Kathryn was doing." -- Danielle Robinson Bell, Build the Damn Thing, Episode #6

“It was really about supporting other Black women who were building things, but there was no money.” — Darlene Gillard Jones, Guest Speaker, Build the Damn Thing, Episode #6

“People often want to believe the worst of Black women.” --Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode #6

“Something my mom always taught me was go where you wanted.”--Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode #6

“I could leave feeling empowered because I knew I could build something else.” --Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode #6

“Sometimes we’re so afraid to leave things, like: “What if I don’t have the next thing...?” But realize that you’re the prize. It’s not the thing; you’re the thing. You’re the one who created it, you’re the one who built it, you’re the one who grew it. So you are, in fact, that prize.” --Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode #6

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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Credits:


Produced by Genius Guild Content Studios

Executive Producers: Kathryn Finney and Darlene Gillard Jones
Post-Production Company: Prosper Digital TV
Post-Production Manager: Joanes Prosper
Post-Production Supervisor: Jason Pierre
Post-Production Sound Editor: Evan Joseph
Co-Music Supervisors: Jason Pierre and Darlene Gillard Jones
Show Music: provided by Prosper Digital TV
Main Show Theme Music: "Self Motivated" Written & Performed by Tamara Bubble

Full Transcript

Valeska Toro
I think the greatest challenge that I saw Kathryn overcome was the challenge of being in a place where you've created something that you absolutely love and adore  and then taking a step back and asking yourself what you want and being willing to make a change. And I think that any entrepreneur that has decided to move on from their startup, whether they're selling it, whether they're stepping down, whether they're deciding to pivot, it's incredibly challenging because no one is harsher to ourselves than we are, right? We're our worst critic.

So I think that for her, I I honestly feel like I have so much empathy for leaders and for CEOs when they're in those places, because I know that it takes a lot of courage and a lot of self reflection to be able to not only identify that something may or may not be right, or that you want something new but then also 

Kathryn Finney
So, in 2012 we started off with this conference, with then mayor Corey Booker who had a startup called Waywire as our  keynote. Now what we did at that first conference is we matched founders up with mentors, and we had people like Anil Dash, and we had these like amazing mentors. And so every founder got two sessions with a mentor. We had about 40 founders at our first focus. And you can imagine partnering them up with mentors was like a Herculean task. It was like really really crazy, but we did it. And we saw the success of that. We saw the partnership of that. In fact, many people who met at focus are still in a mentor mentee relationship, or at least in a friendship based relationship to this day. And we were like, we want to turn this into something a little bit more.

because we could see the future, but partners, potential partners, and corporations did not see black women as innovators, and the future. And so we just couldn't explain it to them. And it was really, really difficult for us. And it was really, really hard. 

Danielle Robinson Bell
During my time with DID, one of the biggest challenges that I experienced with the organization that I actually witnessed Kathryn navigate as well is just dealing with a lot of nos. I got to see up close and personal the rejection, the flat-out nos that the organization received after ya know-a pitch for funding or a pitch for some type of partnership. And what struck me about the nos was that they felt weak and it really made me question why they were saying, no

My name is Danielle Robinson Bell and I handled all things communications both internally and externally for digitalundivided.

They were so surface level. And didn't match the level of work that had been put into the initiative.  But again, it wasn't just the rejection. It was the rejection just felt so weak. And so you had to wonder if the space was really ready for the work that DID was doing and the work that Kathryn was doing. 

Kathryn Finney 
One of the things we had was this sort of virtual incubator program, where we were training black women entrepreneurs to be in a space. And one of the things that was really hardest about that is that we took a lot of shit from people. And that's because we're bringing people to this vulnerable space. Technology which can be scary, and vulnerable for our community.  Entrepreneurship and money, which is also another area of vulnerability for our community. And so it really triggered people, and I didn't realize how much it triggered people. And as a result at digitalundivided, we often absorbed that trigger     many times unfairly so.

and sometimes it was directed directly at me. Sometimes it was directly at Darlene, it was directed at other people. And so we knew in order for us to do this, it was going to be really hard for us to maintain. It wasn't a business because it wasn't generating any income. I couldn't no longer put money in, because it was starting to tap into my own safety net. So I was covering losses, and things like that. And I just couldn't do it anymore. There was no end in sight. And then on the emotional end, we didn't have enough staff to be able to absorb, to spread out some of the emotional um punches that we took from from founders. Like we just didn't have enough staff to spread it out.

So, I said, "Hey, ya know we can't do this in New York city. We tried to do it in New York City. um-It was virtually impossible to find an office space to be able to do the sort of thing that we wanted to do." We wanted our own space because we knew that space was really important. And we knew that black women, in particular, didn't feel welcomed in the spaces at that time. Particularly, the tech space was heavily male, heavily white male, heavily a certain sort of tech culture that wasn't, at that time, open to other people.

So-But in Atlanta, we could. And we knew that Atlanta was going to be sort of the future. Like I had saw what was happening in Atlanta. um-I had saw how tech industry was really excluding black people. uh-Atlanta had so many advantages, with an amazing airport. um-The weather is incredible, It had the infrastructure available there. It had a talent pool with the AUC, the Atlanta University Center, which is Spelman, Clark Atlanta and Morehouse.

It also had the university that graduates the most black undergrads at Georgia state. So, it had this pool of talent of black talent that was really, really interesting. And we knew by doing and testing this incubator in Atlanta that we would be able to convince people to come there, because the cost of living was so low. I actually remodeled the space myself with help from my husband, Tobias, as well as a number of task rabbiters. We painted the space ourselves because we didn't have any money. That $100,000 we got went completely to the program. I I think I didn't collect the salary.

I convinced Darlene to help with this... I think Darlene maybe got 20,000 that year. Literally, this was, again, me sort of funding it and stuff like that. But this was a nonprofit and that was okay. um-But we really didn't have any money because nobody, at that time, really cared about black woman in tech, if I'm being really, really honest. 

Darlene Gillard
I remember vividly Kathryn calling me to tell me that Surdna had given us funding to create a space in Atlanta And I was shocked. I was shocked because we had decided that it was over. But when that came through, we, dove head first into the opportunity. And there was a lot of sacrifice involved. And I don't know if people really know that, but but, um, it was difficult. 

I’m Darlene Gillard Jones, an Executive Producer at the Genius Guild, and a friend of Kathryn Finney.

It was really just about wanting to support other black women who were building things, but there was no money. I mean, I got paid pennies on the dollar to be part of an organization. And, and It was really, really hard. And I don't know if I would have been able to do it, had it not been for the support that I received from my family.

Kathryn Finney
In hindsight, maybe that wasn't the best way to do it, because our first cohort... Because our first cohort was a hot mess, a hot boiling pot of mess. Think of like Fatal Attraction bunny boiling in pot mess. I mean like that's how much of a hot mess it was.

I was being blamed for things that, frankly, I didn't have time. Like I was a mom, I was a wife. I just moved to a new city. I'm trying to run these things like I literally didn't have time to be nefarious with anyone. Because I was barely sleeping at that point.

I also wasn't making any money. Like there was no money coming in. And so, we just started to get shitted on. I mean, it was just crazy. And I realized that the founders in the program were being promised things that I didn't even know they were being promised, and that the expectations weren't aligned. And because I was so busy trying to be the superwoman, I was in DC trying to get them, during the last years of the Obama administration, to invest in black women entrepreneurs, to fund VCs, all this sort of stuff, that I didn't realize on the backend, sort of those insecurities and things weren't being managed. They were being left to fester.

And it was just a lot of finger-pointing and blame. And it was... To this day, I'm surprised I didn't give up. I really maybe should have, to be perfectly honest, at that point. Because I think from that point on, it became really hard to do Digital Undivided for me, because I felt that umm... Not that I expected people to pat me on the back for the things that I was doing, but I didn't expect to get personal darts thrown at me for things that were like literally there to help others.

And the one lesson I've learned is that people often want to believe the worst of black women. even when things say differently, people will believe the worst of black women. And other black women saying that will often help people believe that.

But I understand now, again, if I had to look back on that first cohort, they weren't in a safe space and they didn't have guidance that they needed and they didn't have leadership. And that's a responsibility I have to accept, but the responsibility I won't accept is for people treating me like shit, and not being adult about it and not coming to me and not talking. That I won't I won’t accept.

That's not on me. And so we made a lot of changes after that first cohort.

We blew up the whole thing. That's what we did. We completely restructured everything.  We changed it to call it the Big Accelerator. 

Kelechi Anydieagwu
I think that, being part of the accelerator, one thing that really helped me to understand is where the gaps were. Right. I mean, I, I felt like I was trying to build a team. I was, you know, trying to get the funds necessary to continue growing the company. I was trying to better understand the overall operations of, running the tech company. And so I think that, there are a lot of nuances there when it comes to what you really need. Right. And so I think that, you know, being part of DID really helped me to better understand okay, what I needed and when? And kind of what that, trajectory needs to be. 

My name is  Kelechi Anyadiegwu. I am the CEO Uju, I was at the first focus 100 conference as a focus fellow and I've worked for the organization in different capacities over the past last couple of years. 

I think for me, you know, I had a tendency to like want to micromanage every aspect of the business Versus being comfortable with like letting go and letting people handle things while I kind of worry worried about some of like the kind of bigger aspects of the business. And I think that,-that was probably my biggest lesson, but it's just learning how to, for me, as a CEO focus on the big picture, versus, dwelling too much in the nitty gritty and the day-to-day of the business. 

Kathryn Finney
But it still was hard managing DID. We we never really had the money to do it right. we never were able to hire the people we really needed to hire. Um-What we realized too is that there weren't many people in the space that we could hire.

And so we hired people that we had to train. We hired people who we thought were going to be good fits. And that was really, really difficult. Any leader who's been through the hiring process knows the hiring process is incredibly hard. It's made even harder when you don't have resources because you don't have the resources to get the right recruiters to help you. We couldn't afford recruiters. um-You don't have the resources to pay people at the level in which they should get paid.

So we kind of pieced it together with chopsticks and band-aids and some Elmer's glue um-in order to do this. Now from the outside, it seemed like we were killing it and we were amazing. But internally, it was like we were putting things together and I was really learning how to um-be a better manager and leader. We had four generations in our organization, from baby boomer down to gen Z. We haaad white and black folks who I realized later, living in Atlanta, there isn't actually a lot of interaction between white and black people here. I didn't know that. That's naivety on my part. I did not know that, I was naive. But I had an organization that had white and black people together who normally don't interact together.

Our mission was so clearly focused on supporting black and Latinx women. And I realized that some of our white staff didn't really believe in that, which was really hard for me. And that some of the constructs that I had built was really to make these white staff members feel comfortable. it took  one of our founders, became my chief of staff, Valeska Toro, who's an amazing woman. And it was many years later, we were at a conference  in San Francisco, was her first time going to San Francisco. And we're sitting at this table. We had this house that we had rented. It was just her and I, and she told me what I did. She told me about myself.  And In the gentlest kindest way you can tell someone that you kind of effed up, she did. And I had to come to the realization as a black woman who is unabashedly pro black and pro people and pro woman that I had created a space in which a white woman was centered.

Valeska Toro
So when I came into digital divided, as chief of staff, I had already been trained as a organizational and executive coach, and that made a huge difference because it meant that I could assess the organization and like, understand what the unspoken agreements or like the implicit biases were within the organization. And I was also able to lead a confronting conversation with the leader and also I had built so much trust with Katherine cause we had been working together for so long. And so when I gave her the feedback, the feedback had actually very little to do with the people themselves. What I was speaking to and I was giving her feedback on, as a CEO was on how the system was designed 

Hi, my name is Valeska Toro. I was formerly digitalundivided chief of staff and I am now the founder of uncommonly.

And so, um, and giving her the feedback. I think the thing was one, making it clear that my intentions were not to blame not to criticize, um, not to judge the intention was to identify it, to, um, address it and then to co-create a better system. Right. Uh, and then I think also by focusing on the system itself and not like the people or this person or that person or whatever, um, we were able to create a long-term solution. We weren't looking at it like as something small, we were able to see how it's playing out in every interaction. Uh, so I think that's, that was definitely my intention. And I think framing it that way and bringing it to her that way was what allowed us to just continue to work through it. And there were so many changes that we made after that conversation. And I think, you know, it leads to digital divided still being around today.

Kathryn Finney
that's probably one of the hardest things that I had to come to in my professional life, because that was the opposite of what I was trying to do.

 And that was really a a management lesson for me and a lesson about understanding where you're at, meaning even physical location and coming in and taking time to really absorb and see, which is why I say our first cohort, it probably would have been better if that cohort had been delayed a bit. We did it because of money, the funding to do it, not money that came into my pocket. But the funding to do it, we had to complete the programming in a certain time period.

But in hindsight, it would have been better for us if we had waited a year, and if I had spent some time really understanding the community that I was coming into, because I frankly didn't understand.

And so it created all this friction. The program was going amazing. We were hitting all of our key performance indicators, our KPIs, we were just killing it. But that part I missed. That part I missed. And um so, we were just scaling and we had this great space and amazing people like Stacey Abrams. And we were starting to help put Atlanta on the map. Atlanta was already on the map, but when we came in, in the tech space, people start to ask what was going on in Atlanta, because there was a lot of news that was coming out. In 2018, we did our second ProjectDiane that had received significantly more financial support. So it was a significantly better and bigger report. And we did massive. It was like massive promotion and PR from it. And it was just everyone was talking, I was sort of everywhere.

And everyone's talking about what's going on in Atlanta. What's happening in Atlanta? Because we're hearing about Atlanta, we're hearing about ProjectDiane, we're hearing about Kathryn Finney and people started to like really notice. And I think if there's one thing that has come out really well of me doing DID in Atlanta was that it helped Atlanta, which is a great city, get more shine in the tech space, specifically the tech space.

Atlanta had already had shine and music and other spaces, but tech, no one was really paying attention to. So uh-from that standpoint, it was amazing. And if that's the thing that I could give to Atlanta, Um then-then it was a great thing. But it was really hard for me because I didn't spend time in the South. I didn't understand Southern dynamics. I didn't understand how deep race and racism is in the soil here, in the constructs here.

And so I realized that it was going to be hard to win in Atlanta. There was a number of things that happened, again, because of my own being naive. I I didn't understand there were certain expectations of me as a black woman. There were certain existing relationships that kind of dictated how things move.  In fact, we would get these sort of interestingly veiled threats. There was a threat that Darlene got, which was a very well-known investor in Atlanta said to her, this sort of analogy about “sometimes you wade in the water too deep and before you know it, you're in over your head.” And he said that to us.

But it was stuff like that, these sort of thinly veiled threats of you're not being who we need you to be, you're not playing the game.

And so being in that space, I knew that this wasn't going to be the right environment for me. And that's difficult because  there's so many great, amazing things about Atlanta. But at least in the tech space, and that's the only space that I can talk about, it was not necessarily at that time, welcoming to women.

Darlene Gillard
one of the things that I was responsible for was going out into the community, meeting folks attending events and representing DID in the city of Atlanta. And I was at an event at Morehouse college and saw an investor who I had known and gotten to know over the years and had seen, you know, at a number of events around the country. And he says to me, you know, let me, let me tell you how it worked down here in Atlanta and Atlanta. it's like, you're waiting in the water and everything is fine. And then, you know, you take that step and you're into deep. That's how it works here in Atlanta.

I'm like, okay, thanks for telling me that, you know, not thinking anything of it, but as I thought deeper about it and shared it with Catherine and some of the other team members, I realized that dude was trying to tell us that we're doing too much, that we're overstepping, which was a little disconcerting for me, right? Because we were only trying to be additive to the community.

And, but I think people were maybe a little jealous about some of the attention that we were getting. it was, you know, all for the good we thought, but I think people had a problem with that and felt like we were overstepping. And so initially we had support, we thought we had support in Atlanta, but then not so much things sort of changed or maybe they were the same. I don't know, but we definitely had a tough time in Atlanta.

But the good news is that we as black women, strong black women decided that we were going to still continue this mission to uplift other black women in spite of any opposition that we received. In Atlanta

Kathryn Finney
The ProjectDiane in 2018 found that over 50% of black women founders came from either LA or New York. so if we were going to build an incubator program that was really going to be this catalyst and pipeline, we need to be in the New York area because that's where black women founders were. So we talk with Prudential, we talked with our partners, found an amazing space and started to build on our space in Newark. Newark embraced us in a way that frankly, Atlanta didn't. So where Atlanta was unsure about us, at least towards the end, Newark embraced us with like running arms. They were like, "Come on in," from the mayor down to the economic development.

I had went to Rutgers, so Rutgers had a really strong presence there and it was Lyneir Richardson and Jeff Robinson, both at Rutgers who were like, "Hey, we want you guys to come. We think this is really great." And they were just selling some Newark, just selling us in Newark." And that was something that we didn't get  in Atlanta. And something that my mom always taught me was go where you're wanted. And there's something about going where you wanted, the people see your value. Basically go where people see the value that you're bringing.

