Fellowship Spotlight: Resilient Ventures

When explaining the origin of their firm’s name, Resilient Ventures co-founders Keith Daniel and Tom Droege share the ways they’re inspired by the natural world around them. They elevate the impressive feat of living organisms to withstand all kinds of threats and environmental hardships yet still go on to survive and even flourish. And in considering how this dynamic exists among humans, they are inspired by the history and contemporary ability and determination of Black people surviving and in many instances thriving despite the massive barriers imposed by systemic racism. It’s this type of resilience that led to the name of Resilient Ventures, and that also motivates Daniel and Droege to invest wholeheartedly into Black-led companies that are often overlooked.

Filling a Gap in Venture Capital 

“History has made it clear,” Daniel says matter of factly. “Venture dollars go to White men, and that in and of itself is a problem worth attacking.” Resilient Ventures is focused on addressing the concerning lack of capital flowing toward Black founders — below 1% of venture dollars go to Black founders. 

“Our primary focus,” explains Daniel, “is finding what we call the Jackie Robinsons and the Madam CJ Walkers.” In keeping with this priority, the firm has already invested into a sports apparel company – in the legacy of Robinson – and an AI machine language tech business based in Atlanta whose founder is aspiring to become as successful in the beauty space as Walker – the first documented woman to be a self-made millionaire. 

While Resilient Ventures started out relatively agnostic, their first fund is focused mostly on B2B, education tech, human resources, and SaaS or tech-enabled businesses. Their second fund will similarly invest in companies with substantial revenue which are ready to enter their growth stage with substantial business impact in North Carolina. They’ve successfully closed their first fund, and are in the process of making their second investment out of fund two. 

Just a year into the second fund, they’ve already raised nearly $5M, more than the total $3.425M they raised for their first. Despite facing several barriers to raising capital for their first fund due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm has invested in 11 companies. Aiming for two to three deals per year over the next five years, Resilient Ventures seeks to invest in approximately 15 companies across the lifetime of fund two, writing checks between $250K and $750K.

A Faith- and Asset-Based Approach to Service

Daniel and Droege connected in 2010 through mutual friends in Durham, North Carolina, where both men live and where Resilient Ventures is based. “We live in a legacy city,” Daniel says. “We kind of wake up every day realizing the challenge of progress in our country – what it looks like from across the color line.” Daniel, a Black man, and Droege, who’s White, discovered early on that they share a deep passion for deconstructing systemic racism; closing the wealth gap through economic justice and education work; and cultivating integrated relationships across the color line.

 “We’ve been active on issues of race and reconciliation, particularly from a faith perspective, for decades,” says Daniel. “To persist as an entrepreneur, you have to have a motivation beyond individual wealth accumulation.” Daniel and Droege’s shared faith has served them well in this way. 

The pair first worked together as advisors to a group of friends who had recently returned from the mission field. They supported the group both philanthropically and also in thinking through how they would carry forward their service to marginalized communities in their local context. “It was like supporting domestic missionaries,” Daniel explains. “They were looking at the Black community in particular, and at poverty at large, from the different perspective of asset-based community development.” 

This perspective helps people to see communities through the lens of the assets they offer, rather than seeing them as problems to be solved. The group soon came to focus on racial equity training. “We were just trying to deconstruct the patronizing and often dehumanizing ways that wealth and White supremacy work,” says Daniel.

The Birth of Resilient Ventures

By 2016, Daniel was finishing up his doctoral studies in Christian community development at Duke University, and he and Droege developed a course together with the same focus. They applied a gospel orientation lens to existing, secular racial equity content from the Greensboro, North Carolina-based Racial Equity Institute (REI). The content covers the history of racism in America with a focus on systemic issues. The course attracted lots of interest, including from a number of Christian business people outside of their immediate network who were curious about the subject matter. “That interest led us to think more deeply about what kind of action we could take, given our backgrounds and influence,” Daniel reflects.

They also considered what value their multiracial composition could add. “Most other funds focusing specifically on African Americans are run by African Americans,” Droege raises, illuminating the fact that – while groups of Black folks working together for Black folks might find it feasible to focus less on internal issues of race and racism – he and Daniel and their team inevitably have to broach them. And they pass along to their network insights from their own grappling. “There’s an education component,” Droege says, “and I’m always that squeaky wheel, bringing these questions up when we’re reaching out to mostly White LPs.” 

