I have built and invested in many successful companies, and I want to help you build your successful company.

I started The Budget Fashionista in 2004, one of the first women-led online media companies, and grew it to $1.3M in annual revenue. In 2013 I led the sale myself, a 7-figure exit and one of the first acquisitions of a startup led by a Black woman. Before that, I earned a Master of Public Health from Yale, which is where I learned to study a problem before trying to solve it.

Then I built digitalundivided, growing it from nothing to $5.6M in annual revenue with a team of more than forty. There I led ProjectDiane, the research that put a number on something everybody felt but nobody had measured: Black women founders were receiving less than 1% of venture capital. That work brought a Heinz Award for the Economy, a White House Champion of Change honor, an appointment to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship under the Obama administration, and an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke.

In 2020 I founded Genius Guild, the Chicago venture firm I lead as Managing General Partner. I raised more than $10M and have invested in over 100 companies, and the fund is outperforming funds of the same vintage by 60%. At the height of the pandemic I started The Doonie Fund, named for my grandmother, and put $250K in micro-investments directly into the hands of Black women entrepreneurs.

In 2022 Portfolio published Build the Damn Thing, with a foreword by Guy Kawasaki. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller and hit number one on Amazon in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Forbes put me on its Top 50 Women in Tech list, Inc. called me one of the most influential women in tech, and I give more than twenty keynotes a year at places like Google, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Harvard, Stanford, and JPMorgan Chase. BUILD is where all of it goes to work for you.