Jeffrey Robinson
I remember uh-when we were talking about bringing digitalundivided to Newark and I was, I was  convinced once I heard the story, the first time, let alone when ya know Kathryn and Darlene brought the data. I mean to me, that combination was a slam dunk, digitalundivided does something that most groups aren't able to do well. uh-Number one, they have a successful program.  They've  got a way of working with women of color who are entrepreneurial and taking them through the the steps in the path and and hopefully the proof of concept to get to that to that stage, to present uh their their ideas to investors uh-but then, digitalundivided does a second thing, which most groups aren't able to do.

My name's Jeffrey Robinson. I am a professor at the Rutgers Business School. I'm also the academic director of the center for urban entrepreneurship and economic development.

Lots of folks have programs with varying levels of success but to be able to see how the data is changing over a period of time and what your efforts and other people's efforts are doing to make a difference, that uh that to me, separated digitalundivided from the rest. So It was easy for me to support uh to support them coming to Newark.

Kathryn Finney
And we built this amazingly beautiful space. If you ever get a chance to go to the digitalundivided space in Newark, like go, don't pass it up. . It's just beautiful. We were right down the hall from our friends at Rutgers. It was this community that we had. We were working with Newark Tech Week and amazing, amazing leaders like Medina, who is so pro Newark that youuu can't help but also to be pro Newark. And so it was just the welcome that we received. The clarity, the partnership, it was not something that we had in Atlanta.

Medina
So I'm going to tell you about my love affair with Digital Undivided. Because when the ladies, the leadership team came into Newark, it was such a unique introduction to a organization that I had respected from the work that was being done in Atlanta. So when Digital Undivided came, for me, the unique points were the invitation to the table and what would be built. And the offering of one of the very powerful components of the entity known as Digital Undivided, which is even the sister organization, the project Diana Initiative.

My name is Medina. I am the proud founder of Equal Space and I am a digital advocate for equity space for people of color.

For me, Digital Undivided came and said let's look at what the ecosystem is, let's identify the pain points, the gaps, and talk about how together we can bridge those things.

And for Digital Undivided to have been so focused on black and Latinx women who are doing all the work, who are getting none of the accolades, for me it was like, this is an institution I don't only have to get behind, I have to get behind in such a way that it looks like I am a partner, if not a part of the team. And so many opportunities popped up that gave us that kind of unique bonding experience to do something in a city that I love, that I have been a part of.

Kathryn Finney
And so we were able to build and really build strong partnerships and relationships. And so as a result of this, I had to start discussions several years before with Pivotal Ventures. Pivotal is a investment firm led by Melinda Gates and a number of people, and then met them at South by Southwest and spent a long time talking about digitalundivided and what we were thinking of and things like that. I didn't think anything of it. And over the years we would have these discussions just about what I was thinking of and how I was building and very intellectual like discussions, discussions on research, what were the things that I was seeing,  what resources.

And so, .We were building out a sort of advisory board of people and we had reconnected and they had said, "Hey, ya know we’re-we're kind of interested in maybe giving you funding," uhm digitalundivided funding. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's great." I wasn't thinking about the level of funding. I was just thinking that's great.  And we received a significant amount of funding from Pivotal Ventures  in the spring of 2019.

It was interesting because we received it at the same time I was sort of thinking of what's next for me. At that point, I had been at DID for seven years. I had found DID, I grew it and was kind of thinking of, what's next for me? Um- I felt that I had did the most that I could do for the organization and start to think about what does transition look like? What does life for me look like after DID. What does DID look like after Kathryn? And so I started to really think, and the Pivotal money came at the same time that I was thinking about it. And I hadn't made a clear decision, but I had started talking with mentors of like, what does life look like afterwards?

Kendra Bracken Ferguson
nothing is ever stagnant or nothing can ever stay stagnant. You have to pivot, you have to change, you have to evolve. And it's hard. It's hard to change. It's hard to pivot. It's hard to not get lost in the comfort zone of what may have been, or even knowing that what you may have set out is not exactly how it is right then. Right. So being able to restrategize, refocus, um, reset your intentionality to move and intentionality

my name is Kendra Bracken Ferguson. I'm an entrepreneur founder advisor investor, and the founder of brain trust. 

And so for me, it's always been about, understanding the journey. If I can learn something and carry that with me into the next business, into the next opportunity into the next deal, then that's success, right? Because we constantly have to move and pivot. And we have to find our own validation from within, especially as an entrepreneur, because you're constantly told no, or it's not going to work, or you should do this, or you should do that. 

Kathryn Finney
And so, when we got our investment from Pivotal, it created a space for me to leave. It actually created me the space where I saw that I could set the organization up with an amazing foundation and I could go forth. 

I wanted to leave it in a position that whoever took over from me, whoever became this next CEO was going to come in already winning. They already had the cash. They had the staff, they had everything that they needed. So any sort of changes they wanted to make would be cosmetic. It was almost like the house was remodeled, you didn't have to do anything. If you want to do stuff, go ahead, but you didn't have to do anything. And that was my goal when I left, but I knew that I had to leave.

We had a board meeting in February where I had said that I wanted to leave. I don't think ... We had a board meeting in February. I said, I want to leave. None of the board took me seriously. I said, I want to leave. I said, I'm burnt, I am done, I'm tired. I'm doing so much. The organization's in a point where it doesn't ... like we could start the process to find a new CEO. We can get somebody else and it doesn't have to just be me. We have amazing amount of women who are available. They didn't believe me, I think, or hear me or listen or whatever, it wasn't heard.

And so, I was really thinking in earnest that February after coming from that board meeting of feeling, not listened to, not appreciated, not understood, not understanding that me moving on wasn't anything about the organization, it was just, I need to grow, and feeling not being allowed to grow. 

Laura Weidman Powers
my first impression with Kathryn, which I think has proven to be true is that she's a total powerhouse,, just a really,, sort of commanding presence., but the thing that I've always appreciated about her is that she's a very intentional listener., and she is really gifted, I think, at,, getting to know others and what their needs are,, and thinking about how she can, kind of help, help folks move their goals, move closer to their goals., and she's someone who,, doesn't need or ask for permission, she takes initiative and she, she does what she thinks is necessary, both in terms of her own goals and aspirations, but also in terms of, helping push others towards theirs.

my name is Laura Weidman Powers. I am, the outgoing head of impact at echoing green, and the incoming operating partner at phase 10 of venture firm in San Francisco. 

and I, I feel like I saw that pretty early on with, with her work at digitalundivided divided, but it's, it's proven to be the case over and over again over the years, that combination of, just sort of strong personalities, strong willpower, and also a strong listener and, uh, someone who's willing to be in service of others is quite Rare.

Kathryn Finney
I left DID for me. I left it because... I had a vision and I want to do something and I just felt constricted, restricted. And that I couldn't be myself. Like I couldn’t,  I couldn't be cute. I couldn't wear great hair because if I a great hair and "Oh, she's not really serious about tech." It was all these things, I just couldn't be me. I like style. I like fashion. I like hair. I like nails. I like money. I like investing. I like startups. I like building. I like people. I like being funny. I like being goofy. I like laughing. I like swear words. I like hip hop. I like classical. I like jazz. I like a lot of stuff. And I felt like I couldn't like and be fully myself in the space. So I left digitalundivided for me.

But what I did was I, I left everything. I left DID with nothing. I didn't get any money. I didn't have severance. I didn't have anything. I just left because my sanity is priceless. And I always reflect back to the story that Dr. Dre tells about leaving death row records, where they were like, "If you leave, we're going to keep everything. You don't get anything." And he was like, "So what? You're not the prize I am." And that's the thing that I realize, is that I'm a builder. Digitalundivided wasn't my first thing, it was my third successful thing. 

So I could leave feeling empowered because I knew I could build something else. And I knew I could do other things. And I knew I had ideas and the ideas were great. And so I think it's really important because sometimes we are so afraid to leave things like, "What if I don't have a next thing?" Or "What if I don't... Something doesn't happen." But realize that you're the prize. It's not the thing. You're the thing. You're the one who created it. You're the one who built it. You're the one who grew it. So you are in fact that prize. And that's what I realized. 

Darlene  Gillard
One of the things I've often said to Catherine during our time at digitalundivded was that we were doing the impossible for the ungrateful and I sacrificed quite a bit,time with my family, time for myself, sacrifice myself, my income for digitalundivided. But in all honesty, I think it was worth it because we've really done a tremendous amount of work in changing the face of entrepreneurship for black women in technology. And my life has been changed because of it. My husband is an investor in technology companies because of his proximity to tech. My son graduated from Hampton university as a computer science major an HBCU because his interest was piqued because of my affiliation with the organization. And my daughter works for Tesla. So I'm grateful. I'm thankful to Kathy, and appreciate being part of her journey. 

Calling All Disruptors!

In this episode of Build The Damn Thing, you get to hear how friends, associates and the early attendees of Kathryn Finney’s FOCUS event were positively influenced by the Genius Guild CEO’s visionary thinking as a disrupter in the tech space. Kathryn shares how her “co-conspirators” — such as the founders of BlogHer and her business partner Darlene Gillard Jones — helped her build a powerful company based on her mission of empowering Black and Latina women in technology and helping them raise money through Digital Undivided. She also pioneered the groundbreaking research study, Project Diane, which exposed the disparities in venture capital investing in Black women businesses and went viral.

But while all of this was going on, Kathryn not only had to combat some people misunderstanding her as a Black woman visionary who was often one step ahead, she had to overcome an unexpected health challenge and make some major decisions about her business and her personal life.

Kathryn Finney is known as a pioneer in the fashion blogging community thanks to her blog “The Budget Fashionista” which has helped thousands of women dress chic and cheap. Kathryn not only has built a huge blogging community but also has been featured among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes and is greatly recognized by books like How to Be a Budget Fashionista and The Ultimate Guide to Looking Fabulous for Less. In fact, Kathryn is the living definition of a businesswoman who is always trying to generate new ways to share her knowledge about fashion and entrepreneurship just like she does through her platform the Genius Guild which, apart from having the podcast “Build that Damn Thing”, invests in companies led by Black founders.

Insights from the Podcast:
- How to build your team
- How to leverage relationships
- How to cultivate a work environment that creates a winning  organization
- Women of color often have to face tough decisions in their journey
- How to know when to walk away
- How sharing the data about the disparities in venture capital investing in Black women’s businesses helped change an industry

Quotes from the show:
“One of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to sell others on your big idea. That’s exactly what I did when I started Digital Undivided.”— Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“They not only gave us the check, [BlogHer] literally gave us the manual for how they run events.” — Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“She asked me if I'd be willing to partner with her on an organization called Digital Undivided, that will…support Black women in technology. and I haven't looked back since." — Darlene Gillard Jones, Guest Speaker, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“Because of that relationship because of the trust and the friendship that we were able to grow and establish, we were able to, create something special and my life personally has changed because of it.”— Darlene Gillard Jones, Guest Speaker, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“But when we realized it was too early, like most things in my life and being a visionary — being a Black woman visionary — that's not necessarily celebrated. I see things many steps ahead.” — Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“Oftentimes, the people who are the strongest and who have it together are the very people that you need to check after.”— Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“Before ProjectDiane was released, the experiences of women in color in entrepreneurship were purely anecdotal—so whether you were a person of color or not, you had some idea that things just weren't the same for people of color in particular women and women of color in the startup space; but it wasn't until Kathryn and Digital Undivided came along to quantify that experience that really blew the lid off of that entire dynamic and conversation.”— Danielle Robinson Bell, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

“The hope was that Project Diane would be a catalyst. What I did not know was that Project Diane was going to fundamentally change the venture capital space in ways that still vibrate to this day.” —Kathryn Finney, Build the Damn Thing, Episode 5

Stay Connected:

Kathryn Finney
Website: https://www.kathrynfinney.com/
Twitter: @KathrynFinney
Instagram: @hiiamkathryn
Facebook: Kathryn Finney

Genius Guild
Website: Genius Guild
Twitter: @GeniusGuild
Instagram: @geniusguild
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/genius-guild

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

__________

 Credits:  


Produced by Genius Guild Content Studios


Executive Producers:  Kathryn Finney and Darlene Gillard Jones

Post-Production Company: Prosper Digital TV

Post-Production Manager: Joanes Prosper

Post-Production Supervisor: Jason Pierre

Post-Production Sound Editor: Evan Joseph

Co-Music Supervisors: Jason Pierre and Darlene Gillard Jones

Show Music: provided by Prosper Digital TV

Main Show Theme Music: "Self Motivated" Written & Performed by Tamara Bubble

Special thanks to Baratunde Thurston, Champions of Change: Tech Inclusion, and The Obama Administration  

Full Transcript

Darlene Gillard
I met Kathryn when I was fashion editor at essence magazine and she was the budget fashionista. When I left essence and started a company, Kathryn became one of my clients and she was a great client.

I mean, we made a ton of money together. I brokered a lot of deals on her behalf and we worked on a number of projects and a project that she wanted to do was put together a conference for black women in technology to gather. And she asked me if I would produce it. I agreed. And it was a hit. when it was over. She asked me if I'd be willing to partner with her on an organization called Digital Undivided, that will continue the mission of the conference and support black women in technology. and I haven't looked back since,, because of that relationship because of the trust and the friendship that we were able to grow and establish, we were able to, create something special and my life personally has changed because of it.       My husband is an investor in technology companies because of his proximity to tech. My son graduated from an HBCU as a computer science major because his interest was piqued because of my affiliation with the organization and my daughter works for Tesla. 

And so I'm thankful for that Kathy vortex that everyone speaks about and appreciate being on this journey. And, um, I'm forever grateful

Kathryn
One of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to sell others on your big idea. That’s exactly what I did when I started Digital Undivided. And while I founded the company, there was a core group of co-conspirators who helped me build it. This episode of Build The Damn Thing focuses on me building teams, leveraging relationships, and cultivating a work environment that creates a winning organization.

It was, while at BlogHer, I was doing a lot of conferences.  So they would send me to speak at like Southwest, Southwest and Web 2.0, all these sort of gatherings of people where I was literally the only black person. Um Sometimes the only woman at these conferences, and these conferences weren't like in Minneapolis or something, they were like in Chicago. I would go in Chicago, which has got a lot of black folks, many related to me, and it would be no black people at this conference. And I was like, "What the hell is going on here?" And it just really stuck with me. And so BlogHer had a conference in San Francisco,And I was there, and it wasn't a lot of black women there.

And I knew Blogger is organization like really were interested in getting women of color. They were before it even became cute, before it became cool, before it became a thing, they were doing it. And so to not see us there I was like, "What's going on?" So, I had an idea to do a conference for black women called Focus 100. So I talked to BlogHer because, like no one ran a conference like BlogHer. And so I turned to them and I said, "Telisa, I have this idea of this conference for black women in business." And they said, Oh wow! We think that's really, really great. I'm asking, I know of black women in startups.

There's a lot of us, but there's no, we're not gathering, we're not getting together.  And so she said, "Wow! That's something that we would love to support." And so they gave me the first check, which was for $5,000. And not only did they give the first check, they did something else that was even more important. ----- They gave us the manual, like literally gave us the manual of how they run events.

Elisa Camahort Page:
When Kathryn came to us, um my co-founders of BlogHer, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and I, and had the idea of taking what... She had attended our BlogHer Entrepreneurs Conference, and wanted to replicate something similar for women of color, um she came to us with the idea, and we were immediately like, "We're in, let's help, let's do it, you're the perfect person."

This is Elisa Camahort Page, author and entrepreneur.

We helped her not just financially, but operationally, because if you've never thrown a conference before, which by the way, Lisa, Jory, and I hadn't done when we did the first BlogHer, you have no idea the logistics behind it, so we did things like share contract templates with her, and share other kinds of logistical and operational intelligence from our years of doing conferences, to help her first conference be maybe easier than it was for us in the beginning, and help it have a faster path to success.

Uh ya know our belief was always that we weren't going to try to do everything all the time for everybody, and that sometimes, communities really want to be led and and find um resources that are within their communities, and so we wanted to amplify that movement, and we wanted to help augment um what she did in any way that we could. 

Kathryn Finney
I wasn't an event planner. And I wasn't someone who was used to running major conferences. That's just not wasn't my skillset. But I realized I knew someone who did, and that was Darleen. We had just did this massive $100,000 with the close 25 real people model, amazing crazy fashion show. And she kept calm throughout the whole thing.

And there were moments, Woo! where- where calm was need-ed. 

we got $10,000 from Andreessen Horwitz. And this was again in 2012, this is before everyone was talking about diversity in tech. No one really knew what that even meant. And so I realized that we needed even more money. So, we have the space and the food, and stuff, but there were little things that we needed, like that was costing. And so I spent almost $30,000 of my own money from advertisement to helping people get there. We had a little scholarship um that I gave, and basically paid for people to come. And we had our first Focus Fellow Conference in 2012. And it was amazing. It was every woman you could think of in tech was there and startup space. Uhm And it launched a lot of people.

Kelechi:
So I learned about digitalundivided through, um, another friend; she was with a fellow, um, black woman entrepreneur. Um, I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and she just told me about this conference. Um, and I was really excited to hear about it because I was a black woman in tech and didn't really know a lot of other black women in tech. And when I heard about it, I had applied for the scholarship. I mi- I  I received the scholarship and next night I was on the bus from Pittsburgh to New York for the focus 100 conference. And from there it just was a trajectory to a lot of other great things in my entrepreneurship career.

my name is  Kelechi Anyadiegwu. I am the CEO Uju Um, we are a brand development studio for women of color focused brands. I was at the first focus 100 conference as a focus fellow...

