Walk Upright
A Profile of Rashaun Williams
I met Rashaun Williams earlier this year through legendary talent leader Dolly Singh after she recruited him to our portfolio company Heliogen. In his early 40s, Rashaun already has a storied career, from Goldman Sachs to building businesses in Africa to co-founding Queensbridge Ventures with hip hop legend Nas. He has devoted himself to creating generational wealth for others by teaching financial literacy to youth and adults and building venture capital funds managing hundreds of millions of dollars for dozens of star athletes and musicians.
But Dolly’s glowing introduction did not prepare me for Rashaun’s impact, which left me awestruck in a way I rarely feel with celebrities, athletes, or politicians. As I reflected on why I felt so moved, I realized one of my own stories about myself has been that I have not known another Black man with my particular range of life experience: a grade school friend sold drugs on Alcatraz Avenue, and I officiated a friend’s wedding atop Aspen Mountain; a middle school friend carried a gun in fear of gangs, and stars from my childhood, Gary Payton and E-40, are now my friends and co-investors. The upright march of Rashaun’s journey has charged across the wide breadth of life he’s traversed, driving forward relentlessly to contribute even more — and as I listened to him, I felt my own convictions deepen.
As the next profile in my series Celebrating Black Founders and Investors, I’m honored to share the story of a role model who resonates so deeply with some of my own experiences, and whose story is as inspirational as it is unforgettable.
“I hope your audience is ready for this real conversation.”
“When I was between 11 and 12, three main things happened in my life at the same time. The first one was [that] my mom left my father. . . .
“During [the next] two years, the electricity got turned off, the gas got turned off, we had no food. Remember Chicago winter is negative 20 degrees . . . . We had to run extension cords from next door, the orange, heavy-duty extension cords that can withstand cold temperatures, and then we had to boil water on top of the kerosene heater in order to bathe in a cold bathroom. I remember sleeping in multiple pairs of pants and jeans and sweaters and coats and blankets. So that experience was very traumatizing in itself, and I started to wonder why stuff like this happened to young 12-year-olds like me, what did I do to deserve something like this, right, why do any kids deserve to live like this?”
Brutal Chicago winters seem mild compared to the pain of Rashaun’s early years. The devastation of losing four of his six best childhood friends to violence; being locked up for three days in an adult facility at age 12 because of a playground argument and being unable to contact his mother because they did not have a home phone — these are among a range of difficult memories from his younger years that could shake even the most steadfast faith.
And so, one Sunday in the church where his grandfather pastored, 12-year-old Rashaun sat exhausted in a pew and directed his thoughts to God, when the second big thing happened: “I said, can you prove to me that you exist because I don’t see it. These people out here getting shot and killed every day, we’re starving, we’re freezing . . . prove to me that you actually exist because I just don’t see it. . . . I’m in church on a completely sunny day and not one cloud in the sky . . . I’m sitting there depressed, sad, going through all these things, and I said, ‘If you really exist, do something as simple as make it rain.’ So I closed my eyes, dozed off, woke up, and it was dark outside and it was raining.”
“So now, God had my attention.”
The third, more earthly, sign arrived shortly thereafter when Mr. John Mosby became principal at William H. Ryder Elementary School on 87th and Wallace. Ryder was struggling to serve a student body with serious needs: fights, STDs, and seventh graders with children of their own were common. Rashaun found himself lashing out — he wore the burdens of home life heavily, even while he found relief in school’s luxuries: heat and food.
Against that backdrop, “We got an entirely new principal and teachers, kind of like that movie Lean on Me. . . . And this guy’s name was Mr. Mosby, he came in and man, I thought he was a tyrant at first, but he was the first person who looked me right in my eye and said, ‘Number one, I’m not afraid of you. Number two, I think you’re really smart and you will do well. And number three, I want you to take your street smarts and combine it with your book smarts, and I will help you.’”
Mr. Mosby’s support came with conditions: get serious about school, or no more sports. “He convinced me that someone cared and that he would give me the resources. . . . he was my first mentor . . . he said, ‘If I do this favor for you, don’t disappoint me.’”
On the strength of that favor, Rashaun was able to transfer to an honors program at a better school and escape the fate of so many others in his neighborhood who did not complete high school. He also got a fresh start at home with his mom in a new apartment, in a different neighborhood.
