Early Thursday morning, excited AfroTech attendees shuffled into a conference room to see one thing: Hannah Bronfman, a noted angel investor who has more than 1 million followers on social media, in conversation with Blavity founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun.
Bronfman is a wellness content creator, an author, and an investor in more than 70 companies, including the beauty brands Topicals and Sienna Naturals. She is best known for also founding the health, beauty, and fitness marketplace HBFIT, which closed last year after eight years in business.
She told the audience at AfroTech that she learned a lot during her time as a founder; she shared her journey and the insights that she learned along the way. For example, she learned how to handle co-founder fallouts, which is what led to the closing of HBFIT. She spoke about the importance of community and urged the audience to always lean on their networks — whether for advice or simply to connect.
Leaning on her network is how she found herself advising and mentoring founders, which led to writing angel checks to their companies. Soon she started growing an investment empire, both from angel investing as well as from receiving equity in brands she would work with as a content creator. The audience at this AfroTech panel, filled with young Black professionals and was only open to VIP all access, media, and top executives, was interested to learn more. Less than 5% of investors are Black and the industry still comes across as opaque, even as efforts continue to make it more transparent and accessible for the next generation.
Bronfman and DeBaun spoke about that, too, telling the room that more people could be investors if they wanted to. An increase in Black investor representation will lead to at least the identification of more successful Black founders, experts say. This is one reason why Bronfman decided to focus her investment on overlooked founders who receive dismal and dwindling amounts of venture funding. The requirements to be an accredited investor are high, needing to make more than $200,000 or have a $1 million net worth. But the money wasn’t the issue for this particular audience, filled with corporate execs working in Big Tech. What they needed was guidance — a starting point.
She told them to start having conversations with people in their network, noting that many people around them are probably investors but just haven’t included them in any deals. “Only feel comfortable investing the amount you are comfortable losing,” she told the audience.
Bronfman also provides a network, mentoring, and a more hands-on relationship than an institutional investor would. She doesn’t mind cold emails, and is a fan of casual conversations that aren’t always focused on money.
“There is a lot of strength in reaching out to someone and saying, ‘Hey, your career is something I’ve admired, and I’d really love the opportunity to talk to you,’” she said.
Meanwhile, she is looking to become a little bit more than an angel investor in the future: she says she’s ready to become an institutional investor.
For the past few years, she had been raising special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to get in on larger check rounds, which is how she was able to back the now-unicorn Kindbody and the emergency contraceptive company Julie. She’s pondered for some time about launching her own fund, but said it wasn’t until she saw the backlash to P&G’s acquisition of the Black-owned hair brand Mielle, where consumers accused the Black founders of selling out to a white company, that Bronfamn was ready to take the next step.
“We don’t have any holding [companies] for the culture,” she said, meaning there are essentially no Black-owned conglomerates for Black brands to exit to. “Where is our Black LVMH?”
Her goal is to one day build that. But first, she says she’s going to look at raising a fund, perhaps focused on Series A, with the goal to write checks for $1 million to $3 million. “And maybe one day I’ll get to that holding company.”