How life in the hood helped me build a path to wealth and prosperity
I believe that everyone has a gift. When we are supported to exercise our gifts by a community, we become more deeply vested in protecting that community. When we are vested we are also more willing to make sacrifices for that community, which include doing the essential work to maintain it. This fundamental belief has been rooted in me from childhood experiences. As a leader in tech and AI, I see a powerful opportunity to act on those deeply held beliefs by investing in the future of web3 and its intersection with wellness, wisdom, wealth building and world shaping.
Some of the deepest ingrained memories I have as a child are of people sharing their gifted talents with others. One of those powerful memories is of my brother’s friend Roosevelt. I was seven years old and drawing while sitting on our living room floor.
“Can I draw with you, pleeeease?” Roosevelt asked, making his normally big and booming voice into an intentionally light and gentle voice that sounded out of place coming from his oversized bodybuilding physique.
With my 7-year-old hands I gave him a piece of paper and a pencil and watched him quickly cover every inch of the page with beautifully shaded paisley, butterflies, birds, and flowers. I got lost in the beautifully drawn detail of the page. I was never easy to impress as a kid, I was actually quite stoic, but I remember feeling surprise and amazement. I looked at the drawing on the page, then to his face and back over and over, wondering how this huge buff guy with too loud a voice and gap teeth, who looked like he could bench press Andre the Giant, could create such a mesmerizingly beautiful piece of work with nothing more than a pencil and a sheet of paper. I proceeded to ask him many questions about his art, and he answered by telling me all the different types of art he loved to do, from pastel, to ink and beyond, and how he sees it in his head first and then let’s it out onto the paper.
Later, I would learn that the educational system failed Roosevelt in a huge way. He graduated with a high-school diploma without anyone ever detecting that he had dyslexia, or that he hadn’t been taught to read, write, or do arithmetic. As an adult he would come to our house and my mother (who homeschooled my siblings and I), would give him reading, math and crochet lessons. He would improve his reading in between lessons by reading the Bible. Although the school system failed Roosevelt, it was his God given gift and community that saved him and helped him reinvent himself many times.
If you studied at UC Berkeley or spent any time in that area between the 1990s-2010s, then you probably knew Roosevelt as the big black man who made and sold hats, and restored old photos into hand drawn portraits on Shattuck Avenue while talking suicidal college students off the ledge. He inspired and saved lives with his stories, art, hats and heart. Roosevelt was a gifted artist — who also swept and washed down the street every day before setting up his street corner shop. He set an example by taking great care of the people in the community surrounding him. He was vested in his community.
It’s extremely difficult to nurture your talent when you live in a world where you are undervalued, and grossly underestimated, when you are a poor person of color or ethnic minority like Roosevelt. But watching Roosevelt persevere led me to believe in the power of cultivating people. The way my mother spent time teaching him to read and knit and how he mastered the art so well that he could parlay it into making a living on the streets. As I grew older I began to orient myself to look for the gifts in the people around me and see the best in them the way my mother modeled.
My gift has always been technology. I started trading tech services for money in the 1990s when I was 16 years old: Coding websites, designing graphics, fixing networks, and building computers. I was an early adopter of PayPal, eBay, Amazon and Google even though it was still a time of uncertainty about the future of the internet and ecommerce. Business owners were wary of spending money to establish a web presence for their business, and I was frequently asked “Is this internet thing going to stick around?”
My answer was always an emphatic “Yes!” because it was a democratizing innovation, making it possible for people who didn’t see themselves as “entrepreneurs” to do business by selling their passions online and making it possible for mom and pop shops to scale to reach more customers.
The internet made it so it no longer matters where you are in the world anymore. Love beanie babies? Buy and sell them online. Love fanfiction? Buy and sell it online. Love natural body oils? Buy and sell it online. We’ve seen this accelerate with cloud computing and mobile, data, and AI/automation. And now we’ve seen it leap frog with the pandemic forcing those final industry laggards to digitize. It’s official. THE WORLD IS DIGITAL. And in that time many millionaires and billionaires have been made by those who invested early.