The safety of Rashaun’s new environment provided space for growth: Rashaun read his first book in Mr. Robert Johnson’s 8th grade class. He also had his first exposure to Black history. Looking further back unlocked Rashaun’s ability to look further forward. As in Alex Haley’s Roots, Rashaun described the powerful impact of becoming aware of pre-slavery Black history — he recalled that it was as if he were an aspiring basketball player who suddenly learned Michael Jordan was his father.
“[Mr. Johnson] had a whole shelf of books, and they were all about Black history, and for the first time I learned that we actually had civilizations before we came over here. We actually didn’t come over here slaves; we came over as scientists and doctors, as entrepreneurs. We were doing things there. . . . I figured out that our ancestors weren’t half-naked and hanging on trees and desperate for someone to save them like portrayed, that we had civilization, that we were creators and inventors, and so I just found that out for the first time, because we had no connection to our roots at all. [Descendants of slaves are] the only people probably on the planet who don’t have a country, don’t have a language, don’t have a religion.”
Fortified with his new experiences, Rashaun thrived in high school, never getting less than an A, excelling in three sports, and holding three jobs. Even this much-improved environment, however, contained obstacles that a conventional teenager would find daunting. One Friday his junior year, a teacher told him, “If you want to go to college, you have to show up tomorrow and take this test called the ACT.” He replied, “What is the ACT?”, having never heard of it. He arrived the next day for the test at a nearby high school, which had one of the best football teams in the state, to find a football game in progress just outside the window, among other challenges: “Number one, none of us had ever sat down for three hours to do anything; number two, half the people are looking out the window at the football game, because you hear the band, you hear the crowd, and number three, no one had even prepared for it.” Even in these shocking circumstances, Rashaun’s performance made him a competitive college applicant and earned him praise as a brilliant student.
His senior year, Rashaun was profiled in a school newspaper article titled Rashaun Displays Versatility. In the article, Rashaun said, “I aim to do the best at whatever I do,” and he declared his aim to be a business executive or hospital administrator. The article said that he “puts forth his best efforts in giving to others” and “he enjoys bringing out people’s ability to debate.” At first I was surprised when Rashaun described himself as an arrogant high school student, but he explained: “[I was] arrogant because I thought we deserved better. I wanted better for myself, and I wanted better for everyone else.” He had fire in his voice when he described demanding the school expand the security perimeter outside its doors into the neighborhood so kids were not attacked on their way out, or complaining that his baseball coach did not hold practices and his computer teacher did not know how to use a computer.
At just 16, Rashaun closed that high school interview stating that his inspiration comes from God: “I’m a child of God; I represent him. If I was a second-class person, I’d be worshipping a second-class God, but I’m not because my God is number one.” The article ended, “With such a perspective on life, who could expect less of him.”
Rashaun was ready to contribute and knew where he would grow into a leader. He drove his 1982 Ford Mustang 714 miles from Chicago to Atlanta on October 17, 1996 — the first day Morehouse College was accepting applications for early admission.
“The only school I wanted to go to was the only school in the world that had in its mission statement it wanted to create leaders for the Black community. . . . Morehouse produced Martin Luther King . . . [and sends] more Black men to Ivy League grad schools, medical schools, law schools than any other school in the world. Morehouse was the only application . . . so I drove down there overnight in my old Mustang, with no muffler by the way. I had a bar of soap in a box that every time the fumes came up to the middle of the car, I would inhale the bar so that the fumes wouldn’t overtake me.” Once Rashaun arrived, he found a bathroom to brush his hair and teeth, then went to find the Director of Admissions, Andre Pattillo.
Mr. Pattillo knew Rashaun well, as he had called the Admissions Office frequently leading up to his drive South. The Director signed Rashaun’s admissions paperwork on the spot. Rashaun described his vivid memory of smearing the ink just to make sure the signature was real. He noted that the acceptance letter hangs framed on one of the walls in his Atlanta home (which provided a regal backdrop for our interview).
The Morehouse road trip combined the book smarts and street smarts that had earned praise from Mr. Mosby a few years earlier. As Rashaun began his journey home, the radiator of his old Mustang gave out. As he sat in a gas station parking lot realizing that the $40 cash he was carrying could not cover the cost of gas home and repair of a radiator, another angel was delivered to him.
