What began as unfamiliar territory for Haley Bryant has become her mission – to democratize access to venture capital through her work at Hustle Fund.
The Boston native comes from a family of entrepreneurs. Her father worked at Bank of America in London and later launched an investment business and then a consultancy. She was inspired to bet on herself throughout her career by observing her father’s blueprint as well as that of other family members. Her mother owns a public policy consultancy, and her sister is a leader of Sick Sad Girlz Club, a community of more than 30,000 women with chronic illness.
Bryant initially planned to become a journalist and attended the University of Virginia, earning a degree in media studies and communications by 2010. However, she was always drawn to technology, she says, which led her to Apple and its retail stores after college. She onboarded as an associate and, within four years, rose to senior manager, leading stores that were earning millions in revenue.
“I was really drawn in by people, passion, and this idea that we wore on our credo cards every day in the stores at Apple, [‘our soul is our people’]. It was a very people-first and then customer-first habitat, which I was really inspired by,” she told AFROTECH™.”I loved tech, but I realized, after a few years of getting to advance through the stores and run a $60 million store, $100 million store, there was so much to learn there.”
Bryant had already immersed herself in the startup world by launching Apple’s small business program in the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia region), which supported companies including WeddingWire, Cava, and Sweetgreen, Bryant notes. Her curiosity guided her next career move, working at a productivity startup as a customer success manager, and then a virtual event startup, initially as a tech support implementation lead – both companies were eventually acquired. Later she joined an agency called Animalz, helping it scale from $2 million in revenue to $14 million and from a team of 20 to 150 over three years. She gained experience managing a profit-and-loss statement and leading distributed teams as she rose from director of customer operations to chief operating officer.
In summer 2020, while homeschooling her son as a single mother in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social reckoning around George Floyd’s murder, Bryant says she had a “come to Jesus moment,” which was informed by Animalz founder Walter Chen.
“He wrote an email,something to the effect of ‘the world is not a fair place,but in a startup,you can build the world that you wanna see.’ That really inspired me, and it actually helped me form my thesis for angel investing,” she said. “it was around the same time that a coworker, Jan-Erik Asplund, decided to leave Animalz to found a company called Sacra, a private market research company. And I had worked with him for years and just saw his potential and asked if I could give him some money to support his new venture.
“So that was my first accidental angel investment,” she added. “It’s almost like wanting to invest in AFROTECH™ and then getting to learn about so much in tech, business, [and] entrepreneurship. It was a very similar sort of investment,which gave me access to a community of i
Worth a look