Continue Rising
A Profile of Sevetri Wilson
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A mutual friend recently connected me to Sevetri Wilson, a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School, who made headlines last year when she announced her New Orleans-based company Resilia’s $8 million Series A financing. Resilia is Sevetri’s second company, she has a book coming out April 6 from a major publisher . . . and she is only 34 years old.
Sevetri expresses tremendous gratitude for growing up surrounded by extraordinary role models, including many women, and her dedication to mentoring the next generation makes me thrilled to publish my next profile Celebrating Black Founders and Investors on the final day of Women’s History Month.
“My mother told me [two] things: one was ‘live to fight another day.’ Before I was in college, I [would say], ‘this is injustice,’ and I wanted to save everyone, and my mom [would say], ‘Calm down. Live to fight another day.’
“And I always go back to that . . . because she said ‘you have so far that you’re going to go; you’re going to help so many people.’
“The second one that has stayed with me was, ‘Don’t let your highs get so high you can’t see the ground, or your lows so low you can’t see the heavens.’”
Living off the land on a farm handed down by her grandfather’s Blackfoot Indian ancestors, Sevetri’s childhood was rich with priceless multi-generational wisdom and love. Many would look at the numbers and see scarcity: her father passed when she was 10, and her mother supported the family alone earning $28,000 a year, never receiving any government assistance. But Sevetri experienced no scarcity; her childhood was an abundance of love and security. “A lot of my early lessons and foundations definitely come from my daily walk with my mother, [often] that was us in the kitchen cooking, and how I felt like I always had enough.”
Despite the early loss of her father, Sevetri was surrounded by the power of an extended family unit: her mother was one of nine, and Sevetri is one of eight. “I grew up on this farm, and everything that we had was shared amongst our family, and I do feel that a lot of that provided this idea that we were always kind of taken care of.” She spoke specifically of the strength of her mother and grandmother: “We talk about the idea of role models . . . as people who teach us business or how to be entrepreneurs, and role models are looked at as people who have had financial success, but I do feel that the women, the matriarchs, of my family were my role models.”
Thanks to those matriarchs, the sounds of Gladys Knight and Luther Vandross flowed from the kitchen (her family’s gathering place), which was filled with traditional Southern dishes, especially at breakfast. (Sevetri remembers her surprise and dismay at one of her first breakfasts up North when served potatoes instead of grits.) Music has always been important to the family, which has a long line of New Orleans jazz musicians, including a cousin who has won Grammy Awards and a relative who put a second mortgage on his home to finance an album. Sevetri still plays “about four instruments” (when asked to clarify “about four,” she elaborated to say the clarinet (or any woodwind), piano, violin, and guitar (or any string)). She reflected on her early music recitals: “I remember back to instances when I was really young, I could picture in my head right now, my mother getting there 10 minutes late, but just in time to see me go on and she’s in her Kmart [assistant manager] uniform. . . . I think back now on the sacrifices she had to make to do those things . . . I go back to that sense of gratitude.”
From a young age, Sevetri aimed for a career of leadership and respect. At eight, she dreamed of being an attorney: “Coming from a small town, when you think about the jobs that . . . people would say are the most successful people in your community . . . I saw that as attorneys, doctors, teachers. . . . My friend, her dad was an attorney, and he had these billboards around town, and he drove his little Mercedes around, and I was going to be an attorney.” By her teenage years, though, Sevetri had shifted her focus to impact: “As I got older. I began to think about ways I could help people. . . . I didn’t want to just be a child psychologist, I wanted to be a criminal juvenile psychologist.”
Sevetri left her hometown of Hammond for college at Louisiana State University, carrying the centering love of her family and the financial support of a full Pell Grant. Soon after celebrating her beloved daughter’s matriculation to LSU, Sevetri’s devoted mother Shirley, who never missed a music recital, died of cancer. A decade after young Sevetri lost her father, she was now without her role model mother as well. “A lot of my stories start and end with my mother,” she reflected. “I think about as a child, you just want your parents around, and you want the person who brings you comfort in the moments that you’re achieving something.”
Just as her teenage dream of having a law practice featured on billboards shifted to one of service as a juvenile criminal psychologist, Sevetri continued to evolve at LSU. Her somewhat sheltered small town world expanded as she attended as many office hours as her professors held, especially with Dr. Leonard Moore, who now teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
Sevetri said, “I literally have a degree because of this man. I have a [Masters degree] in history because he was my history professor, and I had never been exposed to African American history . . . . He was teaching African American History 101 . . . , and I had never heard anyone talk about the books that he was assigning, had never read books like this before . . . . He was the one who introduced me to Jim Crow; he introduced the idea of police brutality. I grew up in a very rural area, and so although we definitely had our run-ins with the police and discrimination oftentimes, and I have 1,000 stories that I could talk about . . . he actually wrote a book about it.” Sevetri’s eyes were opened by Dr. Moore, as he gave a name and context and history to “what I was feeling, what I was experiencing.”
As Sevetri was mourning the loss of her mother and having her mind expanded by Dr. Moore, she became a leader in the LSU community. With a total absence of ego in her voice, she explained that she saw her service less as “leadership” and more as “doing what needed to be done.” As she crossed into Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, she was Historian, then Vice President, and then President in her senior year. Flashing one of her brightest smiles, Sevetri gave a shout-out to Vice President Kamala Harris, a fellow Alpha Kappa Alpha sister.