“I see a drug addict right in front of the spot, and he looks at me looking at my engine. . . . Now I’m used to being around drug addicts — I had loved ones who were addicts — I grew up in that environment, so I wasn’t afraid to talk to a drug addict.” With the stranger’s help, Rashaun found a junkyard that had a $14 Mustang radiator, got it installed for free, drove back to Chicago, and spent the rest of his senior year applying to over 100 scholarships. He earned over $100,000 in scholarship money, including a scholarship for Black women that he convinced the panel to invest in him, given his goals for helping his community.
Rashaun does not remember the process of reading the handbook that listed all the scholarships or typing out all the applications, nor does he remember much of the 1,428 mile journey in his 1982 Mustang with no muffler. He said, “I felt like it was a divine process . . . there’s a greater force out here, trying to give me good things if I just focus.” He also knew, “I was so traumatized to get out of my neighborhood, I ran toward what I thought was a saving grace. Someone told me if you get an education, you can make it out. Some people get paralyzed in that community and they just get stuck, and some people fall victim to that community and start to perpetuate the things that are happening there, so that’s really what sent me on the trajectory where others stayed put or fell victim.”
Perhaps the trauma Rashaun experienced is why much of his first 18 years feel blurry to him, other than the specific letters and articles he has saved. He also makes a point to stay in touch with his two childhood best friends who were not killed, Quentin and Mark, who help him stay connected to his community and his childhood. He reflected, “They always tell my family now, ‘Oh yeah we knew Rashaun was going to be doing what he’s doing, he told us. He told us exactly what he was going to do and how.’”
Often Morehouse Men speak of their college experience with a reverence more common among alumni of service academies than liberal arts colleges. With a sudden flood of emotion, Rashaun explained that “the first assignment that I got was to look up my roots and figure out what country in Africa my family came from.” The soulful, emotional breakthrough of connecting to his roots purged the pain he had earlier attached to the lack of ancestral connection felt by many descendants of slaves. (This moment in the interview was emotional for me as well, having last year sourced my paternal pre-slavery lineage to Nigeria and still processing the realization that my father passed without knowing our origins beyond the East Texas slavery of our immediate ancestors.)
The evolutionary impact of Rashaun’s Morehouse experience extended beyond this first exercise and included his new peer group. He reflected on the stark contrast between his high school, where students were made fun of for being smart — and where 500 freshmen started and 200 graduated, 40 of whom were boys — and his Morehouse experience as one of 800 talented Black men from across the country. Rashaun reflected that at Morehouse, “it’s not only guys from communities like [mine], but it’s guys who grew up in wealthy homes, guys who grew up all around the world, but they’re all Black. And I’ve never seen such a diversity of experiences from Black people because I came from a very poor area where everyone was the same.”
Rashaun thought back to freshman orientation, where luminaries including Desmond Tutu poured inspiration into the young men and charged them with a heavy responsibility as they rose: “To carry seven people with us on our left and seven people on our right from our communities.” That charge established deep bonds with friends who became like brothers “for a lot of us who didn’t have families and friends got killed. . . . My friend network now is all Black men who are married with children, who are at the top of their professions, and whatever industry they’re in because of Morehouse. And I would have never met them [without Morehouse].”
While Rashaun did not have traditional financial support or care packages, his full scholarship allowed him to use other funds to participate in the Morehouse investing club. He also landed an internship with Goldman Sachs. He learned that Goldman’s insider trading rules required that he move his investment accounts there upon starting his job, and the timing of this compliance resulted in cashing out right before the market crash of 2001. Rather than being wiped out, he was able to buy his first home and a nice car at the age of 21.
Rashaun continued to accelerate: his investment banking career blossomed at Goldman, where he asked to be placed in Chicago. There, he poured himself into his community, establishing a financial literacy initiative, the Kemet Institute. His work with financial literacy reflects his philosophy that he often shares with young people: “If you won’t do it for free, don’t do it for a fee. . . . If you want to do something, just start doing it now and becoming good at it and build an expertise in it and enjoy it. Get really good at it before you go to people asking for a paycheck for that thing, or raising money for that thing.”
