October 25, 2025 • 11 mins
Barry Givens is managing partner at Collab Capital.
Follow Will Lucas on Instagram: @willlucas
Follow Black Tech Green Money: @blacktechgreenmoney, @btgmpodcast
Learn more at AfroTech.com
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, there are things that you've learned in going
to raise money. And what you know, I think some
start up ownders may not understand is just like they're
pitching to you, you're pitching to funders also, like you're
both pitching somebody. And so when you when you go
to you get with Jewel, you make the call, hey,
(00:21):
Jewel or Jewel cause you're like, yo, let's let's build
a fund. Or I call my dog and I'm like, yo, man,
let's let's go build a fund. We need to get
some capital out here. I see opportunity. What happens from there?
Like what is the process like from you making the
call to your hony being like let's start a VC
firm of a VC fund to the point to where
(00:41):
you're in a meeting, Like what's the in between?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Like, Oh, there's a lot of a lot of decision making.
I mean, picking your partner is the most important thing, right,
Like who is that phone call to? That's an extremely
important decision that you have to make because you're basically
to be working with this person for a decade.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
You know, most fun.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Lives are ten years, and so when you are starting
a fund, it's funny because I'll go back to a
little bit of my experience when I was building Mensur
at the tail end of Monsieur one of the reasons
and with Jewel with part pick, we had really I'll
speak just to me because Jewel's not here to tell
(01:25):
her story, But I had a very bad experience at
the exit of my company. There were a lot of
things that happened between me and my investors that I
thought could have been handled better, that I thought had
I been in the other seat, that I would have
handled things a lot differently, that was more beneficial, and
that had a little bit more heart towards the founder
(01:47):
that had put their blood, sweat and tears into this product.
And so the first thing when I when I called
Jewel to to have this first meeting and say, hey,
is this something you that you're interested in? You have
to have a y like we went into this deeply
rooted in the problem because me and Jewel had just
(02:08):
experienced this issue and we wanted to go out and
solve it. And investors see that whether you're starting a
company or you're starting a fund, they can see how
passionate you are about said problem. And so calling Jewel,
We're having this meeting, and it was immediate. I know
Jewel for over ten years, right, so I knew she
(02:29):
was passionate about the problem as well.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
But then it goes into what does this thing look like?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
And we don't have enough time to talk about all
the different iterations and the things that we tried, the
things we didn't try. But one of the things that
we did very early on is that we found a champion,
a gentleman up in New York named Malcolm Robinson who
was an OG in the investor space. He's back many funds.
(02:58):
He runs a a coaching platform, education platform for future
venture capitalists called BVCC, and we brought him in very
early on when our documents were rough, when we didn't
know what the hell we were doing, and you need
someone like that that's going to be real with you
and look you in the eye and say you have
no clue what you're doing, but let me bring you
(03:18):
in and tell you what you should be doing.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And that totally changed how.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Fast we were able to build Collab and get it
off the ground. And then the last I know, we
talked about just between the first meeting, I'm going to
a little further in the first meeting. But the other
thing that I see fund managers doing now that I
think is super important. I'd be remiss if I did
not mention this is people are just jumping off the cliff,
(03:45):
and I think they look at people like JUELI and
I and they say, oh, well, Julian Barry jumped in
and just started a fund, and that is not That
could be no further away from the truth. We did
jump in with the idea of starting the fund. But
the part of the the process that people maybe didn't
put two and two together is that we did not
(04:06):
have great track records. Jewel had a couple of angel investments.
I had an Angel investment, but we did not have long,
deep track records to be able to put in front
of investors.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
And so when Jewel.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Took exactly the only thing we had was our entrepreneurial experience.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
And so.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
People with people didn't see was that we actually had
a meeting before Jewel took the job at Google for startups.
