Evan Poncelet's Journey to Creating the Black Founders and Funders Network
Photos by Susan Fried
The co-founder and Managing Partner of Dreamward Group, Evan Poncelet, recently joined host Trae Holiday on The Day with Trae. Poncelet appeared on the show to talk about his effort to create a Black Angel network called Black Founders and Funders for investment and economic empowerment.
Poncelet was first introduced to the world of technology as a kid down in Tacoma.
“The CTO [Chief Technology Officer] of the Boys and Girls Club of Pierce County, came into my typing class and asked a bunch of us if we wanted to start a technology club in my high school,” Poncelet said. “We said yes, a group of about five of us, and they had to scroll through the school's pile of old computers to dig through them, take apart the broken computers, and build new ones.”
Those became the first computer labs at the Boys and Girls Club of Pierce County.
“They had us going around setting up email servers back in the 90s,” Poncelet said. “I learned a lot of the fundamentals of computer networks.”
Poncelet graduated during the recession from Gonzaga University, going straight into work with, that that was my area of interest and got into computer and electrical engineering at Gonzaga University, Fluke Networks up in Everett, working on computer networks, but doing more complicated things like shooting laser beams down fiber optic cables, and building some of the first kind of handheld devices with the smart screens that came out for the smartphones.
In 2014 he got his masters from Seattle University heading to Silicon Valley for a time, until he returned to Seattle after the events following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
“That called me back to the community to come work with Africa Town to help work on the William Burroughs Center for Cultural innovation and enterprise,” Poncelet said. “That project came together, we have kids doing amazing things, getting them to associate practical experience in high demand skills into their identity, and we've seen a lot of good results from that.”
Poncelet is now delving into the world of venture capitalist business. Using Black Dot, a culturally attuned community centered on linking entrepreneurs, creatives, and technologists from African descent, Poncelet has seen a community place for lifestyle Black businesses.
“We looked at the finance picture, and there's kind of this general sentiment that it's hard for Black founders to raise money,” Poncelet said.
He wanted to know more — the data he found showed that less than 2% of capital that gets invested from investors of Black or in any businesses gets invested in Black business.
“I needed to go out and find a Black founders that are working on venture scale business to get a better sense of that. But then also looking further into the data and some of the work that Jill Johnson had done with the Austrian Institute for entrepreneurial leadership, discovered that only 1% of angel investors were Black,” Poncelet said.
An angel investor is typically an individual who offers initial funding to startup ventures, often in return for a stake in the company's ownership.
John Sechrest, Managing Director of Angel Investing, started the Seattle Angel conference in 2011.
The conference is a biannual investment program designed to welcome new investors, support startups in securing funding, and foster growth within the Seattle startup community.
At the time Poncelet was still working on completing the renovation for the labor center, he went to the conference just for himself.
“It blew my mind,” Poncelet said. “It was like, okay, so we can actually do collective economics. It's done in a standard structural way, globally, and all we have to do is kind of arrange ourselves to do it, and there are a lot of tax incentives to do it.”
Poncelet initiated a Black Founders and Funders group (BFF) within the Angel Network, aiming to ensure investment for Black founders. The BFF is a newly launched initiative aimed at uplifting Black-founded startups in the Pacific Northwest. He pitched the idea on August 10, garnering support from individuals in venture-scale founding and high-net-worth investors.
“I thought that if we all got together, we could build our own Angel Network to ensure that Black founders got the investment,” Poncelet said. “We've had 22 venture scale, Black founders and pitched our angel network of 12. Angel investors, we wintered it down to 10, in the semifinals. And then now in our finals, we have five.”
The group's upcoming event on June 8 is poised to be a pivotal moment, with five selected founders competing for potential investments ranging from $50,000 to $100,000. Additionally, attendees will have the opportunity to explore exhibitions from five other venture-scale startups.
To look for more events or learn more about BFF go to bffpnw.org.
For more on local business in Seattle, tune into Trae every weekday at 11 a.m. on all Converge Media platforms and The Day With Trae YouTube Channel.
