Fellowship Spotlight: Corridor Ventures

Kelli Saulny, co-founder and managing partner of Corridor Ventures, is guided by two key lessons she’s learned throughout her career: “One,” she says, “is that wealth is just a matter of organized people with organized money. And two, whoever controls the pocketbook controls the power.” Corridor Ventures is what she and her team built to serve as a vehicle for organizing people and their money. “I wanted more power to control who had access to money.” 

Unlocking Innovation in the U.S. Southeast

Corridor Ventures is an industry-agnostic, early-stage VC firm looking to unlock innovation in the U.S. Southeast with a $50M fund. “We’re focused on problem-solver founders pursuing scalable innovation,” says Kwamena Aidoo, who founded the firm with Saulny, Jarrett Cohen, and Adrian Mendez, and also serves as managing partner. “We focus on problems, issues, and opportunities that over-index in the Southeast, where the founders are most proximate to the problems to be solved.” 

They’re investing in areas including future of work, climate innovation, experience tech and innovation, government tech, and improving health outcomes. “If we went through each one, you can see a burning need in the South to solve, address, or improve indicators in these areas,” Aidoo explains.

“Let’s start with the data,” Saulny says when speaking to the reasons Corridor Ventures focuses their work in the Southeast. “The Southeast is outpacing growth of other U.S. regions by 40%,” Saulny adds, “so there’s a real business infrastructure need.” And waiting to address that need is untapped talent across the region. “What we’ve found in our research,” Aidoo says, “is that the profile of the problem-solver founder in the Southeast historically has been not only the most resilient but has also generated outsized returns.” 

He proposes that, when investing in a founder from the Southeast, you’re investing in someone who “doesn’t expect cash to be on their front door,” so they’re better conservators of cash. “And despite not always having the same classical training that your more traditional funds might invest in,” he says, “that need for survival plus the adapt-or-die kind of mentality teaches them how to pivot and be resilient.”

Learning from Those Who Led the Way

Saulny and Aidoo both credit their work in large part to the models of entrepreneurship and resilience they had the opportunity to learn from. 

After graduating from Florida A&M University, Saulny landed her first job with what — at the time — was a little startup company called Carol’s Daughter. As part of the legacy team that grew the company from $3M to ultimately selling to L’oreal for over $100M, Saulny credits this experience as playing a key role in her trajectory.

“It’s never lost on me that my first job out of college was with a Black female founder who had an exit,” she says, referring to Carol’s actual daughter, founder Lisa Price. “I guess you could say I got the bug from there. Any glass ceiling I could’ve possibly had, subconsciously or not, was shattered because of that experience. Leaving Carol’s Daughter, my mission was to create more Carol’s Daughters.” 

Aidoo attributes his own entrepreneurial path to his immediate family’s legacy. His maternal grandfather got himself a boat to take part in the main trade in his village in Ghana: fishing. “He flipped that boat and those fish,” Aidoo shares, “until he built a company that became the distributor for one of the largest fishing companies in the world.”

In the late 1990s, Aidoo watched his father try to build a B2C e-commerce platform — ahead of the curve in a time when Amazon was still just a bookseller. He rolled up his sleeves and did all the work. He taught himself to code and managed to get a meeting with a major retailer as well as a meeting with a relatively known fashion clothing brand. But all this work didn’t translate into access to the capital needed to build a business. “He was a single-income earner with four kids,” Aidoo says. “At some point, he had to get back to work.”

He reflects back to 2003, when he was finishing up at Columbia University. “Jeff Bezos was becoming the Bezos we know now with the empire he built in Amazon, and my dad was still looking for his next move. That sent me on a journey to understand how some people gain access to capital while others don’t. My lived experience suggested that it wasn’t work ethic, ideas, or innovation. There was something else there.” And so he got to figuring out what that something was by getting more proximate to the world of capital, first working at a hedge fund and then at UBS investment bank, and for the past decade in private equity and venture capital. What he discovered is that, “The work that’s done in private equity and venture capital and high finance isn’t that complicated; it’s just guarded.”

Deeply Rooted in the Region

Three out of four members of the Corridor Ventures team are from New Orleans, and the fourth is from South Carolina. “As cultural natives,” Saulny offers, “we understand the landscape. Historically, we’ve been exporting our talent out of the South too often.” 

