Kai Bond’s venture fund aims to spread the wealth among African American and Latino startup founders.
By Becky Monk
When Microsoft alumnus Kai Bond launched his first startup, he struggled.
Starting a company is hard, even in the best circumstances. But being an African American entrepreneur is even more difficult. Advisors and coaches are few and far between. Early capital is even more elusive. Less than 1 percent of venture capital dollars flows to African American or Latino founders.
Kai is changing that as the head of Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund in New York City. Catalyst is a $20 million venture capital fund focused solely on supporting African American and Latino founders, and Kai has made it his mission to spread the wealth.
“I was trying to raise money as an African American male in the 2000s, and I was struggling through (starting) three companies and trying to figure out who could give me dollars,” the Connecticut native said.
“There weren’t the resources that are available today. I wanted to make sure I could give back.” — Kai Bond
|
Giving back means helping the Catalyst make four to six strategic seed-stage investments a year that range from $250,000 to $500,000 each. Kai said Catalyst is industry sector agnostic, though partners don’t invest in ad tech, hardware or life sciences. They’ll also invest in companies anywhere in the U.S. and they have made a couple of investments in Africa-based companies.
It also means providing mentorship and support for the founders of the companies in which he invests.
“I’ve been in the position that I’ve learned things the really excruciatingly, hard way — going flat broke, putting myself in debt, maxing out my credit cards, hiring the wrong people. I’ve been through it,” he said. “I’ve been through the hardest of hard with startups, so I act as a resource for those founders.”
His own experiences — and those of his network of friends and fellow entrepreneurs — helps inform the advice and support he provides, whether it’s psychological and emotional support, tactical advice, or fundraising insight.
Kai earned his tech credentials at Microsoft. He came to the Redmond company via the internship program. He attended Wesleyan University and met Microsoft’s Paul Gross, who was a senior vice president of Microsoft Mobile and a Wesleyan alum. The two hit it off.
“I told him I loved mobile,” Kai recalls. “He told me I should work at Microsoft.”
Kai’s fascination with mobile technology came from a trip he took with his mother to her native Botswana in 1996. He saw people using phones to send text messages and listen to music.
“In the U.S. we didn’t even have cross-carrier text messaging,” he said. “Clearly, they figured it out in Botswana. They had no running water and no electricity, but they are carrying around phones. I thought, ‘this is the future.’”
His internships at Microsoft didn’t immediately land him in the middle of the mobile division. The first summer he worked in customer service and customer support inside MSN Internet Access. He returned a second summer and then was hired.
Working with the Windows Mobile team gave him a taste of what he loves today about entrepreneurialism. His team was small; just 25 people doing transformative work in an evolving industry.
“I always had this hankering that I wanted to be on bleeding edge,” he said. And he was, while he was at Microsoft from 1996 to 2001 and at the other companies where he worked immediately after leaving Microsoft.
But after a decade he was ready to do something new. But starting his first company wasn’t exactly intentional.
Fellow video game enthusiasts were exchanging their games at work. Online secondary marketplaces, like TicketHub, were just gaining popularity. Kai and his cofounders thought they could do what they were doing at work on a much larger scale to give gamers a safe online community in which to exchange their games, and the idea for SwitchGames was born.
He said it was a big life decision to take the entrepreneurial path.
A mentor shared some advice about the commitment it takes to be an entrepreneur. Kai shares it with others who are trying to make the choice of continuing to work inside of a company or strike out on their own. If someone is going to spend every waking hour of their day on a startup idea, they have to love the space they are in.
“Entrepreneurship is the true expression of oneself.” — Kai Bond
|
“There’s a 99 percent chance that you’re not going to get that rich. There’s a 90 percent chance you’re not going to be that successful. To work all the hours and put in all the blood, sweat and tears, to the point that you believe in something so much – either in yourself, an idea, a vision, a market – that you’re willing to do this despite all odds. Is that something you’re really ready to do?”
Kai said he was. But it wasn’t easy. He said it took him about seven years to become good as a CEO. He keeps that in mind when he’s looking at the founders of new companies in which he might invest. He’s looking for people who are coachable.
“As a first-time founder, you’re just not that good,” he said. “They may have deep domain expertise. They may have a lot of connections and be the best in their field, but being a great CEO is different than being a great product designer or engineer.”
While founders are putting in their own time to learn how to be a good CEO, they need to surround themselves with good advisory committees and mentors.
After Kai sold his company Pixie, to Samsung’s Smart TV Division in 2014, he got his first taste of being the mentor instead of seeking advice. While working with Samsung, he became the general manager of Samsung Accelerator, working with startups and identifying breakout products. “I was like, “Who wouldn’t want to be mentoring, coaching, and advising founders.”
He then became a mentor with Defy Ventures and Techstars in New York City. Comcast Ventures told him they were starting the Catalyst Fund to specifically fund minority-led startups and asked him to run it. He jumped at the opportunity.
The importance of investing in companies with diverse leadership boards is imperative. Countless studies that show that for companies with a diverse and inclusive founding team, the likelihood of success is exponentially higher. The teams operate more effectively, and the financial gains of the companies are higher.
“When you look at massive divide of institutional wealth, and the wealth gap in the country, when you look at race, it’s just staggering.” — Kai Bond
|
“I think female founders are somewhere around 3 percent in the market. African American and Latino founders are just about 1 percent.”
One of the challenges stems from access to the earliest stages of the venture capital ecosystem — friends and family dollars.
“It’s obvious to anyone who is an African American or Latino founder that that friends and family money is just not available,” Kai said. “Friends and family money — that first $25,000 or $50K that gets you started and gets your proof of concept and a part time salary to pursue your dreams — is only available to a very small number of people.”
He hopes that Catalyst can change that.
He would love to fund a company that grows to the point where it can create an ecosystem of angel investors who are part of the African American and Latino community.
“I would love to make an investment that has an outsized return and creates something that looks like the PayPal Mafia for the African American and Latino community. What becomes the Black PayPal Mafia could change the landscape. That could be the real tipping point.”