We had a meeting before I took the job as
managing director of tech Stars as strategic things for us
to do to be able to get to the end product,
which was a fund. And so We had already started
(04:45):
collab when we took those roles, but we knew we
needed to do a little more to beef up our
resumes to successfully raise the first fund.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
And so there were.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
A lot of things that we learned along the way,
like track records, like you know how to put to
together a proper l pack and talk about that's the
advisory committee for your limited partners.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
There were a lot of things we just had no
clue about.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That we learned along that year, year and a half
before Clad became a real product in the market, and
we had to make those decisions along the way very strategically,
And I think that's why I love podcasts. A lot
of times people don't hear this full part of the
story that you have to go learn and you have
to be able to fund yourself. And so if you
(05:31):
jump off that cliff and you don't have the proper
funding to take care of you, and if you have
a family to feed yourself, it's a long road to
get to that first close to be able if you
ever get to a first close, to be able to
get a very tiny management fee to be able to
take care of yourself. And so all of these things
we had to put into our equation in order to
(05:54):
get the fund off the ground. And that started from
that very first early conversation of do we even want
to do this?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it is so much there. I want to kind
of translate what I'm what I believe I heard you
say for people who, because I've had people come to
me like, yo, I want to start a fund that
they're asking me to start. They just kind of talk
about they want to start one in their community. And
what I'm hearing you say is it not like, Hey,
we want to start a fund. Let's see who we
know at this teacher's retirement fund. Let's call it in
(06:23):
and see and if they'll give us money, or let's
go to an abisco and see if they'll give us money.
That's not what you're saying. What you're saying is we went,
we made some connections, and we learned.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So this this is this book. If that statement reminds
me of when you talked about Malcolm Robinson.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
This book to it's.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Called Who Not How, and it was like, you know,
you could have just when done a bunch of work,
but you realize there's a person I need to connect
with to show me the game, and so can you
talk to the people who believe that they have a record.
You've been an entrepreneur, you.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Talked about that.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I want you to go a level deeper though, so on. Yeah,
there was a difference between me and being an entrepreneur
and me being somebody who can write checks. Can you
just talk a little bit more about that in there?
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yes, I mean understanding numbers and being an investor.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
There are a lot of people on Wall Street that
understand numbers really well. They're great with spreadsheets, they've been
in finance for twenty years. But if you haven't operated,
particularly at the early stages of a company, there are
things that you don't know need to happen, that need
(07:35):
to happen. And if you think back to the traditional
days of venture capital when it first started, it wasn't
started by folks off of Wall Street that were investment bankers.
It was started by entrepreneurs that it had success, that
then said, let's use this money to go find other
people that look like us, unfortunately, but more importantly, that
(07:59):
think like us, that have the ability to go find
the next great idea and build the next great widget.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
That'll shifting industry.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
And so the heart of venture capital has always been
with operators going to find other operators, and what it's
transformed to is that now has become a finance company
right like now this it's been kind of indoctrinated into
the traditional worlds of finance, and a lot of it
is traditional finance. We're looking at your income statements and
(08:30):
your balance sheet, so we're doing all the traditional finance things.
But when you're investing in, particularly in early stage companies,
there's something you're looking for in the founder to know
whether or not they have what it takes to make
it through the trenches of being an early stage founder.
There are things that you're looking for and how quickly
(08:52):
they're able to operate and iterate, how do they handle challenges,
you know, are they in a a space in their
life where this is a great idea for them to
do it right this moment, Like, there are things as
operators that we have seen, and the other thing is
an operator, you're around a lot of other operators. So
(09:12):
I'm not just leaning into my experience, I'm leaning into
your experience. I'm leaning into all the founders that were
building things when we were in the trenches right ten
years ago, because we talked to each other and we
built relationships, and so I'm not just leaning on to
my world experiences, but I'm thinking about all the things
that my peers went through, and now I'm able to
take all of that experience and hopefully help boost the
(09:34):
founders that we invest in so that they can skip
over some of those early steps because I'm seeing around corners.
And a great example of this we made an investment
into a company Blackmail. Founder has a doctor, one of
the smartest people I've ever met, NASA rocket scientists, and
I told him early on, I said, this is the
(09:57):
type of innovation that by the time you get to
Series A, somebody's going to try to remove you as
CEO and get you out of the way because there's
a lot of value in this and as you continue
to bring on investors, this is what is going to happen.
I thought it was going to be years down the line.
He called me like six months later and he was like, man,
(10:18):
you will never guess what happened. He's going out to
raise a bridge between a pre seed and a seed,
right he has.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Didn't even get into the.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Seed, and he's like, they back channeled with my co
founder who was a white woman and tried to get
her basic to turn on him, to say she wants
to be the CEO and to move him out of
the way. And luckily they handled it great. We got
through it. But being able to see around those corners,
(10:47):
and particularly as a black founder, we're able to bring
those experiences and make being a black founder, even though
a lot of times just look as a detriment. We're
able to take our experiences and turn it into a
positive by beating them at their own game.
