How a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund Is Putting More Black Dollars in Tech Trapital

Megan Holston-Alexander is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund. It’s the first VC fund that raised money exclusively from Black leaders — from entertainment to sports to business. The fund co-invests with a16z’s other funds and has raised more than $60 million across its three funds to date.

The overarching purpose of CLF is to create generational wealth opportunities for Black communities. It’s a two-pronged approach. The first is getting Black dollars directly on the cap tables of high-potential startup companies. And the second is creating a pipeline for more Black talent at early-stage companies. 

Megan joined me on the show on the heels of hosting the first-ever Cultural Leadership Summit and announcing CLF III before then. Here’s everything we covered during our conversation:

[2:39] Takeaways from the Cultural Leadership Summit
[5:19] Building despite economic uncertainties 
[7:36] High-worth individuals also affected by macro economy 
[9:05] How has the Cultural Leadership Fund evolved?
[14:54] Difference between entertainment and executive LP’s
[17:16] Web3’s knowledge imbalance  
[19:16] Megan’s interest in DAO’s
[20:58] Will CLF’s investment model change?
[22:42] How CLF used relationships and trust-building to scale its operation 
[28:35] Megan’s vetting process with LP’s
[36:02] How VC industry at-large can create more opportunities for black founders and talent 
[39:15] Has the Bay Area lost its monopoly on tech? 
[44:59] What CLF is focusing on in 2023

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Host: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.co

Guests: Megan Holston-Alexander, @meghalexander
 
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TRANSCRIPTION
[00:00:00] Megan Holston Alexander: What we hadn't considered on the executive side is, while the athletes and our kind of entertainers can partner on different things or, like, help them go into new markets, when it came down to, like, core operations or how you should run on your board, or how to think about hiring X, Y, and Z, our black executives, like, hold that information, like, in the palm of their hands. These are people who've been, you know, operators for 20 or 30 years, and so they brought kind of an additional level of skill and kind of insight to bolster what our other LPs on the more kind of athlete or entertainment side were doing.  
[00:00:40] Dan Runcie: Hey, welcome to The Trapital podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from executives in music, media, entertainment, and more, who are taking hip-hop culture to the next level. 
[00:01:01] Dan Runcie: Today's guest is Megan Holston Alexander. She's a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, currently leading its Cultural Leadership Fund. And to date, this fund has raised over 60 million, invested in over 300 Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies, and has brought over a hundred black leaders into this space. I'm talking to Megan right after the Cultural Leadership Fund hosted its first-ever in-person summit. It was a pleasure to attend that summit myself and meet so many of the people that are friends of the fund, LPs of the fund, and really make it what it is. So this conversation, we talked a little bit about what it was like bringing that event together, especially after the pandemic. We also talked about how events like that fit within the fund's overall strategy and how that strategy has e