Why I Think Ebony Brown Will Help Transform Venture Capital
Matt Greenfield, Managing Partner
It gives me profound satisfaction to announce that Ebony Brown is now a partner at Rethink Education. Ebony is a remarkable human being. I and the rest of the Rethink community are continually learning from her and becoming better people as well as better nurturers of entrepreneurial talent because of her.
Ebony came to us extraordinarily qualified to make impactful, transformative education investments. After she graduated from Howard University, she worked at Google for a year and then returned to her hometown, Detroit, to help build a network of charter schools. When she went to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, planning to find a non-profit management job, she discovered impact investing and joined a student-run fund. She then took a job with seed investor Village Capital, where, after several promotions, she ended up managing US investing across all of their investment sectors.
Ebony notices things about people. She frequently sees a hidden talent or a hidden character defect or a hidden sorrow that I had missed. She is empathetic but also a clear-eyed judge of character and ability. She also has an exceptionally sensitive, finely-tuned moral compass. I have always worked very hard to maintain the authenticity of Rethink Education’s social impact commitment, but since Ebony’s arrival three years ago we have gotten a lot better at zeroing in on our more radical and transformative entrepreneurial projects.
Entrepreneurs love Ebony, trust her, and rely on her. Ebony excels at creating a safe zone where entrepreneurs can be vulnerable and genuinely collaborative. But Ebony does more than empathize, coach, and strategize with entrepreneurs: she delivers transformational wins for them. At AllHere, a company focused on using behavioral AI to reduce truancy and improve student engagement in K12 schools, Ebony has built a truly amazing board. Ebony’s most recent win for AllHere was to recruit Janice Jackson, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, one of very few black women ever to lead one of the nation’s three largest districts. Ebony got introductions to several former superintendents of large districts, secured a meeting with Janice, and delivered an impassioned and ultimately successful pitch. Ebony also recruited the remarkable Jeff Livingston to the board of AllHere. Jeff is a successful entrepreneur, a senior McGraw Hill Education executive, and now a consultant to organizations including the Gates Foundation. Four of the five board members of AllHere are black, and two of those black board members, including CEO Joanna Smith, are women. Ebony also helped Joanna Smith secure a spot as the featured entrepreneur in the 2020 Forbes Education 30 Under 30 list. The Forbes profile in turn led to inbound interest from venture capitalists, multiple term sheets, and a round led by Andrew Parker of Spero Ventures, who at his previous firm led the A round at Carta.
The trust and respect Ebony has earned from entrepreneurs as well as investors are paying compounding dividends. With ChargerHelp, a company that trains people to repair electric car charging stations and employs them at $60K per year, Ebony won a six-way competition to lead a SAFE note. Similarly, Ebony persuaded Anthill, a company with a talent management and engagement tool for deskless workers, to partner with us and turn down term sheets from several of the top generalist seed funds. This is what Muriel Clauson, CEO of Anthill, has to say about Ebony:
“Ebony has zero ego or pretense and just wants to see things work. She continually points us to the big picture of the business and is great at filtering to what really deserves our focus as a leadership team. She has a keen sense of stage-of-business and has prompted us to lean in or let go appropriately. That alone has saved us countless time and resources — which is critical for any startup. Ebony immediately understood our mission. Her enthusiasm for that mission comes through on every call and she brings a ton of unique ideas on how to make it happen. It’s a joy to see a zoom call with Ebony on the calendar.”
Ebony is also a builder of coalitions and institutions. At Rethink Education, she created Rethink Equity, a five million dollar pool drawn from our most recent fund that invests with seed-stage BIPOC entrepreneurs. Ebony has also played a critical role in making the entire venture capital ecosystem more diverse and more inclusive. She helped trade association Impact Capital Managers create a fellowship to bring talent from under-represented groups into the venture industry. Ebony also spearheaded an initiative that resulted in Southern New Hampshire University, where I am a trustee, allocating eleven million dollars to venture funds run by BIPOC managers.
When I helped start Rethink Education in 2012, we were four white men who had made angel investments together. Our mission was and is to lift up the vulnerable and to give them the opportunity to thrive in their work, their civic engagement, and their family lives. We knew that our mission required us to become a more diverse and more inclusive organization. I am thrilled that Ebony is now a partner, and that our team includes senior associate Amanda Beaudoin and external investment committee member Tammy Wincup, president of Protocol and former COO of our portfolio company EverFi. I am proud that three of the four managing partners of our sister funds Rethink Food and Rethink Impact are women. And I am proud of the wonderful 23-company portfolio we have assembled for our latest fund, which includes six companies run by black CEOs, three of them women, as well as a company run by a Latino CEO. I try to maintain a healthy humility about the amount of work I and the firm still need to do on our implicit biases and our inclusiveness. But we are picking up speed.
Read more about Ebony’s promotion here: https://rethink.vc/news/rethink-education-announces-ebony-browns-promotion-to-partner/.
