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Venita Cooper’s passion for sneaker culture has led her to become an entrepreneur -turned-tech-founder. In 2019, Cooper opened Silhouette Sneakers & Art in Tulsa, OK, after working as a K-12 educator in the Mississippi Delta through Teach for America. She was brought to Oklahoma because her parents decided to retire, Cooper told AFROTECH™ in an interview. With no entrepreneurial background, the thought of launching her own business never crossed her mind until 2018, when the idea of opening a sneaker store was presented to her. “At first I thought it was crazy ’cause I was like, ‘I’m not an entrepreneur. I’ve never done anything like that before,'” Cooper said. “One of the things that I’ve learned is that to start a business and to run a business, to me, the No. 1 skill is the ability to make good decisions consistently and quickly. I always ask investors and other founders who have successful companies, what is the characteristic that they can identify as that No. 1 characteristic...
“It’s our responsibility to remind people that this isn’t charity… this isn’t philanthropic.” Candice Matthews-Brackeen joins Will Lucas on the latest episode of AfroTech’s Black Tech, Green Money podcast to educate listeners on how to capitalize on this current moment in the venture capital space where investors are finally understanding the importance of investing in Black startups. Matthews-Brackeen is the General Partner of Lightship Capital, a Cincinnati-based venture capital fund that works to support underrepresented, early-stage, transformational businesses. During this episode, she reminds us that “it’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure that these good stories are being told.” She also says that for her and the team, it’s important “that we’re highlighting great founders doing great things.” “I have the weight of the world on my shoulders and I feel that it’s my responsibility to deliver a win,” said Matthews-Brackeen when asked about the challenges she faces as a...
Lightship Capital has announced the completion of a $1.6 million equity round of financing into Undock, an AI-enabled productivity platform, according to a press release . A graduate of the Winter 2020 cohort of New York’s prestigious Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA), Undock , is a patent-pending AI that connects people ranging from different organizations, calendar applications, and geographies to meetings that work. “A few times in life you use a product and know instantly that it’s transformationally better than what you have been using. That’s Undock,” General Partner at Lightship Capital, Brian Brackeen, said in a press release. “The company has it all—it solves a real problem, with beauty and elegance, and it’s got a visionary leader in Nash Ahmed. We loved him at hello and the more we dug into the company, the more confident we became that Undock is an absolute winner.” In today’s remote work landscape, Undock’s privacy centered approach to sharing availability is...
Cincinnati-based venture capital firm, Lightship Capital, is on a mission to raise $50 million to invest in underrepresented founders from the Midwest area. The Black-owned firm is headed by investing power couple, Candice Matthews Brackeen and Brian Brackeen, who both have one goal in mind — to invest in the next wave of innovative entrepreneurs that have been overlooked by other investors. The lack of startup funding for women and people of color has been highlighted in recent years via studies like digitalundivided’s ProjectDiane , which reports Black women-led startups raised only 0.0006 percent of the $424.7 billion in tech venture funding raised since 2009. In light of the known disproportional funding opportunities, Lightship’s General Partner, Candice, believes founders of color are worth investing in. “I’m a capitalist at heart. There’s market failure. You can really take advantage of it,” she said, according to The Wall Street Journal . In the midst of the Black Lives...