As he established his nonprofit, he noticed two things at Goldman: not only was he the only Black person, he was also the only person who did not come from a family of bankers or lawyers. Rashaun initially sought to fit in, but quickly discovered that his pretending to be someone else would not lead him to success. He realized he should never bow to pressure to be someone different: “I stopped trying to be like him and started to be myself, and I started to do much better . . . And a lot of people fall victim to that, they lose themselves in those environments. Now I was still able to accept the culture that I came into, but still retained some of myself, and that’s when I started doing well.”
Reginald Lewis’ seminal book Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? inspired Rashaun to seek opportunities to learn the leveraged buyout market, and Morehouse connections through the Jackie Robinson Foundation provided an apprenticeship at which he learned deal structuring alongside his banking work. After moving from Goldman to Wachovia, rising from analyst (skipping the four years at associate level) to Wachovia’s then-youngest-ever Vice President at 23 years old, Rashaun met Robert Sirleaf, son of then-Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Liberia was rebuilding after a decade of civil war, and Robert and Rashaun saw opportunities to invest there, launching a private equity fund focused on infrastructure development.
The investment in the Motherland turned out to be the ultimate hedge: when the 2008 financial crisis hit, devastating Wachovia and many other banks, Rashaun and Robert’s West Africa fund was flourishing, and after a short stint at Deutsche Bank in addition to his other projects, Rashaun retired from Wall Street.
Inspired by the TV Show Entourage, Rashaun moved to LA, where he lived in the Hollywood Hills and had Snoop Dogg attend the first party he hosted. He expanded his financial literacy work to include athletes and entertainers, and paired that contribution with a new career expansion into venture capital. “And I finally hit the jackpot. . . . I’m on a tour of Silicon Valley with these athletes and we’re going to Andreessen Horowitz, we’re going to Kleiner Perkins, we’re meeting with Jawbone, we’re meeting with all these different companies, and I’ll never forget: we’re in a top 10 VC’s office, and they see entertainers and athletes that are in there with me. And they see us and they reach out to the athletes and they’re like ‘Hey if you guys want to invest with us, let us know.’” Later Rashaun and others set up Queensbridge Ventures, named for the New York public housing projects, and capitalized it with $10 million.
Psalm 84:11’s promise that “no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly” materialized just as the rain did on that day in church. Rashaun has leaned on this scripture for decades as he focuses on the output of his life — another mantra that keeps him centered and grounded is “Give everything and expect nothing.” Rashaun’s upright walk through that VC’s office, guiding his financial literacy students, was the moment when so many years of contributing to his community while asking nothing in return monetized: that $10 million was spread across timely investments in dozens of companies, including Coinbase, Robinhood, PillPack, Capser, Ring, Dropbox, and Lyft. And not only did that fund flourish, but Rashaun later set up more than one hundred other funds for influential Black athletes and musicians and several of his own institutional funds, an ecosystem with hundreds of millions under management.
As Rashaun’s work in financial literacy and wealth building continues to grow, he is taking on even more challenges in this chapter of his career. After spending years building his own empire, he has recently accepted a role on the leadership team of Prime Movers Lab company Heliogen led by seven-time unicorn founder Bill Gross. Rashaun reports that he and Bill share a favorite quote: “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure . . . than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” Or, as he paraphrased: ”So I’d rather try to do big crazy shit and fail at it than do nothing like everyone else because I’m afraid of failing.”
As Rashaun looks to the future, having made millions for himself and his partners, and having taught over a thousand adults and children, athletes and entertainers, how to develop generational wealth, he is focused on Jim Collins’ concept of the magnificence of the “AND.” He refuses to be limited by any “OR,” but is excited to continue to be a teacher, and an investor, and a builder . . . and also a father, as he awaits the birth of his daughter and enjoys time with his two-year-old son, whose love he describes as “the first time I think I’ve ever been loved by someone with no conditions on that love. . . Regardless of how funny I am, how much money I have, how successful I am, I’m just his favorite, and that’s a level of love that I never experienced, and now I’m able to pour into him.”
I’m grateful Rashaun gave me the opportunity to celebrate his story, and I feel deeply honored to call him a new friend and also a new business partner at Heliogen.
To hear my conversation with Rashaun, 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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