Well, I never thought it would happen but it did. I was roaming the Internet today looking for a listing of all the minority owned firms in the country that sells it’s stock and I came across a website that has as it’s focus an issue near and dear to my heart: MINORITY VENTURE CAPITAL.
After contacting more than 500 Black entrepreneurs and trying for years to start such a group under every type of configuration I could think of and getting a total of three replies (two of which were looking for investment capital), I decided I would give up the venture capital idea and just look for some Black firms in which to invest.
I found a website called The Minority Angel Investor Network, based in Pennsylvania.
I checked them out and found there was a whole network of such organizations out there, but almost all of them have such onerous requirements that they are almost irrelevant. This network, for example, is a conglomeration of dozens, maybe hundreds of individuals who decide on a personal basis, whether they would invest in a business or not. Exactly the plan I had envisioned, only this group would only consider businesses located in the area and (get this) they require their investors to have a net worth of at least ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Now, if you think about that, how many BLACK investors do you think you could find with a million bucks and how many guns do you think you would have to put to their heads to get any significant amount of investment ? Speaking from experience I don’t think there are ANY, and all the investors in these groups would have to be WHITE, which means that the game is still the same; White investors putting up the money for Black firms and making the profits.
Now, while my plan would be similar, it would not require such a high asset value. In fact, in order to make my plan more acceptable to Black investors (actually NON investors who wanted to become investors) I dropped the person worth requirement to $100 with a minimum investment of $20. STILL didn’t get any takers. After reading all that data about all these investors willing to invest in Black businesses I figured maybe I would try yet again…but then I came across this little tidbit.
Asian firms own one million less companies than American Blacks but have gross receipts of TWENTY TIMES that of Black owned firms ($2,700,000,000 to $137,000,000). This disheartening stat was followed by one even more disheartening: Black firms total 1,900,000 and 1,800,000 (95%) of those have one employee or less! Perhaps wrongly, I concluded that even being a big BLACK fish in the same end of the pool as the small White fishes still would not be anything to brag about, so what’s the use?
But still (one never quits when stubbornness is all they have left)I think I might after all try to find those Black investors who are not afraid to invest $20 in concert with thousands of others like themselves and build something that they can be proud of instead of always whining about what the White guys are doing to them. I will still go on with the project even if the only investor is me.
I mean, what do I have to lose?
Oh, yeah. Twenty bucks.
