Fellowship Spotlight: High Street Equity Partners
The driving vision behind the work of High Street Equity Partners is a tech ecosystem where opportunities and access to capital are more widespread — where, instead of the current reality of narrow representation in the start-up tech world in gender, culture, and race, every U.S. demographic is represented. “We want to realize and actualize this notion of lifting up the least of us,” says High Street Co-Founder and General Partner, Tristan Wilkerson, “and just be an example of how to do this thing the right way, in a way that actually creates opportunity and generates alpha returns.”
Investing in Founders from Underrepresented Geographies
Because Wilkerson and Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Mitch Brooks, believe that exceptional talent and revolutionary ideas know no borders — and that a diversity of solutions can only arise from a diversity of representation — they’re focusing their $15M seed-stage fund on sourcing, championing, and investing in voices from emerging yet underrepresented regions.
There are four key elements to High Street’s strategy:
Geographic Diversification: High Street’s strategy around geographic diversification is rooted in economic logic: capturing high returns within regions that have less competition and more untapped potential.
Thematic Approach: High Street intends to remain sector agnostic across high-growth technology, but they’re investing in the particular promise they see around continued innovation and opportunity for disruption in: Health Tech, Clean Tech, Future of Work, and Consumer Internet. They built their team intentionally, with deep expertise across these four areas.
Early-Stage Synergy: Getting in at the seed stage positions High Street to be able to provide not just capital but also invaluable mentorship, connections, and strategic guidance to our portfolio companies. This early alignment helps ensure the successful scaling of promising ventures.
SEDI Founders Focus: SEDI stands for Socio-Economic Diversity and Inclusion. High Street acknowledges the systemic barriers that have historically limited the reach of venture capital into diverse founder groups and priority SEDI founders as a way to close gaps in representation.
By investing at the seed stage, High Street is looking to do the hard work of sourcing deals where companies have proven product-market fit with paid customers and traction. They’re looking for deals in places like Brooks’ and Wilkerson’s own homes of D.C. and Arkansas, respectively, as well as places like the Mid-Atlantic and Heartland. In addition to the financial capital, they leverage the domain expertise of their team and investors to provide meaningful portfolio support in operations, sales, and policy.
Grounded in a Sense of Purpose
Brooks and Wilkerson both share values tied to faith, family, and financial wellness. These values intersect with their shared purpose to do their part to close the wealth gap, strengthening communities, and growing economies by increasing participation from diverse founders and investing in overlooked geographies.
Brooks and Wilkerson first met at a breakfast gathering of Black men coming together in community and in professional support of each other. Brooks climbed the ranks at his company, ultimately becoming Chief Operating Officer. “Once I was in that role, I started to think about what I wanted to do with my earnings, not just to support or enrich myself, but to have some greater good come from it.”
At that time, about eight years ago, Brooks opted to leverage his growing wealth in angel investing and VC in order to pour capital into what he refers to as Main Street companies, with the goal of helping as many as possible go from $100K in sales to somewhere between $1M and $5M in sales. “I wanted to lend my expertise and business acumen to help advise and mentor them to grow and scale.”
The Power of Timing
Around the same time Brooks began to scale his angel investing portfolio, Wilkerson left his Capitol Hill position to start his own public affairs firm. As he grew his firm’s cash reserve, he too sought to activate the capital he had access to in the interest of creating positive impact. “We began to go the extra mile for each other,” Wilkerson shares. At this point, the friends decided to partner up on their investing work, and after a number of years pouring into underrepresented founders, the idea for High Street Equity Partners emerged. As Brooks explains it, “The question was, what would it look like to do this professionally and as an institutional firm rather than as a side gig?”
While the pair was in the process of visioning and ideating, the world turned upside down. In an unforeseeable turn of events, investing in Black businesses became a focal response to the patterned murders of innocent Black people — George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery in mid-2020 alone.
“We had friends and family reaching out to us saying, ‘I know some folks who want to support Black companies. I know you’ve been doing that for a while now. Can you point us in the right direction?’” Timely momentum from these conversations led Brooks and Wilkerson to form their first fund together, and Wilkerson credits Brooks with helping him see how they could leverage their proximity and connections to Capitol Hill to create far-reaching impact. “How do we create a collective of master operators and organize them in a way that supports high performing, underrepresented founders to expand impact?”
