Henri Pierre-Jacques: How I Founded Harlem Capital; Our $134M Fund | 20VC #901

(music plays) "Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination." Henri, listen, this is such a joy to do. I'm so glad that we had our Twitter interactions first. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me.

Not at all. But I wanna start today with a little bit on you. Tell me, how did you make your way into the wonderful world of venture and how did you come to found Harlem and start that journey from the kitchen table with Jared?

Yeah, I always tell people I kind of bought my way into venture. (laughs) So I, I started out in investment banking at Bank of America, did that for two years, then moved over to a Black-owned private equity firm where Jared and I actually were cube mates. We were working in PE and we basically said, "Hey, like, why don't we do what we're doing at work for ourselves? We're obviously making decent money." Uh, and so we started angel investing, right? So that was 2015, uh, in Jared's living room, in, in Harlem. We all live in Harlem, which is where the name came from. Started angel investing, did that for two and a half years. Uh, Jared and I were both fortunate enough to get into Harvard Business School where we were roommates, and we started recruiting at HBS for, for venture and private equity roles. And most of our angel investing were into diverse, uh, diverse founders, right? Even though that wasn't our mission, our firm was Black-owned. And so, to be frank, you know, going from Bank of America where I was one of 45, uh, one of only 45 in a group of Black people in a group of 45, uh, working at a Black-owned firm, I didn't want to work for a firm that didn't have Black partners, which was 99% of all VC funds. And so I turned to Jared, my roommate in the kitchen and said, "Hey, like why don't we use our angel track record and instead of recruiting, uh, raise a fund?" (laughs) Not fully knowing exactly what that meant. Uh, and so yeah, our summer of July, uh, July of 2018, between first and second year of business school, we formally launched Fund One. Ended up raising $12.5 million, uh, our second year of business school, and then ended up closing on $40 million, uh, November of '19, six months after we graduated. And the pure thesis was just to back, uh, women and diverse founders at the early stage.

Listen, we're gonna get into the fundraise. Uh, I do just wanna ask, I, obviously I have my funds now, but I look at my angel track, I was a shit angel, Henri. (laughs) Like, really crap. Um, how did your mindset change moving from angel investor to now institutional manager, do you think?

It was pretty scary at first, right? Our first check out of Fund One was $250,000. Our average check as an angel was 28, 25. So like we had 10X the check size and we were like, that was, that was a lot of money. Um, and then, you know, by the time we finished Fund One, 'cause we started deploying, we started deploying capital while we were raising, we were writing 750K million dollar checks. And so I always tell people like, "As you scale your AUM, like your, your comfort level for discomfort, uh, increases." And so like now on Fund Two, you know, our average check size is 2 million, and so I've basically gone from 25K to 2 million in three years. And like, it feels like it'd be really scary, but it actually gets more and more easy as you, you do it for longer periods of time. Uh, and so at first it definitely was scary, um, but I think over time I, I really adjusted to it and it's been a, a great learning experience.