...and I've worked for the organization in different capacities over the past last couple of years. 

the conference for me, um, was just, uh introduction into this new ecosystem, around black women entrepreneurs and black women in tech. Iwas in grad school at the time studying user experience design. Um, there weren't a lot of other people who like me. Um, and I always knew that I had this inclination to also wanting to like, just start something. And so, um, being at that room and focus 100 around all of these really visionary women, um, just really inspired me. Um, and then to see what Kathryn was doing, what she was building to see, um, the other focus fellows who, you know, I had, you know, built a really great relationship with. Um, and to just finally feel like I was somewhere where I belonged. It's just, I think something that really set up my career, you know, as an entrepreneur. Um, and, and that's just the feeling that I'll never forget.

Kathryn Finney
in 2014, we kind of saw that things were kind of headed towards another place. It was really, really difficult to get the type of funding we needed to make the Focus Conference, be truly a business at the time Corporate America was looking for employees, not for innovators. And Focus was all about innovators. It was people who were building stuff. 

Kellee James
When I was at Focus, ..Mecaris was more of a concept at that point than a, than an actual company. 

we were incorporated, but, [smooth out] we hadn't raised our first money yet. We didn't have our first customers. It was, it was just, uh, it was all in my head, you know, at that point, I think we did have a landing page, but that's, that's about it.

So - for me, I really liked the, uh, the focus on raising money. Um, that's what attracted me to focus fellows. I think it's an example of why programs need to have specific and can have specific applications for black women. So lots of the critique on venture capital right now, or in general is that it's all about raising money and that's what grabs the headlines and, and, you know, to the detriment of the other sound fundamentals of business. But what I found as a black woman who had not raised money before was that I had an idea of what I needed to do business wise. I had an idea of where to go for, um, industry level expertise. I was working in a field that I had been working in for 10 years prior. What I didn't have, what I didn't have was the experience in raising money before.

And so focus was really a great program for me, um, because that's, that's precisely what I needed at that moment. 

my name is Kellee James, and I am the founder and CEO of Mercaris as a market information service, as well as an online trading platform for organic and non GMO and other what's known as identity preserved agricultural commodities. 

some of the highlights that I found included, oh gosh, there were so many, but, you know, meeting face to face with investors that, uh, folks like Freada Kapor Klein and William Crowder of the catalyst fund, which was a fund run by, uh, Comcast ventures. So some of these folks I had heard about or read about some, I had even, um, maybe corresponded with via email, but this was the first time I got to sit down and ya know have coffee with them, or just sit down around a round table and just, you know, chat. And I think it was just really helpful for developing those relationships.

Now there's a million startup events in every city. Um, but none really at the time were targeted towards black women tech startup founders. So, uh, I took the opportunity to just kind of went up there. I think I learned about the conference only a week before it was happening. Um, but I just made it a point to get up there and it was just a brilliant, brilliant event.

Kathryn Finney
all these people who, before they became with these leaders, they were always innovators. And what we realized is that the innovators that we had corporations did not want to connect with. They didn't even know they needed to connect with these people. And it's interesting now, almost 10 years later to see how connecting with innovators, and influencers are now the language of Corporate America. But when we realized it was too early, like most things in my life and being a visionary, being a black woman visionary, that's not necessarily celebrated. I see things many steps ahead. I've always been able to do that. I think people think sometimes when you're a talker, when you're someone like me, that you're not a good listener and I actually am a really, really good listener. And I pay attention to people and to things. And so with the Focus Conference, we were just several steps, we were about three or four years too early. We really were, we were several steps ahead.

Also at that same time of building focus, especially after the first focus, and before the second focus, I actually became quite sick and a lot of people didn't know that. And so I became sick with stage one Endometrial Cancer. It was a real shock to me.  And so I had this crazy diagnosis, and there's really two courses of treatment. You can take medication or you get surgery. I was trying to like put off getting surgery, um which would have impacted my ability to have children. So, that pushed off and was taking these crazy steroids at the same time as running this sort of organization, at the same time as people triggering, and putting all sorts of ish on me, all their likes sort of stuff.

And so it was really, really hard. Um but there's something about focus that really triggered. And I remember later I decided to have the surgery mostly because I just needed peace of mind. And the day after the surgery, um it's so crazy. Anytime you have major surgery, they make you get up and walk. So I remember walking around because I'm not about ready to stay in the hospital, but I'm on this floor, and I heard this woman who had this amazing suite.

I mean, if you are going to be sick, she had the room you want to be in. I mean, it was beautiful. It was great lighting it had bookcases with books in it, and all this stuff and I'm walking by her room and I hear her like yelling on the phone with somebody. And the nurse who was walking with me was like, "Yeah. She's some big time businesswoman CEO." And I'm like, obviously she had just gone through a certain major surgery. She had obviously went through chemo before because she had a scarf on her head, and she didn't have hair. And she's sitting there yelling at this person and I'm like... It just was such a lesson in life. It was one of those life lessons, a life portal, a life moment of like, "I don't want to be that."

If I'm at the end of my life, the last thing I want to give two Fs about is yelling at someone about something that's just not what I want to do. 

And so the next morning I got up, and I was in the room and of course I checked my email because I actually felt okay after having major abdominal surgery. I thought, "Okay. I did robotics." Because we're tech people. So I was like, I did this robotics, I walked into the surgery. They didn't wheel me in, I saw the machine, I saw the whole apparatus. It was like amazing and stuff. And so afterwards I got this email that said that I got the Champion of Change Award, which was from The White House, and I'm getting a little emotional because I had went through probably the toughest thing I ever went through.

I made a decision about my life, a decision that was that I wasn't going to be able to carry my own children. And I wasn't sure if it was the right decision. I wasn't sure if I had made the right decision. So the morning after, to receive an email that says The White House is honoring you as a champion of change for the work that you do, was incredibly important to me. It was life affirming. It affirmed that I made this tough decision, was the right decision. And I think as women, as people of color, as human beings, we are often met with incredibly tough decisions we have to make in life. And we don't know if they're right or wrong, and we're just asking God for a sign. To just tell me am I doing right? And for me to get that sign, when I say literally in my hospital bed, the very next day after my surgery, I got that email.

It was incredible. And I and I suspect I was nominated by the Kapors, Freada and Mitch Kapor. And I've never told them how important it was to receive that. It wasn't just like, "Oh yeah, I got award from The White House, and I got to go to The White House, and look at me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." It was, it was life affirming and what they did and by celebrating me they helped me celebrate my life. And so the ceremony was two weeks in DC, two weeks after this major abdominal surgery.

And so I went and my mother, and uhm Tobias, my husband, Darlene, uhm went with me and we went to the White House to get this award.

and I was exhausted and very sick. I don't think anybody knew how tired and unwell I was when I was there.

(AUDIO of panel)   (0:01 - 0:06) (Welcome to Champion of Change) ~ [brief Applause] (50:30 - 50:36) (Kathryn is introduced)  ~ (1:02:41 - 1:07) _ 

Baratunde:
….."Your tech aha moment, how that led in some ways to what you’re doing now and by the way what are you doing now?...
Kathryn,  your aha moment.....bucket list..."  [Laughter and extended applause fades out]

Kathryn Finney (addt’l)
“Good afternoon everyone…jazz hands...”

Kathryn Finney
And I think to everybody who saw me in the panel was probably like, "Oh my gosh, she's funny, she's fabulous, she's engaging, she's great." Inside, I was like dying. Like I was hurting.

And one of the things that Iiiii that taught me was humility and also empathy. You don't know what other people are going through, including the people who you may think are the strongest, and who have it together. Oftentimes, the people who are the strongest and who have it together are the very people that you need to check after. (PAUSE) And at that time, there was so much expectations placed on me by people who frankly didn't deserve to place any expectations on me. And here I am sick, going through this major surgery, I had cancer and yet, uhm I was able to come out of it.

So in 2014, when we were doing the final focus, I realized I couldn't do that anymore. I didn't want to leave this life where I wasn't winning, and I felt like I wasn't winning. And I didn't feel like anyone could win. Like we weren't getting the support that we needed. It wasn't going to come anyway soon. Uhm What we wanted to do and what corporations wanted, which were like engineers or something that we couldn't produce. It wasn't like there was a batch of like a big brownstone in Harlem full of engineers, like hidin’ out and chillin’ and not telling anybody, there just really wasn't very many black engineers. There actually needed to be a lot more groundwork that happen in order to create the pipeline that was needed.

And what we realized, the expectation was that we were going to somehow find things that couldn't be found, and that we would somehow make it so they didn't have to do the real work that they needed to do, which was really investing in our community. And I remember getting up on stage, and uhm saying that this is the last focus. What I didn't expect was there to be almost a discussion, church service, a testimonial, people got up and gave testimonials about how much FOCUS meant to them, and how much I meant to them.

Jeanne Sullivan
The actual focus meetings, so vibrant, so exciting, so interesting. And so that's why attending those conferences so important to me. And I remember I declared myself as president of the Kathryn Finney fan club, because I believe in her and her team and her mission,

I am Jean Sullivan. I'm a long time investor in tech.  ...for many years, I attended each of the digital undivided sessions that fabulous Katherine Finney created and curated.

I wouldn't have missed one. Why not? Because I am inspired by her inspiration, showing people, especially women of color, how to take a blank piece of paper and build a business. That's pretty exciting. That's one of the many things I love and loved about digital and divided. 

Kathryn Finney
Now, the irony of it is, is that that last FOCUS conference would have been a great thing to end on. Right? What else did I have to leave behind? But I wanted to document the problem that we were having in raising money. I want to document how hard it was to be a black woman in the startup space.yourself?"

And so I did what was called Project Diane, the very first Project Diane 

Danielle Robinson Bell
So ProjectDiane essentially was the first time that the challenges of women of color in entrepreneurship were quantified and it was this wonderfully but yet shocking report about what women of color were experiencing in the startup space as it relates to funding, networks and training.

My name is Danielle Robinson Bell and I handled all things communications both internally and externally for digitalundivided.

Before ProjectDiane was released, the experiences of women in color in entrepreneurship were purely anecdotal so   whether you were a person of color or not, you    had some idea that things just weren't the same for people of color in particular women and women of color in the startup space, but it wasn't until Kathryn and digitalundivided came along to quantify that experience that really blew the lid off of that entire uhm dynamic and conversation.

Kathryn Finney
the results were just like startling. Like we check, double check, triple check, quadruple check the results of that first Project Diane. Uhm And it was startling. There was only 84 black women startups using the Steve Blanks definition of startups which is a temporary organization that is going to be scaled, and then, possibly exit. And that was just startling to me.

Geri Stengel
The importance of research such as ProjectDiane is that it focuses media on inequities uhh in the ecosystem, or just in the world in general. And uhm there's a lot of research showing uhmm uhh the small percentage of funding that goes to women entrepreneurs. Uhm And that's done primarily through PitchBook, but PitchBook doesn't track uhh race and ethnicity. Um And it was really critical to have some measurement showing um really the minuscule percentage of funding that is going to black and latinx female founders. So, uhm if you take a look at the entire uhm uhh ecosystem, and the percentages uhm  of funding female founded teams, It could be as high as, 13% last year. It actually dropped uh from uh 2017. 

Okay. I'm Geri Stengel, and I'm President of Ventureneer.

and I'm best known for writing in Forbes, about the success factors of uh women entrepreneurs.

….What is really uh the importance of ProjectDiane, is showing that of all the funding going to female founders, which is small. It is minuscule going to black and uh latinx women. Uh It is less than 1%. And um uh when the research, the first ProjectDiane came out, I watched in um amazement the amount of attention that that research uh-uh  got.

So, I do research, and honestly I was a little bit jealous of the attention that that research um study got. It went viral. Uhm I uhm track a lot of feeds, news feeds. And everywhere I looked, everybody was um uh talking about uh ProjectDiane and the numbers, because it highlighted really um horrific inequity in funding going to uh black and brown uh women.

Kathryn Finney:
And so, when we found this data, I was like, "Oh, shit. This is like crazy." I didn't really believe it myself. Like I actually questioned it myself. And I realized that we couldn't keep it to ourselves. It had to be released. We had no money to release it. Um All the money was coming from myself. 

And so, went to a friend. Uhm Again, blogHer connection. Lisa Stone's partner worked at GoDaddy at that time. And she shared with him what I was doing with Project Diane. And he was like, "You know what? I think I have some support for you." And he gave us $5,000, 

Chris Carfi
What made me invest in project Diane in 2015 and 2016, having already been around the startup ecosystem for a number of years. I was seeing the same types of companies and the same types of people that were all getting the investment... 

My name is Christopher Carfi. I'm an angel investor advisor and marketing executive working with entrepreneurs, startups, and growth stage companies. 

...It was disproportionately male, disproportionately white. And I was convinced that if the research was done and the data was out there, there was a path to making entrepreneurship more inclusive and accessible for all.

Kathryn Finney
I mean, it went everywhere. It was from Forbes to Fortune, to all these different communities, Essence to People Magazine. I mean, everyone was talking about Project Diane...

...the hope was that it would be a catalyst. What I did not know was that Project Diane was going to fundamentally change the venture capital space in ways that still uhm vibrate to this day. 

A friend of mine saw the report. It was somebody I went to college with, and he had gotten the report, and he was a officer at a foundation called Surdna. And he had, for many years, been thinking of different ways in which we could address economic insecurity and instability, uhm and really, economic terrorism in the black community. And he was looking for new ways. He thought that traditional ways of just even CDFIs which are community development financial institutions, uhm these sort of savings and loans, like all of these sort of traditional ways he thought were like antiquated. And that there weren't going to really have any impact. So, he was looking for ideas.

Shawn Escoffrey
So I first learned about digital undivided, um, sort of through an article I'm forgetting, I'm forgetting what publication, um, but, uh, the article focused on, um, black women and women entrepreneurs in the tech space. Um, and it was something that, uh, sort of, I was interested in because I was managing and sort of a economic development portfolio portfolio. And that was really focusing on economic inclusion and looking at, uh, people of color in a very different way than philanthropy, philanthropy traditionally looks at people's color. So Um, my thesis was, you know, just stating the fact that we are assets um to the economy that we create jobs. We create businesses. Um, we are leaders, um, and I was looking for organizations that believe the same thing.

My name is Shawn Escoffrey  previously our resi program director for the strong local economies program at the certainty foundation. I am now the executive director of the Rory and Patricia Disney family foundation. 

Um, and not just in the sense of, of micro businesses, but, um, tech enabled businesses, uh, businesses that can  grow to hundreds, if not thousands of employees and businesses that could um disrupt the status quo as well. Um, so I first, um, you know, sort of read the article and saw, um, what digital undivided was doing and sort of waving the flag around women entrepreneurs. Um, and I was intrigued, so I sort of put a pin in, okay, I need to, I need to talk to them eventually, as I'm building out my portfolio 

Kathryn Finney
So, he called me and I said, "Well, the most successful part of the FOCUS conference was this incubator accelerator program we had. It was really hard to do it, but it was also the place where we saw the most impact. And he said, "Well, you know have you guys thought about becoming a nonprofit? I can help you if you become a non-profit. I'm a little bit tied, if you don't." And we'd already been thinking about, through Project Diane just making, DiD a nonprofit And so, we had already started the process, and had just gotten our designation. So, I said to him, "Sure." He was like, "Well, I'm going to give you $100,000. Is that enough for you to test um this concept?" And I was like, "Well, you know what, we'll make it work."

Around the same time, my husband got a job, a new position with Microsoft for Startups. And that position was based in Atlanta. Digital Undivided had done a number of things in Atlanta before. Often, in between the conferences, Darlene and I would go across the country. I mean, we went everywhere. We were from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, to Portland, Oregon, you name it, Minneapolis, Chicago, we were there. In fact, people would call the Thelma & Louise of tech. And so, we did a lot of things in Atlanta, and we had relationships in Atlanta and people wanted us to come to Atlanta. This was in 2014 and '15. 

Shawn Escoffrey
Yea- so so with Digital undivi-um Undivided being, you know, sort of new and the conversation around women in tech and entrepreneurship being new or unheard of in in the sort of philanthropic circles. I think there was a little skepticism but I had a very supportive president at the time, Phil Henderson, um, who believed in my vision uh for the program and you know, I started the program, uh, the strong local economies program during the height of the recession. Uh, you know, the country was hemorrhaging jobs. Um,  we were trying to figure out what's next. How do you, how do you reimagine cities? Um, how do you create new jobs? And I was looking at, um, these new job creators and the leaders of the, the next economy as people of color and women. Um, and I was, you know, sort of determined to identify those organizations that were lifting up those approaches. 

So for me, I'm black, I'm black as hell. Um, and I, I, I take my with me wherever I go, whatever in any spaces that I'm in, and I have an agenda and a narrative that I'm pushing and that starts with people that look like me. Right. And that also starts with, um, people who've always been ignored, um,disinvested or, um, unappreciated. And, um, I used the ability to, to move resources, um, to show that I appreciate these minds and to show that, um, everyone else should appreciate them as well. 