Changing the Game While Playing
“We’re playing the game but, in many ways, we’re looking to change the way the game is played,” says Brooks. “Our approach to investing is unique to our worldview, how we’re looking to operate within it, and how we’re using our lived experiences to do this work.”
“The efforts to roll back DEI motivate our work,” Wilkerson says. He names Fearless Fund as an example of a company working to change how the game is played, interrupting the historic gatekeeping that has persisted for decades by investing expressly in founders who are women of color. They’ve now been targeted by conservatives with a lawsuit. “There are so many other examples of a pervasive threat to progress,” Wilkerson says, referencing the abundance of fuel for the work that he and Brooks are doing. “There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be more women-owned, Black-owned and Black-led technology companies,” Wilkerson insists, “our economy grows when more folks on the margins, irrespective of color or gender, are invited, enabled, and empowered to innovate. High Street is working to do just this.”
A Team that’s Representative of the Change They Seek
The entire High Street team represents the identities, experiences, and ideas that are desperately needed within the tech world. With team members of varied psychographic and socio-economic backgrounds who’ve lived and worked in the U.S. and abroad, across corporate, start-ups, politics, sports, music, and government roles, High Street brings a global perspective to their work.
As Black men with a diverse range of lived and professional experiences, both Wilkerson and Brooks possess sharp pattern recognition skills that benefit their work in different ways. “As a child of the 80s and 90s growing up in the inner city, I was about making money,” Brooks reflects. It’s this time- and place-specific experience that nurtured the skills and perspectives that seeded his skill for creating the efficient systems he’s built for the firm. “I’ve naturally figured out how you operationalize an efficient money-making system. And I feel I’ve become a master at that.”
Brooks lifts up Wilkerson’s way with words, and expertise as a political economist, as another strength that uniquely positions High Street for success. He shares anecdotes of Wilkerson’s ability to understand socio-economic trends and policy, and shape messaging around those priorities in a way that creates connection and generates interest. “That is a unique skill,” Brooks points out, “to be able to message in a way that helps shape policy.” This skill is only cultivated by the ability to pick up on the patterned ways in which people think and behave, and then cater to that.
Personal Connections to Corporate Cause
“When we’re asked why we do this work, you’ll hear us talk through this notion of really supporting small businesses, Black businesses, founders of color, and women founders, and helping folks make good decisions to build strong businesses,” Wilkerson reflects. “But underneath all that,” he adds, “Mitch and I have a deep friendship, and that friendship is grounded in really solid principles, like family.” Both are what Wilkerson refers to as next-in-line patriarchs, sharing a similar sense of urgency and responsibility for the well-being of their families. “We’re two folks who have made a way, and who support our extended and immediate families in helping them find their way.”
Though the two friends and partners don’t elevate this element of differentiation often, it truly is something that sets their work apart. “We view and treat the folks who are in our portfolio like family. We have their backs; we roll up our sleeves; we make the extra phone call,” Wilkerson explains. And he spotlights Brooks’ brilliance in designing structures that accommodate this different, more familial and less transactional way of working. Unlike the countless businesses that have failed to deliver on their post-George Floyd pledges to Black businesses, Brooks and Wilkerson have skin in the game. “It gives us the energy to go the extra mile,” Wilkerson says.
Participating in the VC Include Fellowship
Brooks and Wilkerson note the uniquely curated curriculum of the VCI Fellowship as a true asset. “There’s a little for everybody in the program and curriculum,” Wilkerson says. “For this to be the largest cohort yet and folks to be at different stages of their journeys, and everyone still has a chance to take something away, I think that’s a rare and commendable thing.”
“Bahiyah and her team are unlocking the gatekeeping,” Brooks adds, “something that Tristan and I would like to see a lot more of. They’re trying to help folks like us be able to do good for the culture and do good for the world.”
“The program is still adding value,” Wilkerson shares, “and I’m anticipating that this is going to continue to pay dividends because of the relationships we’ve been able to forge. It’s the gift that’s actually still giving.”
