2019-03-01 Money

MARCH 2019 MONEY.COM (^13)
together 34 investors-in-training
for a two-week workshop. She had
a scholarship, some crowdfunded
cash, and a two-week stay lined up
at an Airbnb—but no plan after
that. So she slept on the floor at the
San Francisco airport for months
while attending conferences,
setting up meetings with potential
investors, chatting with founders,
and sharing her insights on her
Medium blog.
But she still had to make some
cash, so she picked up a gig as a
tour and production manager for
up-and-coming R&B singer Janine,
a job she has worked off and on
throughout the years. While on a
red-eye flight to New York, her blog
post titled “Dear White Venture
Capitalists”—which criticized how
those VCs viewed investing in
I DON’T HAVE ANY
SORT OF STARRY EYES
FOR MONEY.”
—Hamilton on growing up poor and learning how to “tame”
her finances
founders who were female, of color,
and/or LGBTQ—went viral. Her
emails started blowing up. A few
months later, Hamilton got her
first check from angel investor
Susan Kimberlin, and Backstage
Capital was born.
INVESTING IN THE UNDERINVESTED
In a little over three years,
Backstage Capital has backed
more than 100 founders with a
wide range of companies, from
tech to food to entertainment to
toys to fashion. (Hamilton couldn’t
launched her firm. “It’s going to take a long time, and
it’s going to be really, really difficult. So whatever it is,
I really have to mean it.”
For years before she launched Backstage Capital,
Hamilton had spent many long hours at Barnes &
Noble reading tech and investing books because she
couldn’t afford to buy them. She taught herself about
investing and venture capital by watching YouTube
and Vimeo videos. She moved several times, from
outside Houston to outside Austin, to be closer to the
burgeoning tech scene, and then moved to Silicon
Valley. The more she learned, the more she set her
sights on correcting what she saw as an injustice:
An incredibly small percentage of venture capital
funding goes to women, people of color, and LGBTQ
entrepreneurs.
“I couldn’t stomach the idea of women having to
sit around and not get asked to the party and not get
asked to be part of the next 20 to 50 years. It just
didn’t make any sense to me,” Hamilton says. “I also
thought whoever does do this stands to make a lot
of money.”
Now Backstage Capital has surpassed Hamilton’s
own expectations. Last May, she announced her firm
would launch a $36 million fund specifically for black
female startup founders. That same month, Backstage
Capital had officially invested in 100 founders since
its launch—with checks ranging from $25,000 to
$100,000 each—a goal Hamilton wasn’t expecting to
achieve until 2020.
HOW HAMILTON MADE MONEY WORK FOR HER
As a venture capitalist, Hamilton’s job hinges on
securing millions of dollars in funding and choosing
where to invest it. But Hamilton says she never liked
money. Growing up, she “hated it with a passion.”
“It made my mom cry all the time,” she says. “It
kept me from eating sometimes.” Money is unreliable
and can be devastating, she says. But she never
conceded to it.
“I hate it, so I need to tame it,” Hamilton says. “I
need to have power over it. I don’t have any sort of
starry eyes for money. You can be broke and poor, and
then with work or winning the lottery, you can attain
it. It’s just about what you maintain.”
Even when she played Monopoly at 5 years old,
Hamilton says she was willing to take risks to find
financial empowerment. She bought a one-way ticket
from Texas to California in 2015 to attend a pilot
program at Stanford University, which brought