In this episode of Build The Damn Thing, Genius Guild CEO Kathryn Finney shares how to successfully exit a company -- something many entrepreneurs can’t imagine -- and how to start something new. For the first time she gives a behind-the-scenes account of her own experience selling her first start-up and what that was like for her.

Learn Kathryn's process of selling her blog, The Budget Fashionista, and how the proceeds from the sale gave her enough capital to start her next big venture. Plus get inspiration and insight on how you can do the same.

Kathryn Finney is known as a pioneer in the fashion blogging community thanks to her blog “The Budget Fashionista” which has helped thousands of women dress chic and cheap. Kathryn not only has built a huge blogging community but also has been featured among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes and is greatly recognized by books like How to Be a Budget Fashionista and The Ultimate Guide to Looking Fabulous for Less. In fact, Kathryn is the living definition of a businesswoman who is always trying to generate new ways to share her knowledge about fashion and entrepreneurship just like she does through her platform the Genius Guild which apart from having the podcast “Build that Damn Thing”, invests in companies led by Black founders.

Insights from the Podcast

- Understanding that it is okay to outgrow something and want to do something else
- How to pivot and venture into something new
- Understanding that it is okay to leave your job, not because you were treated a certain way but because you want to do -the next thing
- Understand the full arc of acquisition and how start-up work
- How to sell and move on to the next and start another venture
- The 4T’s on buying a tech company:
   Technology: it has technology that would be hard for the corporation to create quickly
   Talent: they have a core group of founders
   Traffic: it has a large community behind it
   Taxable income: the company has a ton of money

Quotes from the show:

“It is okay to outgrow it, as an entrepreneur we are like ‘I created it, it’s my baby, I have to stay. But you don’t always have to stay” -Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, Guest Speaker, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“One of the challenges that we have in the black community is that we overstay, and I know why: because there is security” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“In our community, there isn’t a language about exiting positively: usually when you leave your job, it’s because they were treating you in a certain way or you got a better job” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“A start-up is a temporary organization that is designed to discover a solution to a problem and in the process to also discover a profitable, scalable and reputable business model and while doing that, to grow as quickly as possible” -Brian Laung Aoaeh, Guest Speaker, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“Venture capitalists look for and invest in start-ups. They look for companies that are doing something uniques, that they are solving a problem that hasn’t been solved yet” -Brian Laung Aoaeh, Guest Speaker, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“One of the things about not selling when people come to you is that the price changes” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“I think it comes back to who are the people around you? Who do you trust when it’s hard and you have to make a decision? Some of it is guy, and you have to listen to your gut, and some of it is having the right group that will tell you when you are not thinking correctly” -Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, Guest Speaker, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

“We constantly have to move and pivot and we have to find our own validation from within as entrepreneurs because you are constantly told it’s not gonna work or you should do this or that” -Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, Guest Speaker, Build The Damn Thing Episode #4

Stay Connected:

Kathryn Finney
Website: https://www.kathrynfinney.com/
Twitter: @KathrynFinney
Instagram: @hiiamkathryn
Facebook: Kathryn Finney

Genius Guild
Website: Genius Guild
Twitter: @GeniusGuild
Instagram: @geniusguild
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/genius-guild

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

 Credits:  

Produced by Genius Guild Content Studios

Executive Producers:  Kathryn Finney and Darlene Gillard Jones
Post-Production Company: Prosper Digital TV
Post-Production Manager: Joanes Prosper
Post-Production Supervisor: Jason Pierre
Post-Production Sound Editor: Evan Joseph
Co-Music Supervisors: Jason Pierre and Darlene Gillard Jones
Show Music: provided by Prosper Digital TV
Main Show Theme Music: "Self Motivated" Written & Performed by Tamara Bubble
Special thanks to Forbes Advisor
  


Info         

_{Season 1 Episode 4}

_{Aug 25, 2021}

_{22 mins, 35 secs (21.7MB, Audio)}

_{BlackExcellence #Entrepreneurship #FashionBlog #BloggersUnite #Startups #BlackWomen #KathrynFinney #BlackOwned #TheBudgetFashionista #BlacksInTech #AfroTech #BlackAuthors #Discrimination #Incubators #Lissen #Exiting #VentureCapital}

Full Transcript

Kendra Bracken Ferguson
Catherine was really, you know, when I was going through the transition between digital brand architect, CBA and starting brain trust and really in this place, she said to me, it's okay to outgrow it.

And I think as an entrepreneur, you're like, I created it. It's my baby. I have to staybut you don't always have to stay. And she helped me get very clear with it being okay for me to have outgrown something and wanting to do something else. And that's really been such an  anchor for me.

Kathryn Finney
Diverse entrepreneurs often feel like they haaave to stick to what they’ve built, but what happens if you wanna do something different? How does one even begin? How do you sell a company? In this episode of Build The Damn Thing, I share with you how I sold my first start-up, and started something totally new.

Yeah. One of the challenges that we have in black community is this whole thing about leaving something, right. We overstay. “Stayy.”  And I know why because it's security, right?. And so when I sold The Budget Fashionista, I called my grandparents and I was like, "I sold my company. I'm gonna give you guys a little something, something. I'm gonna hook you up with something, something." And my grandmother was like, "Are you okay? Do you need moneyUm ya know Because in our community, there's not really a language about exiting positively. I realized that. Usually when you leave your job, it's like, "Oh, you left because they were treating you some sort of way." Or, "You got a better job." "No, I'm leaving because I want to. I'm leaving because I'm having money for leaving." like I’m going to the next thing.

John Schmidt
Selling a company can mean a couple of different things, but fundamentally it's about seeing some return on the investment of time and money you put into building your company

You could also sell a company in a sense by going public like you do. When you have an IPO, this allows you to offer shares of your company to the general public, which can also let you cash in on your investment.   And then hopefully lets them cash in on any future growth

I'm John Schmidt and I am an investing and retirement editor with Forbes advisor.

Companies typically IPO in two main ways, a traditional IPO where the company files a ton of paperwork and financial disclosures with the sec and then gets listed on an exchange like the New York stock exchange or the Nasdaq, or they might choose to, to be acquired by a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC.

A SPAC is essentially a public company that is already listed on an exchange and was created with the sole purpose of buying a private company and bringing it public through that acquisition

Kathryn Finney
And your family, particularly black families want you to be safe. They want you to be secure. They want you to be happy. They want to make sure that you are able to feed yourself. And so for my family, I totally got where it came from. It wasn't like, "Kathryn, you're not great." It was like, "We want to make sure that you can eat. Do you need us to send me some money? Do you want to come home to Minneapolis?" I was like, "No, I'm good. I'm really good. I'm going on a month-long trip to the South Pacific too. I'm good. I'm really, really good."And so I think for us as a community, getting comfortable with exits and leaving, and I think the language has definitely changed quite a bit since 2012, which is when I sold The Budget Fashionista, I think people are getting more comfortable.

There are great examples of women who've exited their companies and moved on to something different people like Cheryl Contee, who was one of the first Black women to sell her company to a publicly traded company.

Cheryl Contee                                                                                            
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding in the community around, you know, what selling your company really means. So for example, you know, have the pioneer behind Shea moisture and he ended up, you know, selling to one of the big, I think it was Procter and gamble or Unilever, or one of those, some people might accuse him of, of selling out, you know, selling his grandmother's recipes. Right. And, that's a fundamental misunderstanding  about how capitalist markets work.

I'm Cheryl Contee Chief Innovation Officer at the impact seat and chair and founder of Dobigthings.today. I sold my company attentively in 2016 to Blackbaud.

if the goal is to build generational wealth, if the goal is to, you know, create the kind of wealth that then can be used by angel investors who happen to be black, to support other entrepreneurs who happened to be black or brown, if we're talking about, you know, getting to those board seats, where, oftentimes in an acquisition, such as Jay Z, selling title and getting onto the board of square with Jack Dorsey, that's a big deal. That's a place where we weren't invited before. So, I do think that as people see and understand the full arc of how startups work, what happens when you acquisition, (music should naturally end around here) why you're acquired, what happens when you versus IPO, which is very rare, most companies are not going to IPO. So an acquisition is the natural life cycle, of your average business. If, if you're very lucky,

Kathryn Finney (00:59:24):
Usually when someone buys a tech company, they buy it for one of four reasons, what I call the four T's. It is either for the tech. It has some sort of technology that would be hard to develop, or it would be hard for a corporation to create quickly. So it's cheaper for them to just buy it and buy the company. It's talent, it's, they have an amazing founder or founders, or they have this core group of engineering talent that's so hard to find, that we want to buy it for that talent.

It's traffic. And that also means the community. It has a large community, it has a lot of heat... has people paying attention into it and a corporation or another company wants to get that, "It's cheaper for us to buy this company and get that versus for us to, to create it ourselves." And last but not least is taxable income, aka revenue. "And it is this company has a ton of revenue. It was just making money, hand over fist, it's - it’s got amazing margins. And so, as a company, we want to buy it."

When I started The Budget Fashionista, there there were no options for venture capital for what I was doing. uhhmm so I didn't raise anything for The Budget Fashionista. And it was actually towards the end when I start to think about where I was going to go next that I had this choice between either venture capital or private equity or just selling it. Aaand I took some initial meetings with a number of private equity funds, umm as well as a couple of VCs, and what I realized that in order for me to stay,  eh- in order for me to take this money... If I took it, the expectation would be that I had to stay. In fact, I would have had to sign a contract that said I would have to stay for two to three years.

Heather Hiles
Venture capital is a particular type of capital. There is working capital or, cap ex money, which can be really useful to small businesses of any type that are in need of some money in advance so that they have the money to build and provide the services that their businesses provide.

For example, if you're wanting to bring a grocery store to market, or you wanted to bring food service, a restaurant to market, you might need advanced money to get up and going, but that doesn't mean you would be eligible, or it would be ideal to raise venture capital

My name is Heather Hiles. I founded Pathbrite in 2012 and sold that company at the end of 2015 to Cengage learning. I'm currently the managing partner of black ops ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund for black founders

Private equity is completely different. Private equity is, let's, let's say I have a consulting shop and I build websites. and, I've been doing that with some old technology., and I have a good book of business and I've been running it for maybe a decade, but now the new technologies are so much more advanced and people are requiring machine learning and AI and their websites. And I don't have the talent for it. I don't have the knowledge base. And also maybe as an owner, maybe I've been an entrepreneur for 30 years now, and maybe I'm looking to cash out in some ways. And, semi-retire or pass on my business. Private equity is wonderful for taking stock of and making the most of the existing assets and then, turning them up, maybe doing kind of a think of it as re renovating a house kind of, and bringing in the right technologies and bringing in the right kinds of talent and that sort of thing.

Kathryn Finney
And so I knew in order for me to sell the Budget Fashionista, I needed to focus on at least oone of those four T's, um ‘cause I didn't want it to be talent. I knew it wasn't going to be talent because I was not going to come with it. I was done with being the Budget Fashionista.

I knew it was going to be technology because we used at that time, WordPress, and everyone was using WordPress as the backend. So I couldn't sell the technology. So I knew that it had to be about the community that I had built and it had to be about the income and revenue that I had. In order for it to be about the revenue and also the community, I had to prove that the community and the revenue would stay, even if I left. And that was something that I set out to do. And it took me two years. I had to build a team. I hired editor in chief. I slowwwly started to write less and less for the website, started to do less and less. I still did my spokesperson work, but I did less and less for the website and the editor in chief did more and more.

And I slowly started to pull myself back.

Um I think the thing now, as an investor, as a venture capitalist myself, I think what a lot of people don't realize, particularly in the Black community, is how venture capital works.

Brian Aoaeh
I think in order to define venture capital, one first has to understand what a startup is,

a startup is a temporary organization that is designed to discover his solution to a problem in the process to also discover a profitable, scalable, and repeatable business model, and while doing that to grow as quickly as possible.

My name is Brian Laung Aoaeh, I am a co-founder and general partner of REFASHIOND Ventures, and I am the co-founder of the Worldwide Supply Chain Federation.

Venture capitalists look for and invest in startups, so typically we're looking for companies that are doing something unique, they're solving a problem that has not been solved yet, and depending on the stage at which the venture capitalist is making the investment, they might have discovered a business model, or they might still be searching for a business model, so the earlier the venture capitalist makes the investment the less likely it is that there's already a business model in place, and then the idea is you know hopefully these companies succeed, the founders do well, the venture capitalists do well and the investors in the venture capitalist funds also do well.

Kathryn Finney
... And I was like, "I'm not interested in that, I want to be done. When I'm done with this. I want to be done. I don't want a boss. I just want to be done."

We had a number of people at Alford to purchase the site. The first offer came right in the middle of the television stuff that I was doing. And it was actually quite a significant amount of money, but I said, no, because I was in the middle of the TV stuff, and I realized, now I could have sold the website and its assets and still kept the name, and use that as a negotiation, but I didn't know at that time, because again, I didn't have a lot of advice. No one was really doing this.

And one of the things about not selling when people come to you is that the price changes. And I learned that. So ya know I made good money because I owned 100% of the Budget Fashionista but I didn't make the money I could have made if I would've sold that when this person wanted to buy it, this company wanted to buy it. And so I went back to them and said, "Hey, I’m - I'm ready to sell." And they were like, "Okay, well, we're always interested in buying. It's not going to be the same price." And I was like, "You know what? At this point, if I don't have to stay, then I'm ready to go." All the other offers were contingent on me staying. So there was a number of private equity firms who wanted to buy the Budget Fashionista and put it under like a slate of websites that they had that interconnected and helped sell from some of their um retail brands and things like that.

and I would have to stay for another two to three years before I could exit out, or what we call an earn out. … So I'm going to sell to this person. Yeah, it's less money, but then I'm done. I take it. The wire comes in. And so I sold it

Patrice Grell Yursik
The first time I heard about Kathryn Finney and The Budget Fashionista

She was already established and she was one of the first adopters, she was one of the first Black women who I knew to be out there in the blogging world speaking about style, about fashion, about ya know, her interests.

So I remember very clearly when we discussed that and then when she did it, it was like, oh, like this is what a CEO might do, or somebody who was in charge of a corporation might do, sell and move on to the next and build another one.

My name is Patrice Grell Yursik and I am the creator of Afrobella LLC, So I am a writer.

That was where it was kind of a light bulb moment for me like, oh,  this is not your diary that you  write in forever. You don't have to keep it like that, you can do something different with it and you can interpret it in different ways. And I think Kathryn always had insights that this was not just a passion project and something she was doing for a labor of love, this was- this was  business always.

Kathryn Finney  
it was the day the wire came in, and Tobias and I were getting ready to go on a massive bucket list trip to the South Pacific, to Australia, to New Zealand, to Fiji, just entire South Pacific.

And so I was going to the bank to get some cash. And there was a brotha who was at the teller and he pulled up my bank account. He was like, "Wooo! Ooo sister, you are doing well for yourself." And I'll never forget that. He's like, "I am so proud of you. You are doing well. This is you. You are doing well." And I- and ya know I think some people might be offended if a bank teller says that to them, but it was- it was  like, "I am doing well. I did- I earned this. I built the Budget Fashionista. I did not steal from anybody. I used my own ideas. I did not stomp on anyone. I did not put anyone down I built it based on my own ingenuity and my own work and amazing bunch of people and supporters like Tobias, and Darlene, and my family who didn't know what the hell I was doing, but sure enough bought the books, and bragged on me,

There's a group of us who are successful black woman leaders who are leading in spaces where we don't see ourselves a lot. And we have the same mindset. We have the seen belief system and we have become very, very close friends and we lean on each other for advice and for guidance and for feedback. Um, when it's sometimes hard for us to get it publicly, I am a public person. So there's not that many people I can turn to.. But Kendra is somebody I can turn to.

Kendra Bracken Ferguson
I think it goes back to like, who are the people around you, right? Like who do you trust when it's hard, when you have to make a decision, some of that is gut and you got to listen to your gut. And then some of that is having the right group that will tell you when you are not thinking correctly, or when you need to think about something else,

Name is Kendra Bracken Ferguson. I'm an entrepreneur founder advisor investor, and the founder of brain trust. I sold my company brain trust to CAA GBG in 2017 and the first company I co-founded digital brand architects, otherwise known as DBA to UTA in 2019. I literally, you know, started my second company brain trust as this really exciting thing for me to be able to get back to working with brands. Cause my first agency, digital brand architects, we were the first agency to manage bloggers as talent. And so I had a good foundation I recently just started a company with Halle Berry called re spin.

And so for me, it's always been about, you know, understanding the journey. ...

If I can learn something and carry that with me into the next business, into the next opportunity into the next deal, then that's success, right? Because we constantly have to move and pivot. And we have to find our own validation from within, especially as an entrepreneur, because you're constantly told no, or it's not going to work, or you should do this, or you should do that.

And I have to say that Kathryn was really, you know, when I was going through the transition between digital brand architect, CBA and starting brain trust and really in this place, she said to me, it's okay to outgrow it.