Sevetri’s drive, heart, and focused approach to getting things done led to her devoting herself to serving others. “I came into Student Support Services on the opposite end trying to figure out how I get resources . . . and, over time, I became a mentor. I remember thinking ‘I wish I could have had mentors like this, all of my life.’ . . . I would meet friends whose parents had very successful careers, and I would oftentimes feel like I started late, like I’m trying to catch up. So I thought, in a lot of my mentor roles: how can I help someone else, particularly someone from my demographic, for my background, to be successful in college.” She reflected on now-Dr. D’Jalon Bell, who is thriving with a family of her own, and EJ Milton, who has worked with the Obama Foundation, as just two among many mentees she still cares about deeply.
As a Louisiana native, Sevetri poured herself into her community in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: “We had 20 people in our little apartment who had been displaced from New Orleans and other places. We were at the stadium, and we were helping those who had been displaced, who were living there, when they tried to kick them out because football season was starting, we started a petition to protest it.”
As Sevetri reflected on standing ready to help others, her grandmother came to mind: “I carry loose dollars with me, I always have some type of cash on me. . . . I just remember my grandmother when we came in to play or when she knew I had something coming up, she would say ‘come here, come here.’ And she would give me a couple of dollars, she’d put it in my hand and I’d close my fist really tight over it, and to this day I keep loose dollars to tip people or to give to kids or when I see my cousins, and so those are some things that are so reflective of how I grew up.”
Sevetri has taken the same community-focused approach to build two successful businesses over the last decade. In 2009, she started her first business Solid Ground Innovations, a strategic communications and management firm with a social innovation division called SGI Cares. She recalled, “I attended a Black Enterprise conference in Ohio and I met a woman [Nicole Parker] who was on the stage telling her story and how she broke into government contracting. . . . I was inspired by this Black woman . . . who literally went from working as a single mother, in her mother’s basement, to get her company off the ground, to landing a $75 million government contract that changed her entire trajectory.” SGI was soon selected for a multimillion dollar government contract that allowed the company to scale.
As the company began to grow, Sevetri reflected, “I started thinking about how technology was disrupting our space . . . we’re in Louisiana, and so there are not a lot of tech companies, [but I decided to] create something that’s disruptive and utilize technology to productize some of the services that we were offering to these nonprofits that we were working with.” That company became what is now Resilia, a software platform serving both nonprofits, to increase capacity, and their funders, to deploy money and scale impact. Though Sevetri felt the absence of tech connectivity in Louisiana, a connection presented itself from her friend Anthony Kimble, a prominent Louisiana businessman and Stanford graduate, who connected her to software engineer Ismail Maiyegun. Sevetri and Ismail met in California and sketched out wireframes and specifications for what ultimately became Resilia, and Sevetri then returned to Louisiana to raise capital and build a team.
Sevetri shared some of the challenges of her fundraising: “I was able to raise my first $400,000 to begin to bring on our earliest customers, then from there, I stepped away from SGI to focus on Resilia and went out to try to raise this $2 million seed round, which was very difficult for me to raise and probably the hardest round that I had to raise. It really showed me the importance of relationships, particularly relationships in tech. To be able to raise capital as a Black woman when less than 1% of Black women receive capital, and I was in the South, and I was not technical and was a solo founder, you know I had all the ‘ands’ attached to my name, but we got [the money] raised. And ultimately, I have raised now close to $11 million in venture capital and have opened up offices for Resilia.”
Sevetri’s book Resilient: How to Overcome Anything and Build a Million Dollar Business With or Without Capital will be released April 6 by a national publisher, Wiley. Sevetri described the book as, “my personal experience in building first Solid Ground Innovations, my bootstrapped company, [and then] my experience of creating a startup and raising capital and my journey, and so not only a ‘if I can do this, you can too, particularly coming from where I came from,’ but it’s also in many ways a how-to guide of how I went about actually doing it.”
As Sevetri’s resilience has helped her build businesses, she underscored the importance of bringing others along with her: “It’s been significant to get how far I have, but I always think about how far I still have left to go and how many people I can help along the way, and pull with me, particularly a founder in my position. We have to as we climb — we can’t say ‘oh, when I make it I’m going to turn around and help all these people.’ So we have this added weight and pressure to lift as we climb along the way, which means our climb is so much heavier than an average individual who doesn’t have to carry so much weight on their shoulders as they’re also trying to rise.”
Ultimately, Sevetri wants to honor her parents as she builds this powerful legacy. “I often say that how you deal with disappointments will determine so much in your life, and I think the disappointment of losing my parents at an early age, definitely was very impactful on my life and I also think that it’s been additional fuel to my fire in order to continue rising, and to continue to leave a legacy, and not just for myself, but also for my mother. . . Even in death she continues to give me life, and that’s the same for my father, and I think about ways that I can continue to not only make them proud but also just stay aligned to the foundation and heart of what my family taught me.”
Sevetri honors her roots through her extraordinary business successes, fidelity to her family’s musical traditions, and hosting family gatherings in her new home’s open kitchen. I could see the footsteps of her childhood walks with her mother when she responded to fans on social media asking about her birthday wishes: “For those asking about gifts, if you feel so inclined to please donate to my Mama’s endowment fund. I set it up last year to fund scholarships for kids like me going to LSU . . . more funds will allow for more scholarships to kids that came from places like me!”
I’m grateful that Sevetri gave me the opportunity to celebrate her story, and I look forward to her continued ascent.
To hear my conversation with Sevetri, follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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