Tapping Into Unseen Potential

While many of the people close to them were proposing that they just be generous through philanthropy, Daniel and Droege knew they wanted to create larger scale impact. “Once we saw the hole in VC, the very wretched disparity in funding for Black founders,” Daniel says, “we struck out – and there’s a bit of a pun there.” 

Thinking about the history of the Negro Leagues, a once majorly successful enterprise within the Black community, the pair was inspired by the possibility of supporting more Black founders to scale their companies. Daniel took some steps back from his consulting business; Droege put up some of his own money; and Resilient Ventures was born. “We really are trying to live out with our founders what it means to be resilient,” Daniel says of the fund’s reflection of its name. 

And they know that there are countless deserving Black founders out there just waiting for the investment they need. “There are brilliant people out here,” says Daniel, “They’re overlooked, the history is erased.” Resilient Ventures is seeking to connect some of these brilliant people with the capital their companies need, and elevate true history about race and racism along the way. 

Building Trust “Across the Color Line”

“I had built a number of relationships across the color line starting back in the 90s,” Droege says, “but no one had ever said, ‘If we’re gonna do something, we need to have a relationship; it can’t be transactional,’ like Keith did. That was helpful.” He underscores the positive impact of Daniel’s straightforward nature in navigating the dynamics of interracial relationships at the outset of their work together, and the way that Resilient Ventures works in the reflection of this directness. By taking the time to invest in building relationships and trust, the co-founders fortified the foundation of their firm. The depth and alignment they tapped into supported their ability to create something truly intentional and transformative.

“Our foundational motivation is to do something significant about the racial wealth gap,” Droege shares, adding that he and Daniel were looking for ways to personally and meaningfully address the persistent disparity in wealth between Black and White populations. “We got out on this commitment before the social unrest,” Daniel points out, referring to the summer of 2020 protests in light of the police murder of George Floyd, when the U.S. saw an unprecedented interest in investing in Black businesses. At the time when they were seeking to launch their fund, nothing like it existed. “There was no fund as explicit as ours in North Carolina, focusing on Black founders,” he adds.

Depth and Diversity of Experience

What Resilient Ventures doesn’t have in capital – as a relatively small fund – the firm’s team makes up for in tenure, network, and connections. Together, Daniel and Droege boast 70+ years of experience in Durham and the greater Southeast, which they leverage to expand investment into the people and companies in their portfolio. Droege says the fund is, “connecting entrepreneurs to family offices, other investors, other funds,” and offers a recent example. 

While in conversation with a potential LP at IBM, Daniel and Droege were introduced to the company’s New York office supplier diversity lead, who they were then able to connect with their first fund 2 investment: Scaleup. Scaleup is a company focused on creating a replicable model for scaling small to medium sized businesses. “To introduce the founder of Scaleup to the person at IBM corporate who’s in charge of their global diversity supplier network was a good introduction,” Droege says with conviction, “and we make those kinds of introductions regularly.”

The fact that their network is diverse also adds value. “We’ve seen the world in some very different ways,” Daniel says. While Droege ran a successful computing business and has experience as a lifelong entrepreneur and philanthropist, Daniel’s career has mostly been in community development and higher education – primarily at Duke University – in what he calls the “people-building business.” In addition to completing several degrees and spending most of his career there, he was the first Black person hired into a managerial position in the business school. 

The Value-Add of Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

Daniel and Droege’s track records and overlapping networks facilitated many of the steps needed to build a successful firm. “We have one of the best attorneys in the country, and it wasn’t hard to build a team,” Daniel says. But there were still a few gaps to fill. 

Daniel’s participation in the VC Include Fellowship addressed some outstanding needs. “Being in our second fund, I wasn’t sure if we’d get in,” he says. “I was grateful that we did, because with the second fund, with us taking institutional dollars – including an investment from the U.S. Treasury – that’s a whole other level.” Access to other people who’ve experienced this transition and growth has supported Daniel as he navigates it himself. “It’s been good to hear about how to present to institutional funds, learning about the construction of funds, and how to tell our stories.”

We’re eager to see what stories continue to emerge as a result of the powerful work of Resilient Ventures.