Brian Hollins (left) and Aaron Samuels first met in 2016 and began preparing to launch what became Collide Capital in 2019.
Collide CapitalWhen Brian Hollins and Aaron Samuels dial into Zoom on a Friday in October, they’re headed to their fifth conference of the week in Miami. “I’ve been in a different city every week for the last 10 weeks,” Samuels says, “And I’ll be in a different city every week for the next 10.”
For the duo, who themselves first met at a conference six years ago, flying around the world is part of the hustle to get their fledgling VC firm Collide Capital off the ground. It was key, for one, in helping Collide close its debut VC fund, a $66 million vehicle that Hollins and Samuels announced Thursday. The fund boasts a list of investors uncommon for such a fledgling VC firm: It’s anchored by the University of California’s endowment, and also received backing from Citi and Bank of America. Tech giants Amazon, Alphabet and Twitter put in greater than 20% of the total fund.
The travel circuit is crucial, too, in how Collide hopes to differentiate itself from what PitchBook counts to be more than 1,000 first-time funds that have cropped up in the last five years. Hollins and Samuels, who are both Black, are hoping to propagate a new tech ecosystem rooted in diversity (the name “Collide” comes from the concept of intersectionality between different communities and identities). Of the 40 startups Collide has funded so far, 80% are led by Black, Latino or female founders. In their travels, the pair searches for startups to fund and ways to assist the companies in its portfolio, like identifying potential hires or customers.
“Given the amount of capital in the market, investors can no longer afford to just show up in the founder ecosystems and expect to build genuine connections with entrepreneurs—they need to build strong ties and firm roots in the ecosystem,” Samuels says. And while the concept of “community” has become somewhat of a cliche among VC firms marketing themselves to prospective startup founders, Hollins and Samuels have more real world experience than most.
Samuels was raised in a Black and Jewish household to parents who were both clinical psychologists. “That basically meant I spent every day of my childhood talking about my feelings,” he says. It also led him into poetry. By 15, he had performed spoken word at the Apollo Theater, and in his early 20s he went on tours opening for hip hop legends Mos Def and Talib Kweli. He then moved into the business world—as a consultant at Bain, a product manager at security startup TeleSign and an MBA student at Stanford—to gain skills to “scale the power of storytelling,” he says. That plan came to fruition as Blavity, a startup he cofounded that hosts a digital media website and conferences for the Black community (Samuels made the 30 Under 30 list in Media for Blavity in 2016).
At the first iteration of Blavity’s Afrotech conference in 2016, Samuels met Hollins, a Goldman Sachs banker who was helping to build the firm’s Silicon Valley presence. Hollins helped source Goldman Sachs’ investment in fintech company Plaid and deployed $100 million from the balance sheet into enterprise software companies. In 2018, he also became a founding board member of the Black venture investor community BLCK VC. By 2019, the duo’s exposure to VC and community building led them to begin brainstorming how to build a fund together.
They set out to raise $40 million in January and ended up closing out the oversubscribed first fund by June—a relatively short amount of time for an emerging VC fund, especially in an downturning market. That quickness wouldn’t have been possible, Hollins says, without the two years of time they spent beforehand to build a $1.3 million “fund zero” in hopes of demonstrating a track record. Of the 34 investments into the test fund, 10 went on to raise again at a higher valuation, while three companies exited through acquisitions. “It gave us the belief earlier this year that we had enough proof we should be running an institutional vehicle,” Hollins says.
Beyond diversity, the founders also envision the “collision” of networks to extend to the business level, between small startups and tech giants. Its Big Tech backers are the product of yearslong relationships—for example, Alphabet’s Google Ventures was an early investor in Blavity, while Amazon has maintained a partnership with the AfroTech conference. Having those companies on board will give founders access to resources and partnerships, but also the potential to be acquired by these larger companies, Hollins says.
With the new fund, Collide intends to find deals in which a more established firm leads the funding round, while it writes the second largest check. “It sets up founders to win when there’s a few folks around the table instead of just one,” Samuels says. “This creates the expansion into the networks of all those different organizations.” The fund will make investments of about $750,000 into startups at the seed stage, the founders say. For them, having trudged through time last year writing $25,000 checks to try to prove that they deserved a seat at the investment table, it’s a massive leap. “In the past we’ve been [helping founders] with resources,” Hollins says. “Now it’s going to be with resources and capital.”