A key element of that Southern landscape is the grounding legacy of Black excellence. “#BlackExcellence is kind of behind the curve for us,” she says with a bit of a laugh, “Growing up in New Orleans, Black excellence was just normalized. It was just everyday life, and that’s something special in our DNA.” 

The firm’s name pays homage to one of the many models of Black excellence that Saulny references. The Claiborne Corridor, once known as the “Main Street” of Black New Orleans, runs through the Treme, the oldest Black neighborhood in the country, and is comparable to Black Wall Street with its rich history of Black entrepreneurship. 

Saulny also points to the rich network of higher ed institutions in the region as an asset. “The university system is truly incomparable,” she says. “You have this high density of state schools — pretty much all HBCUs — and some of the most elite universities in the world. So you have this incredible diversity of demographic but also of thought.” The talent coming out of these nearby schools creates the people pipeline needed in order for the companies in Corridor Ventures’ portfolio to grow and thrive. “It’s not just about infusing capital into these ventures, but also ensuring that there’s a talent pipeline that can stand them up. Building an ecosystem through the university system was a priority for us.”

Homecoming

About five years ago, when Aidoo began his transition back to New Orleans, he reached out to Camelback Ventures, an accelerator for entrepreneurs of color and women founded by VC Include Fellowship alum Aaron Walker, and also a magnet for mission-driven VC professionals.

Aidoo ended up working for the organization as a coach, and when Saulny returned home to New Orleans after her successful career launch in New York, she also landed at Camelback Ventures. The two began to build a working relationship, discussing the patterns they were seeing in the field. “We both built our careers on the coast and we started talking about the abundance of talent we were seeing in the South but not enough access to capital. Even when the capital was here,” she explains, “everyone didn’t have fair access to it.”

After working and connecting at Camelback, Aidoo and Saulny joined forces with the other two Corridor Ventures co-founders: serial entrepreneur, Adrian Mendez, and Jarrett Cohen, founder and managing partner of wealth management firm, JE Cohen. The four started meeting regularly on Saturday mornings to get to work determining, in Saulny’s words, “if there was a ‘there’ there — or a ‘there’ here in the Southeast.” And when the team quickly confirmed that there was in fact a clear gap that they could address, Corridor Ventures was born. 

Technical Experience and a Hands-On Approach

“Very few investors have our team’s operating experience,” Aidoo points out. After getting his career going in private equity, he worked for seven years as a CFO working with investment companies — a job he did full time while also having a full-blown career as investor and investment manager. He and Saulny have between them over 20 years of supply chain operations experience, including Saulny’s time at Carol’s Daughter, where all of supply chain and operations reported to her. 

“We’ve both seen companies across industries through the full company life cycle, from early stage to maturity,” Aidoo says. “We can help founders not only plan for what they need for the next 18 to 24 months, but also think about where they want to end up and work backwards from there. Whereas other founders can make recommendations, we can show founders how to make the things that they need.”

And because the Corridor Ventures team knows that the founders who need the support are often excluded from the spaces where capital, information, and other resources flow freely, they take a hands-on approach in identifying and connecting with them. “We meet founders where they are,” Aidoo explains, mentioning conferences and mentoring programs as a couple of places where his team finds founders who might not otherwise know where to go. 

“We’re able to find a lot of founders who might be very good at building their thing, but don’t understand the venture capital game.” The fact that the team of four represents a great deal of diversity among them — in terms of higher ed networks in particular — expands their reach as well. “I consider us to be organizers first,” Saulny clarifies. “We’re very boots on the ground,” she says, underscoring the driving values of the firm as she articulates how her team’s approach shifts the typical VC power dynamic. 

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

When asked about their time in the VC Include Fellowship, Aidoo reflects, “The first word that comes to mind is fellowship. There’s a lot of value in who your cohort mates are and not feeling alone while you climb on this journey. I think we had a really awesome cohort and that’s kudos to VCI.” He also elevates the value of having access to frank, specific, and educational conversations with an impressive array of experts.

Saulny adds her perspective, saying, “I think one of the most special things was how the curriculum was executed. A lot of accelerators have panels of people talking at you, where this fellowship felt more like an interactive class, which is not easy to do in a virtual world. This felt more like what class should be.”

It’s a pleasure for us to curate a learning opportunity that feels aligned to what participants need and envision for themselves. We look forward to seeing the ways Corridor Ventures continues to pay forward their learning by creating more aligned opportunities for founders in the Southeast.