Kathryn Finney
And so having this moment of success. I'm working really hard. Even though people told me, "Flat out," I wasn't going to win because I was Black and a woman, and then ended up winning and I owned 100% of this. This was 100% mine because they didn't have the vision. It was an incredible… it was incredible. It was an incredible moment.   I could fly first class to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, and stay at Four Seasons and stay at these resorts at the best five-star resorts. And I could do all of that. And that was because of this hard work that I didI could send money to my family. I could ya know have money in the bank. I could pay off student loans. I could do all these different things because of this hard work and because of their support.

Kathryn Finney
Me selling The Budget Fashionista just meant that I was going into the next step. Kathryn was always Kathryn, and I used the resources from The Budget Fashionista, from selling it to actually start my next thing, which definitely had a fundamental impact on the Black community. But I wouldn't have been able to start my next thing, if I had not sold The Budget Fashionista, if I had not had the capital that came from selling The Budget Fashionista.

Patrice Grell
even though the impact that Kathryn had on the space to me cannot be underestimated, because from looking at Kathryn and getting to know Kathryn in the early days of blogging, she was already understanding that this was a business and she was already understanding that some of us were unfortunately being taken advantage of. So she was extremely savvy. And I would say extremely ahead of the curve, because she recognized that the ways that we were being compensated for our productivity was not commensurate with our value. And I mean, she was one of the first people to leave. She was one of the first people to sell and be like, "I'm out of this blogging thing. I'm done."

In this episode of Build The Damn Thing, Kathryn Finney opens up about the different struggles she went through on her way to success as a Black woman in business and as an innovator in technology. Learn about her business trajectory since the early 2000’s, where she was managing to create the Budget Fashionista blog, which later on became a sensation in the blogging community. However, this was not enough to succeed: with the evolution of technology Kathryn had to constantly reinvent herself and come up with new ideas and new projects that weren’t received with open arms by the white male community who had the monopoly over entrepreneurship and technology at that time.

This episode is a testimony of how Kathryn turned every rejection or project that did not work out the way she wanted into motivation to inspire other women and spark new and innovative ideas to change the game.

Kathryn Finney is known as a pioneer in the fashion blogging community thanks to her blog “The Budget Fashionista” which has helped thousands of women dress chic and cheap. Kathryn not only has built a huge blogging community but also has been featured among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes and is greatly recognized by books like How to be a Budget Fashionista and The Ultimate Guide to Looking Fabulous for Less. In fact, Kathryn is the living definition of a businesswoman who is always trying to generate new ways to share her knowledge about fashion and entrepreneurship just like she does through her platform the Genius Guild which apart from having the podcast “Build that Damn Thing”, invests in companies led by Black founders.

Insight from the Podcast

- How Kathryn became a successful black business woman.
- Details on how Kathryn had to constantly reinvent her projects according to the technology and blogging evolutions.
- Difficulties Kathryn experienced being a black woman in a work scenario mainly dominated by white men.
- How throughout the years Kathryn, with the help of other black businesswoman, found her spot in the fashion and entrepreneur industry.
- How Kathryn has always sought to support women, who like her in the early 2000´s, are looking to be successful.

Quotes from the show:

“I wasn't the first black woman, I was one of the first women period” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

“Blogging was the future and I knew how influential the influencers were for their community” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

“I needed to build a team because I couldn't do it all myself, I couldn't serve the amount of content that my community wanted all the time” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

“I kind of knew that it was changing, I started to see that technology became easier, there were more people and more competition and the difference between me and others was not that great, people started to try to take the name of Budget Fashionista which I had trademarked” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

“My agent and attorney at the time said to me: don't you ever do that again and I was like what do you mean? They were like you can't be smart like that, you let us do that” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

“I don't know of any black woman that ever received the venture funding and I don't think you'll be the first” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

“We were invisible Black Founders, Black women were invisible, the irony of it is to see how many of them are trying to get woken up” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #3

Stay Connected:

Kathryn Finney
Website: https://www.kathrynfinney.com/
Twitter: @KathrynFinney
Instagram: @hiiamkathryn
Facebook: Kathryn Finney

Genius Guild
Website: Genius Guild
Twitter: @GeniusGuild
Instagram: @geniusguild
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/genius-guild

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

      Credits:  

Produced by Genius Guild Content Studios

Executive Producers:  Kathryn Finney and Darlene Gillard Jones
Post-Production Company: Prosper Digital TV
Post-Production Manager: Joanes Prosper
Post-Production Supervisor: Jason Pierre
Post-Production Sound Editor: Evan Joseph
Co-Music Supervisors: Jason Pierre and Darlene Gillard Jones
Show Music: provided by Prosper Digital TV
Main Show Theme Music: "Self Motivated" Written & Performed by Tamara Bubble
Add’l Music: "Lil' Sumn" by Dreamadai
      

      


Info       

_{Season 1 Episode 3}

_{July 30, 2021}

_{37 mins, 50 secs (34.7MB, Audio)}

_{BlackExcellence #Entrepreneurship #FashionBlog #BloggersUnite #Startups #BlackWomen #KathrynFinney #BlackOwned #TheBudgetFashionista #BlacksInTech #AfroTech #BlackAuthors #Discrimination #Incubators #Lissen}

Full Transcript

Patrice Yursik Grell  
If you don't really know, Kathryn, you can kind of look at her as a person who is, a very knowledgeable expert.. and who has a really cool, funky fashion sense. And you see her beautiful, big hair and the cool glasses and the way she puts herself together. And…. I think that if you aren't familiar with her, it can be a little intimidating, because she just looks like she has it so together, and she does have it so together. 

She's a dynamic, amazing, knowledgeable, fierce woman, but she's friendly and she's sweet and she's approachable, and she's funny, And she does not approach things from a lofty, unfriendly, I'm better than you perspective. She's always just been... Kathryn. 

Kathryn Finney
Before Google was google, and blogging was a thing, I was The Budget Fashionista; thee expert on all things cheap and chic. From a Best Selling book to regular appearances in morning shows like The Today Show, I was one of the first women to find success in the Blogosphere. This episode explores the early days of what is now known as the Influencer Economy, and how I was able to build an extremely successful business, while no one was looking.

When I first started Budget Fashionista, this was in the early 2000s. And so I wasn't the first Black woman, I was one of the first women, period, in the space. At that time, no one really knew anything about blogging, no one knew what blogging was going to become. And in fact, I remember saying to my mom, "Hey, I'm going to do this blog." And she's like, "You went to Yale for what? Why are you doing that? A smog [inaudible 00:12:09]? What is a blog?" I'm like, "Oh, it's like a diary, but on the web, and I'm talking about shopping, and it's an outlet, and I'm going to sample sales, I'm doing all these different things." And she's like, "Oh, okay…. Well, you know, make sure you use that Yale degree for something." And so, I actually didn't leave my day job until I got my book deal. this was in 2002, I think at that time it was like less than 100,000 blogs. I mean, that was just written web blogs. 

Tobias Wright
When we first started the Budget Fashionista. It really was the wild west of blogs. The tools that you have today are not the tools that existed back then. So it was an opportunity to look at some different technologies and get things up on the web, which was a lllot harder then, than it is now. We had to get our own servers. We had to kind of maintain our own software or maintain open source software. There wasn't always the best experience.   

My name is Tobias Wright. I am a software engineer... Kathryn, is my wife.

At the time, most people who, who were using these types of things were kind of just right at the forefront.   This is back in the day when things like MySpace and Yahoo GeoCities were a big deal. When people got those, pages up, but this is opportunity to kind of get our own domain name, kind of go through that process, get the server and hosting, which was a lot harder back then. And then kind of get those things up and running for the world to see.

Kathryn Finney
we're talking about, not many things going on and virtually no women. But when I got the book deal, it was like outside validation, And it gave me knowledge I could do it.

It was a tough time because the publishing industry understood books, but they didn't understand the internet. And here I was coming from the internet. And so I remember we had this big meeting at Random House because I was doing what was called a blog book tour. And what it was, was that, I was giving the book to anybody who would write about it, as long as they post the link to this Amazon account. Didn't matter. You didn't have to write anything positive. I didn't even care what you said. You could say, "This is a piece of S-H-I-T," but as long as you link to Amazon, that's all I cared about.

I knew blogging was the future. I also knew how influential influencers were to their community. And again, this was 2004, 2005. And so, we're in this big room, it's me, my literary agent, Nicholas, and about six or seven other people, all White, from the marketing department, and they just could not believe I was doing this. Another thing that had happened was that Marshalls, had agreed to sponsor 15 city book tour for me.

They were paying for everything. When you are a new author, you rarely even get a one city book tour, let alone a 15 city book tour paid for and sponsored by a major retailer. And the publisher could not understand why Marshalls would spend this sort of money on someone like me. I mean, they actually said that, "We don't understand why Marshalls would do that." And I remember my literary agent had to get a little direct with them and said, "You will not mess this up because you don't understand." Talk amongst yourselves, and get some understanding."    

Nicholas Roman Lewis  
I remember, I think it was QVC or home shopping network. One of those places, we had a very lovely, tea or lunch. And I remember vividly, we were like, oh, this is exciting. because clearly her brand at the time, the budget fashionista, was perfect for that, but that company had a different vision of, of Kathy and it wasn't of her being front and center, but kind of like, you know, you've got a great idea here. Maybe we should like take it or do something with it, but without you, and it was just like, you don't understand that we're talking about something bigger. 

My name is Nicholas Roman Lewis, and I served as Kathy Finney's book agent on her first book deal. How to be a budget fashionista. 

So that kind of, narrative of Kathy, like, Hey, this train is going in a certain place. If you don't want to be in this destination, then get off this train and there's a vision about it. 

Kathryn Finney (00:16:21):
I started the Budget Fashionista because I was spending too much money and I had lots of student loans. And I knew I wasn't the only person in the world who was faced with that. So when the book came out, it exploded. And I went on this tour and people were like, "Oh my God, we love her. She's funny, she's different, she knows her ish about budget shopping. She's Black. We weren't expecting all of this."

And it was really awesome. And at the same time that was happening, I started to do a lot more national TV, namely The Today Show. 

The Budget Fashionista TV segment HERE] (a 30sec clip)

my anniversary party for the Budget Fashionista ended up being one of the biggest parties of fashion week of New York fashion week in 2008, which is crazy to think about, um, almost, you know, 10 plus years later I was working with agents and stuff and really wanted to get a variety of sponsors. And I was introduced to this amazing woman who at the time, her name was Kendra Bracken. Uh, it wasn't Kendra Bracken-Ferguson yet. Um, but I met Kendra and we were talking and she was so amazing- she was just like so radiant and we just like fell in love with 

Kendra Bracken Ferguson 
So I met Kathryn, this is early two thousands when she was, of course the founder, the leader of the budget fashionista.I was an account executive at Fleishman Hillard, one of the largest agencies in the world. And I'll never forget that fashion week. When, when we sponsored her event, my client NuvaRing, I got them to sponsor and I was just obsessed with Kathryn and budgetfashionista. She was such a pioneer and really one of the first, and to look at someone in that space who looked like me, who sounded like me, who was accomplished. it was really exciting. And I remember telling everyone at the agency, oh my gosh, budget fashionista is amazing.

I'm Kendra Bracken Ferguson. I'm a long time supporter friends admire of Catherine 

And at the time, I mean blogging, oh my gosh, it was the early days. Facebook was still a.edu and there just wasn't anyone doing what Kathryn was doing. She was truly a pioneer. And so for me, you know, being on this corporate agency side and going to this event and seeing her and her personality and just really how influential she was back then, it's really phenomenal because, you know, she's always been influential. She always was, she is, and she will continue to be. And so being part of those budget, fashionista days has really carried and evolved our friendship and our business relationship.

Kathryn Finney
At that time, in 2006, 2007, there were really very few ways to really monetize your content online. And one of the only ways you could at that time was through display ads, which were usually these ads that you would see on the side of your blog or at the top of the blog.  And so I was contacted by Glam Media, which was one of the first ad networks. And Glam was really entering into this lifestyle space. No one else was serving ads for lifestyle. It was only ads for Dell computers and like ya know computer chips and Intel,  which the people who are reading the Budget Fashionista were interested in fashion and lifestyle  and how to live a good life on a budget.

Denitria Lewis
I knew about Catherine for many years before she and I actually met in person. I was a fan of the budget fashionista, the agencies that I worked for as a media planner, we would buy space on her blog. really just to connect with hard to reach markets

I'm Deniitria Nyree Lewis and I am a Serial entrepreneur and digital marketer

So as an agency executive, the budget fashionista was ranked right up there with like essence honey, suede. But what really made it special is that Kathryn was one of the first, folks to take advantage of, you know, just real organic and authentic, social media and blogging. Like she's literally an OG influencer. She was one of a very small segment of like just bold black women with big hair, big curvy bodies that didn't shrink who they were. They really own their identity. And someone like Kathryn was just, you know, really just rare to see in that space and that really inspired and resonated with me. -  

Kathryn Finney
And so I remember that I was getting paid for remnant ads, Remnant Ads are the ads that nobody really wants, like the throwaway ads. Sometimes it's advertising the Glam networks, sometimes it was advertising good, low cost cookies or whatever. And I was getting paid $12 CPM for those type of ads.

For video, for more tailored ads, I was getting paid $30 CPM. And then I often would get paid even more to do sponsored posts. And sponsored posts on the Budget Fashionista at its height, which was getting over a million unique views a day, a DAY, not a year, a month, a day, would get 5k or 10k. So I was making a shit ton of money. I was doing really well for a very long time. 

Nicholas Roman Lewis
So I think the budget fashionista played, not just a solid role for Kathy, but I think it served as an example for a Black person, a Black woman in particular having a brand. And at the time, the brand was smaller, but, you know, working with the book and Katherine being able to go on a book tour and, you know, being on morning television shows, being on the Wendy Williams, back when it was a radio show, you were able to see this, young, Black woman with a vision, with a business, let's get it, correct. Like with a business and with the product.  So I think even though, the whole notion of what was the concept of the book about how to be a budget fashionista, that content was great.

It was even more, I think, important or powerful just to see this black woman doing her thing. Right. That's something she created. So I think that was a real, importance of the budget fashionista. 

Kathryn Finney
And so, I started to build a team because I couldn't do it all myself.

I couldn't serve the amount of content that my community wanted all the time. also, we were just starting to dabble in video. before iPhones, before you could actually record video on your phone, you have to do it separately. While still doing Today Show, started to do a lot of spokesperson work, and was a spokesperson for TJ Maxx and Marshalls for about four years. And it was amazing and it was great, but I kind of knew that it was changing.

I started to see, as technology became easier, there started to be more people and more competition. And the difference between me and others was you know not that great. People started to try to take the name, the Budget Fashionista, which I had trademarked. And we were always fighting, people trying to steal our trademark and I was starting to get exhausted, and also was starting to feel like it was just a little too easy. It wasn't fun anymore.

And so I started to get a little bit disenchanted. So when I started, with me and other early bloggers, we were really a community.   And it started to change the more money came in, it started to change the more television came in, and I was one of the people that was doing a lot of TV at that time. And spent a lot of time in LA… I lived in LA for a little bit. And in fact, one of the times I went to LA, I actually broke my ankle. I was wearing the most fabulous pair of four inch Jeffrey Campbell platform shoes they had gold around the platform. 

I was KILLING IT. And I was walking into the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, and I knew I looked fierce, and tripped over the carpet,... fell right on my face and broke my ankle. 

 So I go on to the TMZ office, the office you see on TV, and I actually had Tobias roll me in, in a chair, 

And I remember having this meeting with them and talking about what I was about and the Budget Fashionista and how a majority of our readers were White women because that was the majority of people who were also online at that point.  " And I started to go into all these details and stats on the Budget Fashionista... and they were just looking at me like I was speaking... I don't know... Klingon or something

And I remember leaving and my agent and my attorney at the time- they said to me, "Don't you ever do that again?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" They're like, "You can't be smart like that. You let us do that." And my attorneys and agent at the time were two White men and they were like, "You've got to let us do that. You just sit there and you'll be pretty, and you're smart, and funny, and entertaining, and let us do that sort of talk."

And I just remember being so taken aback by that

So it annoyed me and I wasn't really feeling that life. Um It just wasn't what I wanted to do even though I had a show that was in development. the show I created. We had to spend months negotiating for me to be co-creator. And I'm like, "But this is a show I created. The whole concept, the whole idea, it was me. Why am I doing this with you about that?" Even the size of the font was a whole situation,  whether yourfont is 9 point versus 12 point. And I'm like, "Are we effin serious

And so we're on this final call with someone who's a showrunner.

Nicholas Roman Lewis
one of my fondest memories is just, looking at Kathy and just knowing at that time to be able to walk into a room and, and have a vision and hold to that vision. And if people aren't with that vision to know, walk out of that room~

...every time I think of Kathy and I see all the great things that she's doing, I'm like, yep. here's, here's the other vision, here's the next level of execution. And it's just very exciting to see

Kathryn Finney
So I left LA, came back to New York, and started to think of, "How do I turn this idea into a bigger business?"

