Early Thursday morning, excited Afrotech attendees walked into the conference room to see something. Hannah Bronfman, a prominent angel investor with over 1 million followers on social media, is in conversation with Morgan DeBaun, founder and CEO of Blavity.
Bronfman is a wellness content creator, author, and investor in more than 70 companies, including beauty brands Topicals and Sienna Naturals. She is best known for founding the health, beauty and fitness marketplace HBFIT, which closed last year after eight years in business.
She told the Afrotech audience that she has learned a lot during her time as a founder. She shared her journey and the insights she learned along the way. For example, she learned how to deal with a rift between her co-founders, which led to HBFIT's closure. She spoke about the importance of community and urged the audience to always rely on their networks, whether they're looking for advice or just a connection.
She began relying on her network to advise and mentor founders, which led to her writing angel checks to their companies. Soon, she began growing her investment empire both through angel investing and receiving equity in the brands she collaborates with as a content creator. The audience for this Afrotech panel was filled with young black professionals and was open only to VIP All Access, Media, and Top Executives, all interested in learning more. Less than 5% of investors are Black, and despite ongoing efforts to make the industry more transparent and accessible to the next generation, the industry remains opaque.
Bronfman and DeBaun also talked about that, telling the audience that more people could become investors if they wanted to. Increasing the representation of Black investors would at least lead to the identification of more successful Black founders, experts say. This is one reason Bronfman decided to focus his investments on overlooked founders who receive dismal amounts of venture funding. The requirements to become an accredited investor are high: you must have an income of at least $200,000 or a net worth of $1 million. But for this particular audience of executives working in Big Tech, money wasn't an issue. What they needed was some guidance to get them started.
She told them to start conversations with people in their networks, pointing out that many people around them are probably investors, but they just aren't bringing them into the deal. “Be comfortable investing only the amount you can afford to lose,” she told the audience.
Bronfman also offers networking, mentorship and more hands-on relationships than institutional investors. She doesn't mind cold emails and is a fan of casual conversations that aren't necessarily focused on money.
“There's a lot of power in reaching out to someone and saying, 'Hey, your career is something I admire and I'd love to have the opportunity to talk to you,'” she said.
On the other hand, she wants to be more than an angel investor in the future and says she is ready to become an institutional investor.
For the past few years, she has been procuring special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to participate in large-scale testing rounds, and in doing so, she has supported the now unicorn Kind Body and emergency contraceptive company Julie. was completed. She had been thinking about starting her own fund for a while, but saw the backlash over P&G's acquisition of Mierre, a black-owned hair brand that consumers accused of selling out its black founders to white companies. Bronfman said he thought so for the first time. I was ready to take the next step.
“We don't own anything [companies] This means there are essentially no black-owned conglomerates that black brands can exit from. “Where is our black LVMH?”
Her goal is to build one someday. But first, she says, she'll look into raising money, perhaps focusing on Series A, with the goal of writing a check in the $1 million to $3 million range. “And maybe one day I'll join that holding company.”