You know, there are things that you've learned in going
to raise money. And what you know, I think some
start up ownders may not understand is just like they're
pitching to you, you're pitching to funders also, like you're
both pitching somebody. And so when you when you go
to you get with Jewel, you make the call, hey,
(00:21):
Jewel or Jewel cause you're like, yo, let's let's build
a fund. Or I call my dog and I'm like, yo, man,
let's let's go build a fund. We need to get
some capital out here. I see opportunity. What happens from there?
Like what is the process like from you making the
call to your hony being like let's start a VC
firm of a VC fund to the point to where
(00:41):
you're in a meeting, Like what's the in between?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Like, Oh, there's a lot of a lot of decision making.
I mean, picking your partner is the most important thing, right,
Like who is that phone call to? That's an extremely
important decision that you have to make because you're basically
to be working with this person for a decade.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
You know, most fun.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Lives are ten years, and so when you are starting
a fund, it's funny because I'll go back to a
little bit of my experience when I was building Mensur
at the tail end of Monsieur one of the reasons
and with Jewel with part pick, we had really I'll
speak just to me because Jewel's not here to tell
(01:25):
her story, But I had a very bad experience at
the exit of my company. There were a lot of
things that happened between me and my investors that I
thought could have been handled better, that I thought had
I been in the other seat, that I would have
handled things a lot differently, that was more beneficial, and
that had a little bit more heart towards the founder
(01:47):
that had put their blood, sweat and tears into this product.
And so the first thing when I when I called
Jewel to to have this first meeting and say, hey,
is this something you that you're interested in? You have
to have a y like we went into this deeply
rooted in the problem because me and Jewel had just
(02:08):
experienced this issue and we wanted to go out and
solve it. And investors see that whether you're starting a
company or you're starting a fund, they can see how
passionate you are about said problem. And so calling Jewel,
We're having this meeting, and it was immediate. I know
Jewel for over ten years, right, so I knew she
(02:29):
was passionate about the problem as well.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
But then it goes into what does this thing look like?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
And we don't have enough time to talk about all
the different iterations and the things that we tried, the
things we didn't try. But one of the things that
we did very early on is that we found a champion,
a gentleman up in New York named Malcolm Robinson who
was an OG in the investor space. He's back many funds.
(02:58):
He runs a a coaching platform, education platform for future
venture capitalists called BVCC, and we brought him in very
early on when our documents were rough, when we didn't
know what the hell we were doing, and you need
someone like that that's going to be real with you
and look you in the eye and say you have
no clue what you're doing, but let me bring you
(03:18):
in and tell you what you should be doing.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And that totally changed how.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Fast we were able to build Collab and get it
off the ground. And then the last I know, we
talked about just between the first meeting, I'm going to
a little further in the first meeting. But the other
thing that I see fund managers doing now that I
think is super important. I'd be remiss if I did
not mention this is people are just jumping off the cliff,
(03:45):
and I think they look at people like JUELI and
I and they say, oh, well, Julian Barry jumped in
and just started a fund, and that is not That
could be no further away from the truth. We did
jump in with the idea of starting the fund. But
the part of the the process that people maybe didn't
put two and two together is that we did not
(04:06):
have great track records. Jewel had a couple of angel investments.
I had an Angel investment, but we did not have long,
deep track records to be able to put in front
of investors.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
And so when Jewel.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Took exactly the only thing we had was our entrepreneurial experience.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
And so.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
People with people didn't see was that we actually had
a meeting before Jewel took the job at Google for startups.
We had a meeting before I took the job as
managing director of tech Stars as strategic things for us
to do to be able to get to the end product,
which was a fund. And so We had already started
(04:45):
collab when we took those roles, but we knew we
needed to do a little more to beef up our
resumes to successfully raise the first fund.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
And so there were.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
A lot of things that we learned along the way,
like track records, like you know how to put to
together a proper l pack and talk about that's the
advisory committee for your limited partners.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
There were a lot of things we just had no
clue about.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That we learned along that year, year and a half
before Clad became a real product in the market, and
we had to make those decisions along the way very strategically,
And I think that's why I love podcasts. A lot
of times people don't hear this full part of the
story that you have to go learn and you have
to be able to fund yourself. And so if you
(05:31):
jump off that cliff and you don't have the proper
funding to take care of you, and if you have
a family to feed yourself, it's a long road to
get to that first close to be able if you
ever get to a first close, to be able to
get a very tiny management fee to be able to
take care of yourself. And so all of these things
we had to put into our equation in order to
(05:54):
get the fund off the ground. And that started from
that very first early conversation of do we even want
to do this?