At the time I had a friend who was working in PR for one of the major consumer brands, and she was telling me how hard it was to get sampling, particularly to Black women. She also shared with me some data on how, about 40% of all hair care products bought in the United States are bought by Black women. We're only about 6% of the US population. So this small segment of the population was buying all the hair care products. So I said, "Okay, well, why don't I do a subscription service, very similar to Birchbox, which I knew the founders really well.

so I went to one of the early incubator programs. It was called The Founders Institute. And at first it was great. It was me and two other Black people and about 60 other people.

within two weeks the other two Black founders dropped out and it was just Kathyrn. And also a lot of the women dropped out. So it was about four women, and it was deeply uncomfortable. We would be in these sort of groups, once a week, we were supposed to meet, and it was just a hostile environment. And I only had like one or two friends. It was mostly young White dudes in this and it was so uncomfortable about being around a woman, and especially a Black woman. And so, one of the things that you would do in this incubator was that they would call on you at random, to go and pitch your idea.

It was a 12 week program.  In 10 weeks they never called on me, ever. They just looked at me. So week 11 I said, "I want to pitch what I'm doing." And literally the dude who ran it said, "Oh, I didn't know if you would be comfortable doing it. We didn't want to make you feel uncomfortable." And it was the first time in my life that I experienced people having no expectations of me, not just low, but no expectations. They literally didn't think I could do anything. They didn't even think I could do it bad, they didn't think I could do it poorly, they just didn't think I could do it.

So me being me, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to show you boo. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Watch."

Tobias Wright
They had cardboard tables out. It was like not the best lighting, you know, pull out chairs, just very, uh start-uppy maybe. And she went through a pitch, went to a fine, she, you know, she's a show person 

She knows when to put the show on. And so she had her, all her numbers together. She had her slides together. Anybody had any, other questions,, she had splash for those, for people that come across a question that she has not answered in her slides. And once she finished. complete silence, no one knew a question to ask. And then I think someone maybe finally broke the silence because, somebody had to,  but it wasn't, I, I suspect the silence really stemmed from, they were looking for things to knock it down with and it wasn't a lot and they didn't have enough domain knowledge in Black women,, to ask intelligent questions either. So yeah, after she did a pitch there, it was utter quiet. And then they some ask some of the standard questions, and then, um, she sat down and that was it. 

Kathryn Finney
So I was excited~I thought they were going to punch a hole in my business model. "How are you going to do this? How are you going to scale? Tell me a little bit about your anticipated MRR, your monthly recurring revenue. What do you think is going to come from..." All of that. I was prepared and excited to hear that. But the first question... was- did I know any bloggers?

Now I was, again, one of the first women bloggers. I was like the dean of women blogging. The Budget Fashionista was one of the first blogs that many people read. There's a lot of people in the blogging community who would tell you the first blog they ever read was the Budget Fashionista. And so here's this dude asking me that. And that let me know that he didn't even take a moment to Google me to find out. ‘cause if he Googled me, he would've found all that out really really really quickly. And then the second question came, and that was not really a question, but a statement. And it was from a White male who was the brother of the founder of Founder’s Institute. And he says to me, "I don't think you can relate to other Black women." 

And I was like, "Okay, do tell in this room, which there are no Black people, tell the one Black person how she doesn't relate to other Black people because you seem to know a lot." And I was like, "Well, do tell," because maybe he grew up in Harlem, I don't know. Maybe he knows something about Black people I don't know, even though I've been Black my entire life. And he said, "I don't think you can relate to other Black people and particularly Black women because you have an accountant. And I don't think a lot of Black women have accountants, and I don't think they're going to be able to relate to that." 

And like many people who are put on the spot, women, particularly Black women, Black people, I called him all sorts of words in my head. 

Umm I read him for filth, up and down in my head, and I had to do a quick mental calculation, "Do I go off on this MF right here, in front of all these people and what would happen if I did?

And in fact, somebody even said, "Well, do you have any media? And I'm like, "Dude, I was on Today Show this morning." I mean, they absolutely did not think I could do it. And that really stuck with me. It was the first time in my life that I had been invisible

so the next day, the founder of Founders Institute had office hours.

And I went to go talk to him because it just really irked me. And we're sitting there, we're talking, and he said to me, "Yeah, I understand your point, but I don't know of any Black woman who has ever received a venture funding, ever, and I don't think you'll be the first."

The hair care product market was $6 billion at that time. And nobody was applying innovation and technology to it. No one. And so you're telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about, and that this isn't a big enough market, and the VC world is not going to fund it. 

And in many ways he was right, because in 2009, there was no incentive for the VC world to fund anyone who was Black. It was actually an incentive to keep funding the same people they always funded. And that's only what they were interested in. And we were invisible, Black founders, Black women were invisible to these VCs. And the irony of it now is to see how many of them are trying to pretend like they're woke. But I remember you dude in 2009, in 2010, and how you weren't supportive, and how you really were quite racist in fact, and maybe you had awakening and I hope so, because we need you to, but I'm not sure how much you’ve awoke. I'm not sure.

Denitria Lewis
a few years after Catherine, I also attended the founder Institute. We had a class that started with like 30 to 40 people. And it ended up with just about 10 and I was in the top five. I was the only Black woman out of the two that remained.  The other woman was quite a bit older than me and even further out of her comfort zone with technology than I was. She was constantly having issues with the mentors, and her frustration showed a lot in the class. It was definitely a topic of conversation- among the entire cohort and the alumni that would pop in. Like it wasn't a secret that she was very frustrated.

So the head of the incubator comes into town and, you know, we've been granted access to this personal happy hour for him to get to know us. And as we're chatting that night, he asked each of us about the status of our companies kind of one by one. So he gets to me and he says, “you know, your problem is you gotta listen. You gotta be coachable.

We're all trying to help you, but you've got to drop the attitude.” so I can tell that he's tipsy, but I'm also kind of gobsmacked because up to that point, all of the mentors were very, positive. And they were asking me to be more bold and to show more personality. Then it kind of clicks.  the other woman, the older white woman, her name also starts with a D. And so clearly the woman with an attitude is, you know, it must be me, it must be the Black one because, you know, how could it be anyone else? So, you know, of course now I  have to do this mental trigonometry of, do I address him about this right now? -and just prove his point or do I just let it go?

And, you know, I'm upset about that because like I went home thinking about what he said the whole night. I had drafted an email, trying to figure out if I should send it or not. Meanwhile, the folks who could advocate for me in the moment, they didn't because at the end of the day, allyship with me might result in a loss of power, that their privilege provided them just by being white and male. And it's also not lost on me that a white woman was still protected at my expense, even though I hadn't done anything at all. And this was eight years ago. And what has changed.

Kathryn Finney
So after leaving the incubator, I decided that it was time for me to transition on. I wanted to do something different. I didn't know what it was that I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to do something different. 

Elisa Camahort Page
When I first met Kathryn, she was running the site Budget Fashionista. we're talking back more than 10 years now. Not only had she parlayed her blog into a book, into television appearances, and into a real money-making concern that she could later sell, she was one of the very few women I can think of who had reached that level, and certainly an even smaller number of women of color, and that was the whole thing when BlogHer started, was that we wanted to bring visibility and economic opportunity to all the women we knew that were blogging when it was still a very male-dominated space at that kind of elite level where the press was paying attention and publishers were paying attention, and advertisers were paying attention. Kathryn had managed to do all that without working with BlogHer before we ever came together to work together.

This is is Elisa Camahort Page, author and entrepreneur.

We brought Kathryn to work with us at BlogHer because we've always felt like if you want to make avenues into a newer community, or a community of which you are not already a really embedded part, you need to find partners that are part of that community, and we felt that one of the areas that held a lot of promise, and where a lot of women bloggers were probably waiting to find more opportunity, was in the style and beauty space. And so Kathryn was the ideal person, as someone who had been very early in the space, but also very successful in the space, to sort of help us understand the lay of the land, how this community, its unique qualities, its differentiators.

Kathryn Finney
There is nothing like a BlogHer conference. 

You had 5,000 of the most influential women in one room and everybody wanted to connect. And so I got to do a lot of amazing things as building the community. [Music naturally Fades around here] One of my first things we had was this luncheon that was just so amazing where I got to invite a lot of my friends from The Space. The other thing I got to do at BlogHer was a fashion show. And this fashion show was at ep-ic.

Elisa Camahort Page
we brought her on to understand the style and beauty space better, and then that naturally led to other ideas about how we could work in that space, including introducing a fashion show into the BlogHer Conference, and Kathryn was just the natural person to help us put that whole thing together, to not just emcee it, which she did, which was really fun, but to actually style it and help us find partners for it, so…  It started more though as a community-driven effort that Kathryn really could lead on.

Kathryn Finney
It was sponsored by a company called 6pm and I had access to thousands upon thousands of designer clothes. I'm talking Marc Jacobs, Versace, Gucci, Diane Von Furstenberg, Norma Kamali. I mean, you name it. It was amazing.    And so in doing that, I needed help. And I had met Darlene Gillard,  um through a friend. And so I had asked Darlene to help me with some of my projects at BlogHer because a lot of it was about bringing people together and building community in the fashion space. Darlene had been an editor at like some of the top public publications, including Essence and WWD. And so I was like, "I need help." 

Darlene  Gillard
I had been working with Kathryn for a few years, by the time the BlogHer fashion show came around, we had worked together on the budget fashionista. I was managing PR you know, producing events, brokering deals with brands for her. And I knew her work ethic, and I knew how much she cared about, fashion.   And so having all of this experience that I had coming from the fashion industry, working at top magazines, it was something that I could do very easily and that I wanted to do and was excited about. What I didn't expect was that I would be working harder than I've ever worked before in my life. Um, there were well over 20 women who came from all different backgrounds. They were all different ages, all different sizes. and to watch the confidence build and the transformation. It was something to behold 

I’m Darlene Gillard Jones, and Executive Producer at the Genius Guild, and a friend of Kathryn Finney.

I remember there was one model who was in a wheelchair who wanted to walk the runway. It was like a dream of hers to walk the runway and we set it up so that she could do just that. And I'll never forget she had on a gold Norma Kamali dress. And, you know  she was wheeled out to the end of the runway or the front of the runway. And, you know, the music dropped, she stood up and walked to the end of the runway and everyone lost their shit. I mean, it was like, I mean, there were tears everywhere.  Everyone was so excited and she got to live her dream and we made that possible. You can't beat an experience like that. 

Kathryn Finney
it's also amazing to see after the Budget Fashionista where people have grown and people have gone. We have, ya know some amazing friends that I made. ya know Luvie, look at where Luvie’s is at. I mean, she's like a superstar, and Patrice from Afrobella, and Claire from the Fashion Bomb, Ree Drummond from Pioneer Woman, who's like a boss as it gets.  

All of these incredible women who were friends of mine, who we came up together, and they're doing so well. They've built these amazing companies and have grown into even be a little part of their story, even to see them as they're on the come-up, it's just been such an honor 

Patrice Grell Yursik
One of the fond memories that I have of Kathryn was when she came to the Blogging While Brown Conference in Philadelphia. And that was... My goodness, even saying those words is just like a lifetime ago. There used to be this conference called Blogging While Brown, (laughs) where all of the popular well-known creators of color, Black people, would come together in different cities and get to know each other, and spend time together, and get to hear from each other. 

When Kathryn came that year, I definitely remember it was just like royalty was visiting us, because she had so much experience and so much knowledge, but she was just approachable and real and friendly and funny. And she became my friend,

My name is Patrice Grell Yursik and I am the creator of Afrobella LLC, So I am a writer. 

I really can say every project that Kathryn has gotten involved with since   The Budget Fashionista, and I will say also including The Budget Fashionista is intended to inform, uplift, celebrate, and assist other women. And she continues to do that work. I couldn't be prouder of her. 

In this episode of Build The Damn Thing, Kathryn Finney talks to those people who were present at the beginning of her journey as a young builder and what led her to become one of the most influential women in tech. All the people in Kathryn’s life speak of how they always knew she was “different” from a young age -- and that’s a good thing. They also share that she had the unique ability to bring people around to her way of thinking to impact change. But it wasn’t easy: Kathryn shares a painful and transformative childhood experience when she ran for school president against a white kid and the hate that she endured during her campaign.

Kathryn Finney is known as a pioneer in the fashion blogging community thanks to her blog “The Budget Fashionista” which has helped thousands of women dress cheap and chic. Kathryn not only has built a huge blogging community but also has been featured among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes and is greatly recognized by books like How to Be a Budget Fashionista and The Ultimate Guide to Looking Fabulous for Less. In fact, Kathryn is the living definition of a businesswoman who is always trying to generate new ways to share her knowledge about fashion and entrepreneurship just like she does through her platform the Genius Guild which apart from having the podcast “Build that Damn Thing”, invests in companies led by Black founders.

Insights from the Podcast
- How her entrepreneurial family background impacted her to build against all odds
- Strategies on monetizing your skills and ideas
- How to build, grow and make things bigger and how to do good in this world
- Understanding how to fight against the entitled
- Strategies to getting people to come to your way of thinking
- Understanding how to create your own identity

Quotes from the show:
“I challenge each and every one of you to be your full self and to give others a space to do the same and to know that you, in all your imperfect imperfections, are more than enough for this world” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

“Maybe my work ethic is genetic, I may not be as smart as you, I may not as good as you, but you will not outwork me” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

“People misunderstand that I have this incredible work ethic that you might not even see” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

“Money allowed me to have the life that I wanted to live, and I saw that very early: the options that it gave me” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

“When I joined high school, I was different, I tried to figure out how to fit in and not realizing as that 14/15-year-olds that you will never fit in when you are the type of person that I am” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

“Sometimes there is a price to pay when you go against the entitles” -Kathryn Finney, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

“I really think I wouldn’t have dreamed as far as I did, or gone as far as I did or had the initiative to prepare for college if it weren’t for Kathryn” -Ann McCarthy, Guest Speaker, Build The Damn Thing Episode #2

Stay Connected:

Kathryn Finney
Website: https://www.kathrynfinney.com/
Twitter: @KathrynFinney
Instagram: @hiiamkathryn
Facebook: Kathryn Finney

Genius Guild
Website: Genius Guild
Twitter: @GeniusGuild
Instagram: @geniusguild
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/genius-guild

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    Credits:  

Produced by Genius Guild Content Studios

Executive Producers:  Kathryn Finney and Darlene Gillard Jones
Post-Production Company: Prosper Digital TV
Post-Production Manager: Joanes Prosper
Post-Production Supervisor: Jason Pierre
Post-Production Sound Editor: Evan Joseph
Co-Music Supervisors: Jason Pierre and Darlene Gillard Jones
Show Music: provided by Prosper Digital TV
Main Show Theme Music: "Self Motivated" Written & Performed by Tamara Bubble
Add’l Music: "Lil' Sumn" by Dreamadai
"Walk" by Saucy Santana
Audio Sample Courtesy of: the Minnesota Historical Society's Black History, Black Voices Initiative; Washburn High School, Minneapolis, Minnesota 

    


Info     

_{Season 1 Episode 2}

_{July 30, 2021}

_{36 mins, 34 secs (34.1MB, Audio)}

_{BlackExcellence #Entrepreneurship #DreamBig #Startups #BlackWomen #KathrynFinney #BlackOwned #Minnesota #Minneapolis #BlacksInTech #AfroTech #Yale #Rutgers #Ghana}

Full Transcript

Pam Olson
Kathryn does not... It's difficult to describe her in one word. But I would say that she is driven,

She sees what she wants to do. She knows what she wants to do, and she has that inner drive to just go after what it is that she wants. Not everyone has that”

Washburn High School 2019 graduation Kathryn Keynote (40:41 - 41:14), (42:21 - 42:51)    (44:31 - 44:55) min mark  NOTE: THERE IS NO TRANSCRIPT FOR THIS BUT THERE ARE A FEW GOOD QUOTES IN HERE IF YOU LISTEN TO EPISODE)

Kathryn
In this episode of build a thing, we talked to those who were there at the beginning of my journey as a young builder. And what led me here 

I believe, that this sort of vision and ability to build against insurmountable odds really comes from my family. I believe it's actually genetic. My family has a long history of entrepreneurship. My great-grandparents, George and Florence Woods, had a grocery store and restaurant in the Greenwood section of Tulsa and lost everything during the Tulsa murders and riots, literally lost everything and didn't even get insurance payouts from it and had to move heir family to Kansas, the Kansas, Oklahoma border. And I often think and wonder how much has that impacted me, this drive to build... and to build against the odds.

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Home of the Packers, home of the Brewers. When people think of Wisconsin, and Milwaukee especially, they think of like the old TV show Happy Days where you have Richie Cunningham and it's all white and everyone has this great house. 

The Milwaukee I grew up in was different.

In the early eighties, you didn't have to have a college degree to have a good life. And it was while as a child living in Milwaukee where my father was a brewery worker and my mother who came from a very upper middle class black family, went to college, was also working as an HR manager. I was living there when the breweries left. 

Robert Finney
When the brewery system in Milwaukee shut down, you had a couple of different breweries there. You had Joseph Schlitz brewery. You had Pabst and you had Miller, Miller, which is still there. But the fabric of the community, the blue collar portion of Milwaukee was based upon those types of industries..., 

When that shut down, it tore up the community. It tore people apart. Families tore apart because the men had to make decisions for their family, "Do you leave Milwaukee and move to Memphis, where the jobs are moving to?" And not everyone was promised a job in that transfer. "Or did you stay in Milwaukee and try to find something different?"   I think for our father, having grown up and being born and raised in Milwaukee, moving to Memphis and being a part of Memphis in that community and being part of that blue collar community wasn't something that he had envisioned for Kathy and I.

