Fellowship Spotlight: Ruthless for Good Fund
In 2014, Aaron Walker started Camelback Ventures, an accelerator that provides coaching, connections, and capital to social impact entrepreneurs who are women and people of color. “We say we’re the friends and family to give that first check to people that don’t have a rich uncle,” Aaron deadpans. “We’ve seen over 2,000 companies and invested $4 million into almost 100 of them, and they’ve gone on to raise over $60 million more.”
Realities On the Ground
Right before the pandemic, Aaron examined the Camelback portfolio and saw that “the companies, and founders that were leading them, were outperforming their more white and more male peers. They had more revenue, they were building more diverse teams, across most metrics they were doing better – but they were getting outraised 3 to 1.”
He continues with his bone dry humor, “So that must mean one of two things – either that sophisticated investors are OK paying three times as much for the same thing, or that there’s really deep bias in the system.”
His solution to fill that investment gap was the Ruthless for Good Fund (RFG). “Oftentimes, where there’s market failure, there’s market opportunity,” Aaron points out. RFG is a $30MM pre-seed and seed fund investing in education, the future of work, and access innovation.
In February 2021, when this hyper-intelligent emerging manager started the VC Include Fellowship for BIPOC First-Time Fund Managers, he had not yet raised money for the Ruthless for Good Fund. By the time he finished the program at the end of the year, he successfully closed $12MM towards the fund.
The RFG Advantage
Through Camelback Ventures, Aaron built the relationships, insights, and networks to launch The Ruthless for Good Fund. His Camelback team raised $20MM in philanthropic funding to invest in for-profit impact companies and to make grants to education-oriented nonprofits.
Aaron’s fundraising track record is impressive by any standard, with well-known investors having backed Camelback including the McKenzie Scott Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Techstars, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among many others. Another benefit to having run Camelback over the years is that Aaron established a wide network of established mentors and advisors that will help him support the start-ups he invests in via RFG.
How the VCI Fellowship Helped the RFG
“The name of the game is fundraising. When we started the VCI program, we hadn’t raised any money. Our first close of $11 million came while we were at VCI because of some of the relationships we were able to achieve through the program. So that’s been immensely helpful,” Aaron says.
But he adds that the value of the VCI fellowship can be measured in more than just dollars. “One of the other things that I’ve enjoyed is to be able to hear from people who have done it before. Sometimes the value is in knowing what others have done so you know what to do, what not to do, and to be able to take those lessons with you. It’s been invaluable to learn from folks like Seth Levine, and others that VCI has brought to the table, so we could learn from their experience and shorten our learning curve to be able to get to the point of success that they’ve reached.”
Aaron Walker has already accomplished so much by building and running Camelback Ventures. We can’t wait for him to take his abilities and achievements to the next level with the Ruthless For Good Fund. We’re certain that his investments will produce alpha, innovation, more equality, and create positive social impact for communities all over the United States for many years to come.