In the early days of my career I didn’t have money to invest, so I used my time and the hustle I learned from surviving the streets of Oakland. I got in early and often to help others who were applying their gifts in tech and entrepreneurship to solve interesting problems. I did this online in forums and irc chat rooms both learning, and giving back by offering solutions to various technical challenges.
I did this in person at computer labs at Laney College and at the companies where I worked. I took a diversified approach to my time — and was careful not to put too much energy into a single basket by exploring innovation across streaming media, sms, social networking, ecommerce, enterprise apps, SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
When I turned 25, I started making my first capital investments in the stock market to get a piece of those companies where I was previously only a user giving advice, and driving adoption with my network. Google, Netflix, Ebay, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce. I bought them all. I basically bought stocks instead of fancy bags and shoes.
In fact, if I wanted Nikes, I bought Nike stock. If I ate organic food I bought Whole Foods stock. I became really good at connecting the dots between companies driving the consumer experiences that I actively consumed and valued, and my own investment portfolio. This personal behavior-driven investment thesis is a great way to get started with small amounts of capital when you don’t have enough assets to make a financial advisor worthwhile.
The personal behavior-driven investment thesis enables us to focus on understanding what’s doing well in your area of passion, paying close attention to what you believe has staying power as opposed to hot trends and why.
Love podcasts? Buy stock in companies enabling podcasters and marketing in that arena. I always say investing can start with less than the cost of a cup of Starbucks coffee. In the ghetto I learned early on, if you stand still too long you become someone’s target. In fact standing still too long in the ghetto as a young woman will get you snatched and pulled in somebody’s unmarked van. Likewise, I apply that thinking to my money. If it’s not growing, then it’s declining. In the same vein, it doesn’t matter how small your investments are, it just matters that you overcome the well established inertia to do nothing and invest in something.
I didn’t win on all my investments. I had some tough losses and lessons mostly around buying into hot trends that I had nothing to do with, coming in too late or following the advice of charlatans — don’t do anything because someone else says it’s a good idea — have your own conviction behind your investments. Once I learned to separate the hope from the hype, my investments returned multiples that made me proud to say I’m on track to leave a fortune of love AND valuable assets to my children and I don’t worry about building wealth anymore. I just do it. I’ve confidently established myself as a wealth builder in my generation. No longer do I see myself as a poor kid from the hood. I now see myself as a poor kid from the hood who by the grace of God paved a path to wealth and prosperity.
But building wealth alone is not enough. Establishing wealth AND keeping it across 3 three generations (or more) are two different things. We all want to leave our kids with a better future whether we do that through Hoop, Hollywood, Healthcare, Hacking or something else. I’ve proven myself with the former, but it’s my children and their children who will answer the latter — quite possibly after I’m dead and gone. And that’s why I’m writing this blog. To leave a legacy of intellectual property to my future generations and share my lessons with others who can benefit and use it to drive material change in their own life and the world.
That being said, I (like many smart people before me) have learned that what builds fortunes for one generation often isn’t what builds fortunes in the next. Each generation has its own wealth building opportunities. Right now we are at a pivotal moment of generational shift that is breaking ground on new types of wealth. The wealth of the 4th industrial revolution will be made on the backs of web3 enabled, ai/automation powered Selfpreneurs instead of the big businesses we know of today.
I’m excited by emerging technologies like DApps, Smart Contracts, Digital Assets, Next Generation Search, Unified Identity, Personal Data Mining and empowering the Roosevelts of today to thrive and monetize their gifts online far beyond the street corners. But it won’t just happen on its own. These innovators need capital invested in their visions in order to make it a reality. Therefore it’s up to us to visualize the future, and support the innovations that will help us get there. And let’s not forget to make the capital investments along the way. More on that in a future installment.
Thank you for reading and allowing me to share my thoughts. I’ll continue to distill my insights for innovators, investors and instigators right here through blogs and videos to share what I’m seeing on this web3 journey. Subscribe to my newsletter, follow, and stay connected so you don’t miss any updates.
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