Kathryn Finney
My father did not graduate from high school until he was 30. He had a 4.0 GPA with two kids and a wife, which I still don't know how he did that. so, my father took a course taught by a gentleman from IBM who just was like, "I'm going to teach displaced factory workers how to code." And he fell in love. 

As a result of this, the person teaching the class saw how incredible he was and offered an internship. This was an unpaid internship at 36. If you can imagine that. And my dad said yes. And as a result got an entry-level position at a place called Digital Equipment, which was one of the early personal computing companies. Except this position was in Minneapolis. And so, let me tell you the difference between Minneapolis and Milwaukee is vast.  Milwaukee is working class factory. Everyone we know there was working class factory. Minneapolis is very much so not. 

It was vastly, vastly different culturally 

Even weather. They're both cold, but Minneapolis is a special kind of cold.

My dad was like the ultimate hustler. I mean, just the most brilliant person I ever met in my entire life. And he was just doing all sorts of things he could do to take care of his family.He saw the future. He saw that computers were going to be the future, even though no one around him saw it except for my mother.

Karen Finney
Mr. Finney went to school and he went to OIC and learned coding. Had a gentleman that was very much of a major mentor to him. A gentleman who worked for IBM, one thing led to another. And he was offered, Mr. Finney was offered a job in the Twin Cities.

I'm Karen Finney, Kathryn Finney's mother.

And it was not a very hard decision in one respect to leave Milwaukee, And we made a decision, a family decision. Well, Mr. Finney, and I did, that it would be worth our while to move to the Twin Cities. And he had been given such a wonderful job opportunity to start in a new career. And we don't regret having made that decision.

Kathryn Finney
And it was in high school that he had the opportunity to work for Microsoft. and it changed the trajectory of my life and my family's life. 

Karen Finney
We lived in an apartment complex, which was several buildings, not just one high rise building. And Kathryn came to us, to me and mentioned the newsletter. She was going to do a newsletter. And I think she charged, I don't know, something less than a nickel or something less to share this newsletter with kids in the complex. 

And I'm not sure of how lucrative it was, but for a busy mom, when you have a child that has an activity for which limited supervision is needed, it was like okay, Kathryn.. that was one of her earliest endeavors. 

Kathryn Finney
I've always tried to explain like, "How did I know I could do this?"

And the only answer I could say, is Growing up, my parents gave me probably the best gift a parent could give a child, which is unlimited possibilities. It didn't matter how crazy or how out there or how outside the norm, my parents never told me, "Kathryn, you can't do that."

So In the fourth grade, it was my first real lucrative business. And it was a friendship bracelet business. I think they first became popular in the 60s and 70s. They were coming back in 1980s Minnesota 

I enlisted my brother,  really in his first sales job. Now he's a big sales executive. I like to think I gave him his first sales job. And I would give him a small cut, ya know, 10, 20% commission, something- something that he can at least get a soda with ya know.

Wasn't going to give him too much because that would eat into my margins. And at fourth grade, I was concerned about my margins. 

Robert Finney
Some of the things that Kathy had as early entrepreneurial endeavors, I remember such things as friendship bracelets. I remember a newsletter but probably the very genesis of all of this came from her trying to loan me money. I mean, as the older brother, I was the spendthrift. I was the one trying to go to play video games, just trying to buy all the treats from the store and all those things. So as soon as my parents gave us money, I’d blow through it. And Kathy, I think at an early age, had developed the intellect to know like, "If I can get him to buy me stuff with his money and blow to his money, I can loan him my money back and then he'll buy me the same stuff, but then I can say charge an interest of what he loaned me."

I think Kathy was one of the very first people to figure out try how to monetize just about anything and everything a person could do. She was trying to figure out a way to make money on that at a very early age, five, six, seven years old. She was trying to figure those things out. 

Kathryn Finney
I think it's something about growing up in the family in which we will do what it takes to survive and to eat. And that work mentality, that work ethic that was really instilled from my parents, especially from my father, like never left me. It was always there. Actually, it was there from the beginning. Maybe my work ethic is genetic but I may not be as smart as you. I may not be as cute as you but you will not outwork me. You will just not. Like and I think that's one of the things that now as an adult, that people misunderstand about me.

People misunderstand that I have this incredible work ethic that you may not even see but I'm doing it. And I'm always thinking. And I'm always thinking about how to build and how to make things grow and how to make them bigger and how to even be bigger myself. And then how to also do good and do well in this world. So this was my first company. It then translated into a babysitting business. I was a primary babysitter. I had three or four other babysitters that were working with me and for me. I would help arrange their babysitting gigs. I would take a small cut. Again we take a small cut because margins. And did really, really so at 16, I had a checkbook.

I had a credit card at 17. That was mostly because money allowed me to have the life that I wanted to live. And I saw that very, very early, the options that it gave me. And it was really powerful. In high school, I was always working. I was class president, played sports, did theater. And I also worked 20 hours a week.

Julie Munger
Kathy was always very driven in high school, and so she always had her eye on the prize, and she knew she was headed for bigger things than Minnesota. I think everyone could see that in her at a young age that she just had a special spark about her at a young age. And that's something that I remember a lot of teachers would think that too at the time, that she was just very special and unique. And she was at the very top of her class too,  which unfortunately I can't say the same for myself, but hey, some of that smartness got to rub off on me in high school, so that's nice.

My name is Julie Munger, and I am a high school friend of Kathy Finney.

Kathryn Finney
High school was a situation. It was a very interesting experience for me. And it was the first place that I really encountered what I call the Entitleds. These are mostly white, rich, affluent people for whom the world is just given to them.

So when I first came into high school, people were really mean. I was awkward. I wasn't the cutest. I had a wave nouveau, which was a dry jheri curl. There was no such thing as a dry jheri curl. You either got a jheri curl or you don't.

I came in awkward, braces, a very quirky fashion sense that no one can understand in the GAP land that was Minneapolis and it was really, really hard. And so the first thing I did was just try to figure out how to fit in and not really realizing as most 14, 15 year olds, that you'll never fit in when you're the type of person I am. Me having this sense to build, I thought I'm going to run for student council president  I ran against this upper-class woman. There were posters trashing me. People were talking all sorts of ish. This is high school. Okay? She was a, entitled, wealthy, white person who had everything constructed for her comfort.

And here comes this smart, black chick making her very, very uncomfortable. And that was like a no-no. I got up and I gave this speech which  quieted down this auditorium of 2,000 kids and I talked in my speech about how there's a school that is 50% black but yet none of the officers up here are black. I said it. I called it. I spoke truth to Minnesota power and people were shocked. And at the end of it I got a standing ovation from at least half the school. The other half was like, "Huh!" But I got a standing ovation. and I'll never forget the student council advisor, Mr. Herb Chambers, said as I was sitting down at the end of the speech.

He said, "That girl is got spunk." I'll never forget that. ….. But there was a price to pay for that and this is something that I learned quite early of when you go against the Entitleds, that there was sometimes a price to pay and that price was my entire high school year it was a campaign to hate me. 

And that followed me throughout high school but at the same time everyone respected me. I won every award. I won my class award for service and academics. I became my class president in my senior year. I 

Ann Lentz
One thing that Katherine and I have always discussed as a common experience, we had growing up. A lot of it had to do with our adolescence in high school and what it was like to grow up here in Minneapolis and be a person of color and be someone who was more prone to being a sort of outsider group of kids. And you know so those social years of adolescence in high school can be trying times for everyone and they were definitely trying times, where ya know high school especially sort of felt like a bit of a battlefield. 

My name is Ann Lentz.I have known Kathryn since the fourth grade and ever since then, she has remained one of my closest and dearest friends. 

I have always been so thankful to Kathryn because she was a cheerleader to all of her friends. She was also someone who was friends with all different kinds of people. She didn't confine herself to just one group. so she had friends who were athletes, who were in student government, who were the theater kids, who were the brainy geeky kids. I mean she she got around and in a genuine way

Kathryn Finney
almost 25 years to the date that I gave that class speech, I gave the commencement speech at my high school

I had great support in high school. I had a number of teachers who were just always there and that really, really helped me.

Ms. McCarthy who had my brother and then myself in Japanese class. And Japanese class was one of the most fun classes.  We did a lot of cultural things and she was a young teacher so it wasn't like she was all stodgy and stuff. We took field trips and it was really, really important and it became a safe haven because it was the one class where I felt I could have fun and that people weren't necessarily judging me

Ann McCarthy:
She always had fun. Sometimes you look to those kinds of students to kind of spark the rest of the kids ya know. You just need a few students to grab onto whatever dorky thing I'm going to do. Aaand they can kind of pull along the rest of the class. And Catherine was one of those kids....

I'm Ann McCarthy. Catherine knows me as “Ma-kah-shii Sensei.” My last name is McCarthy and that's how they pronounce it in Japanese

She was involved in a lot of activities I know in the school. she did some sports and band and a student council. So she was really active in the school itself. But in my class, she added energy to the class and that's important to a teacher to know you can count on certain kids to get the other kids going. 

We've all been teenagers so. Sometimes they're not the most willing people to do what you want them to do. Catherine was able to motivate her classmates, but in a good way. I think it's because she was engaged too.

Kathryn Finney
Another amazing support was Mrs. Olson. Pam Olson, was really another amazing light. She was the student  activities advisor for all of Minneapolis public schools. She was also the advisor for the city-wide student council as well as other things. 

Pam Olson 

Kathryn just had people skills, and she knew how to bring people to her way of thinking. It wasn't always exactly the way she wanted it, but I think she learned, over time, how to actually get people to come to her way of thinking, 

My name is Pam Olson. before I retired, I was a student activities director for Minneapolis public schools, 

Kathryn Finney
When I was 16 I got a full scholarship to go to Phillips Academy Andover. Phillips Andover is one of the most prestigious private schools in the country.

And going there I was allowed to be me. I met my first love. I was encouraged to be smart. Everyone was smart. Black, white where you go everybody was smart. Everybody was doing something. It was the first time in my life where I was in this community of other young builders like myself. Those sort of outlets became so crucially and important for me because it allowed me to see that the world was bigger than where I was at. And as a young black woman that was incredibly important. 

Anne Lentz
the social times were really fun. Just the goofy hangout. Tons of laughs, tons of jokes. But I always think about that time in my life and I'm so grateful to Katherine for her assertiveness in looking ahead towards our futures 

Katherine was ready to go. She was like, "We're going to take these prep classes. We're going to study for our PISA tests." And she got all of the guidebooks about colleges. She marked some pages for me and showed them to me and said, "Anne, you should look at these colleges, you are a dancer, you need to go to a liberal arts college." And I really don't think I would have dreamed as far as I did or gone where I went or had the initiative to prepare myself for college if it weren't for Katherine.

Kathryn Finney
College for me was like going to Mars. It was the complete opposite of where I had been. I went from Minneapolis to New Brunswick, New Jersey. It's like two completely different worlds. People often ask me, "Why did you go to Rutgers?" I went to Rutgers because it was free. I had a full scholarship. My parents again being pragmatic Midwesterners was like, "Look. LookK. It is free. We like free. You need to go." And so I went and coming into college and just looking like the Black Lori engles wilder. I really did. I can only imagine what I looked like and friends have explained me what I looked like when I showed up. 

Sira Maliphol
I met Kathy. We actually lived in a special interest dorm named Demarest Hall.During moving,I bumped into her in another friend's room and we just got somehow started talking about black hair product of all things, but that's the kind of place that Demarest was

I'm Sira Maliphol. I have known Kathy since college and we've been best friends ever since. 

She was coming from Minnesota and I think that she may have thought that it was an issue in terms of how she presented herself. but this is back when we were coming out of that grunge era so it was an affliction that affected the entire country and I think we were just a little bit more tolerant. Also, subject to the same, types of trends that were going on. I don't think that, that was such a big deal except for when we were going out. That was also the Velvet Rope era um you had to present in a certain way and you just had to be aware. But Kathy was aware so it wasn't that big of a problem. 

Kathryn Finney
college was just crazy. Everyone who's ever existed was at Rutgers. I mean every group. You had the Rocky Horror Picture Show group, the Young Muslims group, the Republican group, the Democrat group, the Anarchists group. You had like every one. The libertarian group. To come from Minnesota where everyone was the same. Everyone kind of strived to be the same. To this environment where everyone strived NOT to be the same was incredible for me. I had a friend who would wear drag to class. Never experienced that in Minneapolis, and she would wear it to class and be like, "what? Say..."

And nobody said anything. Nobody cared. It was just this sense of being there and also being so close to New York meant we clubbed all the time.  

And so my first year in college was that and student government.  and became a representative on the Rutgers University Student Government.

And while I was there and as a representative at the same time we had a crisis. The president of the University said that Black students were genetically inferior and couldn't not do well on ACTs and SATs and was recorded saying that. 

Dale Russakoff 
the comment was made at a faculty meeting, where he was advocating de-emphasizing the S.A.T. as a tool in undergraduate admissions on the grounds that students of color did way more poorly on average than white students. And he said, why, why would we use something that's so limits the entrance of talented people of all races. and he said, and then he said the words, “just because, black kids don't have the genetic hereditary background that it takes to Excel on the test.”

My name is Dale Russakoff.  I'm a freelance journalist and I spent most of my career at the Washington post.

And then at some point someone, it may have been anonymous sent a recording of his speech to the Newark newspaper, the star ledger, and pointed out that phrase and they wrote it and it led to this tremendous outpouring of anger and, disappointment and rage from the undergraduates… they had an open mic for students, faculty, anyone to say what they felt. And one student after the next talked about, they felt like they couldn't go to this university anymore.

Kathryn Finney
And so we were on TV. We were protesting. The Today Show was at our school. Jesse Jackson was at our school. Rev. Al Sharpton was there. It was madness. And here I am 18 year old, fresh off the Northwest airline flight from Minneapolis right dab in the middle of this.

By the time I was at the end of my sophomore year I could graduate if I wanted to. I at 20 was not moving back to Minneapolis. Come on now. After being in New York at the height of hip-hop's reemer gence, right?

We're talking Puffy shiny suits. Biggie at Nells. I used to go to Nellls and see Biggie and Puffy. I had friends that were in stuff. We were in a Kool G Rap video. Being a part of this how could I go back to Minneapolis? Like For real. For reals. How could I go to Minneapolis after that?    And one of my advisors said, "Hey, why don't you apply for a fellowship to go abroad?" I was like, "Okay. That sounds cool." I applied for a fellowship from the US government and got it. 

And so I went to Ghana for a year. Within about two months of being there I became very sick. I got malaria and I won't say that I almost died but I was very, very, very, very sick.

Ghana is the reason why I became an epidemiologist

Kofi Owusu-Ansah
about her getting malaria, you know, what one thing I do recall it hit a very hard...

my name is Kofi I'm a good old friend of Kathryn from Ghana. 

I guess it was a very first time she endured that, um, illness, which for anyone who has had malaria for the very first time, it will hit you pretty bad and it's unlike any other, 

But I do recall, I mean, she just weathered the whole thing, very bravely. And, uh, in a matter of days, she was back to her old self

one of my fondest memories of Kathryn, she was, she was because of the fact that she was always, willing to share her experiences. It was always good to just just Hangouts chat with her for hours upon end. 

Kathryn Finney
And so when I came back I was at Rutgers for another year. Went to Spain for like three weeks. And I remember my parents again... My dad asking, "One, how much is this going to cost me?" "Dad, nothing." I was working. I saved some money.

And then the second question was like, "How are you going to take three, four weeks off to go to just go Spain." 

Listen, please believe we’re coming back to this Spain story. I won’t get into all that happened on that trip  but trust- we partied our - asses - OFF, and were living La Vida Loca, but you’ll have to check out the bonus footage for that onnne So let’s continue… After Spain, I graduate from Rutgers…

Now, even though I was traveling and clubbing, I somehow managed to graduate like at the top of my class. And so it's was [inaudible 01:42:52] I was going to do next and being ill and it had big impact on me and decided I was going to go into health. Really, I was going to go into medicine and, but first was really interested in public health and epidemiology, particularly from an international standpoint. So I applied for public health schools and got into Johns Hopkins, Yale and Harvard  

So I decided to go to Yale and Yale's like, it was like, again, going from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, the difference between Rutgers and Yale. One was this community that had all sorts of people in it. It was very, very diverse to a real privileged institution. But here's the thing about Yale that I didn't expect even going there. I had the best time of my life. 

Ironically enough, you wouldn't think this traditionally white institution would do that. But that sort of thing of like, "We expect great things from you," and having that expectation was quite amazing.

Lamont Tillery
I think one of the things that impressed me about the institution was its endowment at the time Yale had a 17- $20 billion endowment,And the name carried a lot of weight, the further you were from the institution. And Catherine was one of those people who could use it just right.  I found her to be incredibly selfless. And even though she was at this Ivy league institution, she was still very much concerned with the social justice and doing the right thing instead of exploiting the privilege for herself. She was trying to use that privilege to help other people. 