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, it is so much there. I want to kind
of translate what I'm what I believe I heard you
say for people who, because I've had people come to
me like, yo, I want to start a fund that
they're asking me to start. They just kind of talk
about they want to start one in their community. And
what I'm hearing you say is it not like, Hey,
we want to start a fund. Let's see who we
know at this teacher's retirement fund. Let's call it in
(06:23):
and see and if they'll give us money, or let's
go to an abisco and see if they'll give us money.
That's not what you're saying. What you're saying is we went,
we made some connections, and we learned.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So this this is this book. If that statement reminds
me of when you talked about Malcolm Robinson.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
This book to it's.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Called Who Not How, and it was like, you know,
you could have just when done a bunch of work,
but you realize there's a person I need to connect
with to show me the game, and so can you
talk to the people who believe that they have a record.
You've been an entrepreneur, you.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Talked about that.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I want you to go a level deeper though, so on. Yeah,
there was a difference between me and being an entrepreneur
and me being somebody who can write checks. Can you
just talk a little bit more about that in there?
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Yes, I mean understanding numbers and being an investor.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
There are a lot of people on Wall Street that
understand numbers really well. They're great with spreadsheets, they've been
in finance for twenty years. But if you haven't operated,
particularly at the early stages of a company, there are
things that you don't know need to happen, that need
(07:35):
to happen. And if you think back to the traditional
days of venture capital when it first started, it wasn't
started by folks off of Wall Street that were investment bankers.
It was started by entrepreneurs that it had success, that
then said, let's use this money to go find other
people that look like us, unfortunately, but more importantly, that
(07:59):
think like us, that have the ability to go find
the next great idea and build the next great widget.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
That'll shifting industry.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
And so the heart of venture capital has always been
with operators going to find other operators, and what it's
transformed to is that now has become a finance company
right like now this it's been kind of indoctrinated into
the traditional worlds of finance, and a lot of it
is traditional finance. We're looking at your income statements and
(08:30):
your balance sheet, so we're doing all the traditional finance things.
But when you're investing in, particularly in early stage companies,
there's something you're looking for in the founder to know
whether or not they have what it takes to make
it through the trenches of being an early stage founder.
There are things that you're looking for and how quickly
(08:52):
they're able to operate and iterate, how do they handle challenges,
you know, are they in a a space in their
life where this is a great idea for them to
do it right this moment, Like, there are things as
operators that we have seen, and the other thing is
an operator, you're around a lot of other operators. So
(09:12):
I'm not just leaning into my experience, I'm leaning into
your experience. I'm leaning into all the founders that were
building things when we were in the trenches right ten
years ago, because we talked to each other and we
built relationships, and so I'm not just leaning on to
my world experiences, but I'm thinking about all the things
that my peers went through, and now I'm able to
take all of that experience and hopefully help boost the
(09:34):
founders that we invest in so that they can skip
over some of those early steps because I'm seeing around corners.
And a great example of this we made an investment
into a company Blackmail. Founder has a doctor, one of
the smartest people I've ever met, NASA rocket scientists, and
I told him early on, I said, this is the
(09:57):
type of innovation that by the time you get to
Series A, somebody's going to try to remove you as
CEO and get you out of the way because there's
a lot of value in this and as you continue
to bring on investors, this is what is going to happen.
I thought it was going to be years down the line.
He called me like six months later and he was like, man,
(10:18):
you will never guess what happened. He's going out to
raise a bridge between a pre seed and a seed,
right he has.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Didn't even get into the.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Seed, and he's like, they back channeled with my co
founder who was a white woman and tried to get
her basic to turn on him, to say she wants
to be the CEO and to move him out of
the way. And luckily they handled it great. We got
through it. But being able to see around those corners,
(10:47):
and particularly as a black founder, we're able to bring
those experiences and make being a black founder, even though
a lot of times just look as a detriment. We're
able to take our experiences and turn it into a
positive by beating them at their own game.
Host
Will Lucas
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!