1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity (Part 1)

Heather Hiles is the Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity and a pioneering entrepreneur in the Black community. Heather also has deep experience in financing Black entrepreneurs, as well as on the education side to close knowledge gaps at scale.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you acquainted with our audience. Tell us about you and the tracks you have traveled to get to where you are today. Tell us about what you’re working on at Imminent. What is your investment focus?

Heather Hiles: We don’t have nearly enough time to get to all my adventures today. I’ll try to summarize a couple of them. I was born and raised in LA. I was raised by a single mom who set a model for me that if I set my mind to something and work really hard, I can achieve it. At the same time, she provided me with a ton of freedom to experiment and tinker.

I was born an entrepreneur, probably a social entrepreneur. Everything that I do is to solve what I think is a really important big problem. I found myself attending UC Berkeley. Initially, I was recruited to play basketball. I turned down the scholarship. I worked my way through college. Two things impressed upon me. One was, there are lots of opportunity gaps in the world. I became very passionate about closing opportunity gaps. I learned that I could make a difference if I put the effort in.

I also got the computing and technology bug. I was stunned by the scale of impact one can have through technology. It’s definitely one of the toolkits that I’ve used. I’ve created a couple of non-profits in the past. I do have an MBA in Finance from Yale. One of my toolkits is finance. In the first non-profit I built, I used learning technology to help build hard skills with women who were formerly on welfare. I helped 11,000 women on welfare get hired to living wage jobs.

I then built a FinTech that would help working poor people achieve and obtain their first assets whether home ownership or education. We have over 30,000 San Franciscans acquiring their first assets. Then I realized I wanted to build a for-profit tech company. After running a consulting business for a decade, I launched my first company in 2012. It was called PathBright. I sold it at the end of 2015.

I had the whole experience from conceiving the idea in my head, to doing the research, to figuring out why I wanted to build these cloud-based digital portfolios, and then going from an app to building enterprise software and selling into college. I’ve had all those experiences from A-Z.

From 2012 to 2018, I was the black woman who raised the most venture capital. It was sad and embarrassing to talk about it back then. While $12 million was a lot of money, it still was a drop in the bucket compared to what my white male counterparts were doing in Silicon Valley. To this day, only 1% of venture-backed founders are black. Something like 0.03% of venture-backed founders is black women in the US. We have really bad stats. It was so heartbreaking.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity
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