My name is Lamont Tillery,I am currently a human resource director in Ontario, Canada. Kat and I met Kat in grad school. we will both go into Yale for our master's in public health. 

when we were in grad school Kathy and I both found ourselves in Ghana at the same time we'd meet up for dinner or we'd go hanging out or go clubbing because it's Kathy, right? So you have to find the party. 

Everybody who met her, wanted to know more about her and she had natural leadership and people would follow her. And even if you thought that she might not be right, you had to follow her to see where she's going. Cause you know, what's going to still end up someplace fabulous.

Kathryn Finney
I always had a gig, meaning I always worked. I will do whatever it takes. I will never not have a job. I will never not have money because I have no problem working wherever. When I was in Ghana, I learned how to braid hair. So I braided hair when I was at Yale to make some extra dough.

And people are like, "Well, when you're at Yale, you had scholarship. You had money. Like, why were you doing that?" I'm like, "Listen, I will always have a gig. I will always have money in my pocket. I'm not going to ever just rest on my laurels. I always have skillsets. I have 10 or 15 different things I can do. If one thing doesn't work, I can do something else." So if this whole Yale epidemiologist thing didn't work, I could always start my own hair braiding shop. And when I left Yale, I had a fellowship with USA ID to go back to Ghana. And I was going back to Ghana to work on maternal child health and STDs and [inaudible 01:52:00] with women. And 

I finished Yale and was back in Ghana when I had to come back because I had a sick parent. My dad had stage four liver cancer and he metastasized. It was like, "My parent is dying and I'm 8,000 miles away. I got to go." 

And I frankly had no idea what I was going to do. So I came back home for about four months and helped my dad.

Kathryn Finney (01:58:30):
And I remember about two months or three months after he had gotten out of the hospital and he was on the mend and a little bit better, we were in the car and he said to me, "You need to go." And I was like, "what do you mean? Like go out the car. What do you mean?" He was like, "I appreciate what you've done for me. I want you to know that. I love you. And I appreciate what you've done for me. But your life is not here. Your life is not in Minnesota." And he said, "I've lived my life. I've had a great life. I've had a wonderful life. You need to go live yours. So I want you to go. Not because I want you to go, but I want you to go and live your life." And again, of the many gifts my parents gave me this sort of gift of like, "I'm good. No matter what happens. You go on and live your life. You are young. You are 23, 24 years old. I am 50 something years old. And I'm good. So you can go out and live your life."

Woo! (sniffle) Brought me to a moment. I always wonder, and I've said this to my mum, "What would Dad have thought about me now?"

Robert Finney
When I take a step back and try to peel back the onion and look at Kathy and who Kathy happens to be and why Kathy happens to be, I think for me, the biggest challenge was moving from the known to the unknown.  So what she knew, from grandparents being around and positive black female influences around her, that changed when you came to Minnesota, because the positive black influence that you had around you was just your mom now.

You didn't have the extended family. You didn't have those, the aunts and the grandparents and the uncle. You didn't have that stuff.  So she really had to get into creating who her identity happened to be.

The fashion aspect coming from another positive black female she had in her life- our grandmother, who was a very early fashion designer in Milwaukee and fashion icon in Milwaukee.  So if we take it all back to that very beginning, I can see the genesis to where she is today.

In this episode of Build the Damn Thing, Kathryn Finney shares how a series of unfortunate events led her to create Genius Guild, which is supported by one of the most powerful women in the world -- Melinda Gates. Kathryn also highlights how her failed trip to Alaska in 2020 led her to donate more than $160,000 to 15,000 black women-led entrepreneurs within six weeks. And this action showed her that it was possible to help such startups in a new way.

Kathryn Finney is a venture capitalist, tech visionary, and startup champion who is the Founder and CEO of Genius Guild and General Partner of The Greenhouse Fund. She is former CEO of digitalundivided, a groundbreaking social enterprise focused on creating a world where Black women own their work. She is also the founder of The Budget Fashionista (TBF) and became one of the first Black women to have a successful seven-figure startup exit when she sold TBF.

A Yale-trained Epidemiologist, she has been recognized for her groundbreaking work by the Aspen Institute, Entrepreneur Magazine, Marie Claire, Ebony, Inc. Magazine, Black Enterprise, and more.

Insights from the Podcast

- Understanding that sometimes things will not work and that’s okay

- Strategies on building a community around black-women entrepreneurs

- How her life in building led her to create Genius Guild

- Understanding that black-owned businesses are undercapitalized and under resourced, and the structures needed to enable them to succeed does not exist

- How to create a space where everyone can win, especially Black folks

- How to move capital to Black communities without asking for permission

Quotes from the show:

“It took me twenty years to build relationships to be able to do Genius Guild.” -Kathryn Finney, Genius Guild Ep #1

“I knew that I could build Genius Guild because I had spent a lifetime building staff.” -Kathryn Finney, Genius Guild Ep #1

“Genius Guild is a culmination of all the experience that she (Kathryn Finney) has gained over more than a decade of working on related problems.” -Brian Laung Aoaeh, Genius Guild Ep #1

“I cannot tell you how scary it is to be a Black woman and to ask for what it is you need because we rarely get it” -Kathryn Finney, Genius Guild Ep #1

“If this doesn’t work, we are okay because we believe in you and we know you will figure it out” -Kathryn Finney, Genius Guild Ep #1

“When Black people win, everyone wins. We want to help humanity win” -Saidah Nash Carter, Genius Guild Ep #1

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Website: https://www.kathrynfinney.com/

Twitter: @KathrynFinney

Instagram: @hiiamkathryn

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Twitter: @GeniusGuild

Instagram: @geniusguild

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   Credits:  

Produced by Genius Guild Content Studios

Executive Producers:  Kathryn Finney and Darlene Gillard Jones
Post-Production Company: Prosper Digital TV
Post-Production Manager: Joanes Prosper
Post-Production Supervisor: Jason Pierre
Post-Production Sound Editor: Evan Joseph
Co-Music Supervisor: Jason Pierre and Darlene Gillard Jones
Show Music: Provided by Prosper Digital TV
Main Show Theme Music: "Self Motivated" Written & Performed by Tamara Bubble


Info   

Season 1 Episode 1

July 16, 2021

18 mins, 14 secs (18.1MB, Audio)

#BlackExcellence #Entrepreneurship #Startups #BlackWomen #KathrynFinney #BlackOwned

Full Transcript

Mia Henry
I’m just always amazed and inspired by what Kathy has been able to build. And I say, it's not just she's built, but she’s built and built and built and that's what's really been inspiring for me. And it has helped me, take those risks, help me be more brave seeing her do it, for sure.

Kathryn Finney
Hi. I'm Kathryn Finney, founder of many startups and a habitual rule breaker, who’s now the CEO of yet another future forward idea, that will disrupt not just the startup world, and the world in general. 

In this first episode of Build the Damn thing I’ll share how a lifetime of building and a series of unusual events led me to the Genius Guild.  

I always remember this story about Pablo Picasso and how one day he met someone who asked him if he would draw something on the napkin. And so he took the napkin and took about 10 seconds and drew a picture. And before he gave it to the person, he said, "That will be $50,000."

The person replied, "Well, $50,000 It only took you 10 seconds to do it." He said, "Yes, but it took me 30 years to learn how to do those 10 seconds." And that's very much the way it is with me and Genius Guild. It took me 20 years to build the relationships to be able to do Genius Guild.  so when I was able to raise $5 million without anybody really knowing  without being public it was because I had did the work.  I had did the work over 20 years.  I knew I could build Genius Guild because I spent a lifetime building stuff. 

In 2020, in March, right after the pandemic hit, we were seeing that there were a lot of black women-led companies that were really struggling and weren't able to get the PPP loans that were given out to distressed companies at that time. And so I authorized to give out $1,000 grants to our portfolio companies, like no questions asked, we're going to just give this to you because we know you're really struggling and we know how hard it is. And the response from our portfolio companies was astounding.

I was so inspired and moved by that, that at the same time I was scheduled to go on a trip. I usually go on a big trip around my birthday and we were going to Alaska on a cruise. That was never, ever gonna happen. I had this extra money, about $10,000, that was refunded as a result of not going on that cruise. And I was like, "I need to do something because I can't go on a cruise. I'm feeling really bad. I'm not going to be able to go to Minneapolis and see my grandmother who's in her nineties, and who's an inspiration for me in terms of building the business." And I was like, "I don't know what to do."

So I took the money and gave it away. I started the Donnie Fund. There was a lot of people that were like, "Oh, it's your birthday, Kathryn. What do you want? At that time, they weren't even delivering flowers. I said, "You know what? Donate to this fund. And so that one ask turned into more asks, and one donation became many donations. We gave out over $160,000 to over 1,500 black women-led entrepreneurs within the six week time period. And that just showed me that it could be done.

At the same time, I was transitioning from Digitalundivided and was just kind of like, This nonprofit, really restrictive, lack of innovation, lack of vision sort of space, really, isn't a good fit for me. I'm not an administrator. I am a builder and I'm an innovator and I know that about myself. And so I left DID and maybe a day before I left DID George Floyd happened.  

So I spent really June and July thinking. I gave myself time to breathe. I didn't put myself on a schedule to think. I was also writing my book at that time, Build the Damn Thing, so it's really reflective on sort of what was going on, what was happening. And I just was like, the universe kept telling me to do this. I started talking with a dear friend, who is really known as a big thinker in the venture capital space. And I was like, "Hey Brian, I have this idea I've been noodling around. I don't know. It's right at concept stage. Let's talk about it."

Brian Aoaeh
So I met Kathryn at a Christmas party in December 2013. And I now don't recall who suggested that I go over and say hi, but once we started talking, I found out that she had traveled to Ghana and had spent some time in Ghana. I found out that while she was at Yale, I think she dated a guy who was a DJ and who I have a fond memory of crushing when he came to DJ at my alma mater, Connecticut College. So we laughed about that. And then we got to discussing work, what she was working on

My name is Brian Laung Aoaeh, I am a co-founder and general partner of REFASHIOND Ventures, and I am the co-founder of the Worldwide Supply Chain Federation.

It was an interesting coincidence because around that time, I was writing for a tech blog based in Nigeria, and I was spending a lot of time thinking about the problems that African startups have. And when she described to me what she was trying to do, which was build a community to support black women startup founders and also get them more capital, I said, "The problems they face are very similar to the problems that African startups face. They're, under-resourced, under-capitalized, and the structures to enable them to succeed don't exist. And that's exactly what you're building." And so I said to her, "If there's any way that I can help, just let me know, and I'd be happy to do so."

When she called me in July of 2020 to tell me about Genius Guild, two thoughts went through my mind. One is that Genius Guild is the culmination of all of the experience that she has gained over definitely more than a decade of working on related problems. And this starts with The Budget Fashionista. And then the second thought was “I'm incredibly busy right now trying to get my own fund off the ground. But of course I have to do this. This is really important. I have to help Kathryn.” And so my role now with Genius Guild is as a VC in residence. Essentially, I'm helping Kathryn with everything that's related to getting, the FUND part of Genius Guild off the ground. 

Kathryn Finney
I spent the summer of 2020 really thinking. Post George Floyd's murder, I had a lot to think about. 

And so I started to think more about how do we create the space where everyone can win, especially black people, there's this dichotomy that's been created that somehow if black people win, that means white people lose, which is so not true. Maybe when black people win, maybe the powers that be lose because it has to be more equitable distribution, but the average white person wins quite a bit.  There's a whole big thing about the extractive nature of slavery and the impact that slavery had, but not just on black people, but on middle and poor white people as well.

Because labor was "free," it depressed the wages of white workers. White people could not charge what they would normally charge in the competitive, true capitalistic market. So white people's labor was devalued quite significantly as well. Who benefited from the devaluation of white labor and the free labor that enslaved people provided? It wasn't black people. it wasn't even poor, middle-class white people. It was wealthy plantation planter-class white people who have benefited.

And so that really, stuck with me and I spent the summer reading about restorative capitalism and stakeholder capitalism.  Stakeholder capitalism is capitalism where all the people who are involved, from the community, from employees to investors are all, sort of, aligned. And so you try to find returns and value, not just for your shareholders, but for your stakeholders too. For everybody.

So I started the Genius Guild really after years of trying to figure out how to create a space where everyone wins. I like to think of Digitalundivided as really the MVP for the Genius Guild. It was a first sort of way in which I was kind of implementing and thinking about this concept of everybody wins, and how do you create a world. And how do we move capital to black communities without having to ask for permission? I always felt I was asking for permission, and I learned that in particular when running Digitalundivided, because it was a nonprofit and there was so many restrictions on what you could do, that I was just really frustrated because you couldn't really be innovative. 

I was kind of walking around this idea for black founders and the language was very nebulous; ya know people of color, all these sorts of words. And I was talking to a really good friend, a real big thinker named Mia Henry. Mia and I had been friends since college. She was always kind of my big sister and always somebody I looked up to because she's brilliant in the way she thinks about things and particularly, the way she thinks about language and her clarity around language was always so helpful for me, because my instinct is to go back to Minnesota and be a nice little Minnesotan girl. And she would always say to me, "Say what you mean. If that's what you want to say, say it." 

Mia Handry
It's so funny, I remember having a lot of fun with Kathy. I'm not sure if it was always at parties, but we were both... I mean, we went to our parties, but one of my strongest memories of Kathy in groups was when we were sitting around and we were talking about politics and politicians. And I think maybe I was actually interning for one or had just finished interning for one because the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I had an internship with a state senator, and he had aspirations of being governor and he eventually did become governor of New Jersey. And so I think I was talking about that and how I was writing all his letters and signing his name to things, and he may have been a good person before, but now he's doing some questionable things.

My name is Mia Henry and I'm the founder and principal of Freedom Lifted, and I met Kathy in college at Rutgers University. 

And This one night, we had this really intense conversation about whether or not a person can keep their values and remain who they are and even just remain good if they go into politics. And I'm a cynic and I still am, and I said no. And I think Kathy was pushing back and saying, "No, you can. You can still be principled no matter where you are." And so we had this really intense conversation. There were other people around and we loved those conversations. And I remember that even if we, disagreed, it was just like we loved the tension, because we knew we were getting to new ideas and getting to new places with that. And then afterwards, I'm pretty sure we went to a party 

Kathryn Finney
So I was talking to her and getting all flowery with language and asking her advice on some frameworks. And she'd given me some really strong feedback, and even some frameworks to look at and ways of thinking. And she was like, “You don't want to just fund black founders. You don't want to just invest in people of color. You want to end racism." That's bold, that's big. And she said, "Kathryn, your whole entire life has led up to this moment. Your whole entire life has led to Genius Guild, so live in the moment. Say what you mean.

What time in world history, would I be okay able to be this bold and people be able to hear? We were in the middle of the global pandemic in which black people were dying at a rate that was significantly higher than everyone else. We had a number of brutal killings and murders of black people, black women included. We had a president that didn't care about o ther human beings, especially human beings who look like me. 

I can't tell you how scary it is to be a black woman and to ask for what it is you need, because we rarely get it. I said, "I'm actually going to need more, because I'm going to have to convince the most talented people to leave whatever cushy job they have to come work with me, and I'm going to have to pay them real money.

Money has never been the motivation in my life. I realized that it needed to be, that I didn't need to be a martyr anymore, and that also, I didn't want to ask other people to be that either. And so I said, "This is what I need."

One of the most amazing things in my life happened. I asked this partner for what I needed and they gave it to me. I cried because there are rarely times- 

Oh, okay. Yeah, we got to stop. I'm in the middle of teariness.

And it was really a changing point for me, in my life, because I realize that you can live from a point of abundance. I saw how all the years of work that I did trying to really live my life from abundance, and at this moment, abundance was being returned back to me. And the partner said something else that was a privilege they gave me that black women also don't get, which is, "It is fine if this doesn't work." 

Kathryn Finney (03:16):
Even as a successful very public black woman, I had never had anyone ever tell me that before, that if this doesn't work, we're okay, because we believe in you and we know you'll figure it out. it gave me space. It allowed me to breathe, and it allowed me to create 

Saidah Nash Carter
So why Genius Guild, and why now

My name is Saidah Nash Carter, and I am the Head of Labs at Genius Guild.

We are in a state of emergency. I feel like there is a real sense of urgency for Black empowerment, and empowerment that translates into power, for economic freedom and prosperity in communities. I think overall it is time for the evil genius that is white supremacy to end and to create a world where all people can flourish, and that is what is really at the core, at the center of the Genius Guild mission. And as we know, and as history has taught us, when Black people win, everyone wins, and we want to help humanity win.

Kathryn Finney is one of the most influential woman in tech, an entrepreneur, a social media visionary, an investor, writer, and advocate for women. Having her on the side of women is a big deal, I'm a huge fan! On this podcast episode she's sharing her unconventional journey to motherhood and what she's doing to help the women around her and support them as she grows in motherhood and life.

Key takeaways

1. Taking pauses helps to manage anxiety and decide who needs you the most at the moment
2. It's helpful to remind moms that our kids will be okay and we are doing our best every day, things don't have to look perfect
3. Accepting and offering support can be hard, especially in the early days, but you need to take it