A Discussion with Eric Collins

Eric Collins is a technology executive and serial entrepreneur. In 2011, President Obama appointed him to the Small Business Administration’s Council on Underserved Communities. In 2018, Eric became part of a prominent group of Black European and US founders of Impact X Capital Partners. In the same year, the Financial Times named him among the UK’s top one hundred Black leaders in technology. Since 2019 he has been voted one of the most influential Black people in Britain on The Power List. Eric has appeared on The BBC, Radio 4, Bloomberg, CNN and Sky News, and has been featured in the Financial Times, Guardian, The Times and Sunday Times. He is the host of UK Channel 4’s award-winning business series The Money Maker.

Patricia Lewis: Thank you for meeting with us. To start, please tell us a little about yourself and the origins of how you became a disruptive visionary?

Eric Collins: Thank you again for letting me have this conversation with you. That's a big question. My parents were young adults of the Civil Rights Movement. Right out of graduate school they proactively decided to move and teach at an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) called Tuskegee University in Alabama. They moved before the Civil Rights Act. They moved before the Voting Rights Act. They actually moved to a place where they had to take a literacy test in order to vote. My mother used to tell me that I was on freedom rides because she was pregnant with me. So it’s that catalytic cauldron that determined my nature.

In my world there were many Black professional people – doctors, lawyers, bankers, restaurant owners, hairdressers, barbers, morticians, people in the armed forces, ministers, educators, pilots, farmers. But I always saw my Dad as a different kind of professional. He eventually left academia, to become an executive at a Swiss chemical company. I grew up going to airports to watch my father fly to Basel, Switzerland for quarterly meetings.

So when I think about the disruptions that I was seeing on a day-to-day basis, the examples of difference that was happening in the sixties and seventies in my own house – it all makes disrupting a comfortable stance to take. I really don't know that I was actually born and raised for anything else other than to be disruptive. And that's a strange thing to say, because I've never thought about this before. But when you ask me that question, that's what came to mind.

Lewis: When did you start exhibiting this disruptive mindset?

Collins: Leaving Greensboro, North Carolina to further my education allowed me to meet people with a broader set of experiences of the world. It was no longer just the American experience, it was now the Pan-Africanism and people of color experience. Through college and law school, the disruptive enabler was consistently surrounding myself with a group of engaged and strong Black people. It was a choice that I made.

I must admit that in law school, I found myself woefully unhappy in my study of the law, and I knew that I made a mistake, because the study of law wasn't really what interested me. But then I discovered an alternative path in the law, which also helped me see that even some missteps can serve as the foundation for something bigger. I discovered that I could do anything with conflict resolution and negotiation: a vast number of opportunities, whether in the public sector or private sector, commercial or government. Law, negotiation and conflict resolution could be my North Star.

Lewis: What was the catalyst that caused you to leave a successful corporate career to start your own venture capital fund?

Collins: Dick Parsons, a Black man, was the CEO and chair of Time Warner, one of the companies I worked for. At that time, I remember being overjoyed to be working for a Black man. I worked in the AOL division. And not just that, I was assigned to a very small wholly-owned software company that was like a tick on a dog – being from the South, a tick on a dog means it was tiny. I didn't think I was being dealt a good hand at the time. In fact, I thought it was a miserable hand, but I said to myself, “Well, I’m here. There must be some opportunity behind this door.”

You need to look behind the door before closing it for good, and so I opened the door, and there were all sorts of possibilities. No one cared about this small company in the organization as long it produced some profit and didn’t make too many demands. The higher ups just thought – let it run on its own. The folks working in this small company were far away from headquarters and the politics there. They were very passionate about the company and could see all sorts of potential upside. I also saw all sorts of personal as well as business opportunities. As a team, we were able to grow relatively rapidly. When I got there, we were five million a year in revenue, and three years later we were approaching seventy million. This is a good example of how I embraced the unexpected, leveraged what I knew, and implemented some great ideas with a strong team.

On a personal level, while at AOL, I had the opportunity to manage offices around the world – I led offices in Korea, China, Japan, Brazil. I was all of a sudden in charge of executing across cultures and moving from the theoretical to the practical in a high stakes environment. It was intoxicating. It was such a great opportunity for me to become the kind of operating executive that I wanted to become. I took risks. Sometimes I made big mistakes, even huge mistakes, but overall the possible outcomes outweighed the mistakes. And so, I was given even more leeway. This is when I realized that there are many interesting and potential opportunities in smaller organizations that are trying to grow.

Lewis: Fast forward – in 2018 you launched Impact X, a venture capital fund investing in under-represented entrepreneurs. This year you launched your book, We Do Not Need Permission: How Black Business Can Change Our World. Can you please discuss how you believe capitalism, and specifically Black businesses, can be a solution that can lead to Black economic empowerment?

Collins: We as Black people have our superheroes. Let's just stipulate right now that we are superheroes in terms of survival skills. And I just don’t limit this to survival – we also have thriving skills. And so when I thought about what is going to make for a faster more permanent result in the fight for social justice given all of the strategies and techniques that we have employed to date, I decided that controlling more capital is the sustainable solution. We have marched, we have sued, we have collaborated, we have argued, we have appeased, all superhuman actions in attempting to ensure that people of color, women, and particularly Black women, remain in a position to be able to make their full contributions to the world. And it is because of the lack of those full contributions and underinvestment in Black businesses, that about one trillion dollars a year is lost to the US economy. Similarly, about seventy five billion is lost in the UK. Now, that's a fact. The thing that is also a fact is that there are many movements that we wish to fund as Black people which are about social justice. When we think about the sustained approach we wish to have – whether we want to see more representative content on television or movies so that we can see ourselves accurately; or we want to be able to build businesses that employ Black women in high level tech focused roles – then we need capital to fund those visions and missions.

Similarly, if we want to ensure voter rights, women's reproductive rights, or eradicate police brutality, we now have to go hat in hand and ask our allies to give us capital to fund what we think needs to be done. And you know what happens in that conversation: people are very willing to have a conversation if you could just sort of adjust your needs a little bit. If we could just soften our demands somewhat, and that's the most benign instance of the compromise. Think about the more malignant elements of this dynamic. When the world gets smacked suddenly with galloping inflation, and our allies don't have time for us. It is not the most important thing right now to think about women's reproductive rights or Black women's pay equity. Now, there are white men who are losing jobs, or whose financial portfolios are being decimated. Suddenly it stops being a conversation about solutions to help Black women who still have those same problems. Instead, it becomes a different conversation about protecting everybody – and that often ends up privileging white men’s problems. And we have very little recourse, because we don't have the capital to actually drive the conversation. So in my book We Don't Need Permission, the reason I am saying that business is the solution is because, in addition to all the things we have done, marching and everything else, we need to add the financial means to make change happen in our timeframe and at our scale.

I bet you woke up this morning and Elon Musk was on the front page of your newspaper. For some reason when an African man has built an organization, it only occupies column inches in most publications, most newscasts. We spend more time talking about Musk than we ever talk about the issues of stop-and-frisk in the UK and the over-policing of Black communities. We do that in part, because Musk has created a lot of value in the ecosystem called the capitalist economy. He has a business that has created billions for himself, billions for other people, millions for a whole lot of people, hundreds of thousands for a lot more people. And quite frankly, all of those people can use those resources any way they want. We know he uses his for libertarian things, and even to go into space.

If there was a Black woman from Baltimore who started a company like Amazon, not only would we not be dealing with the DEI retrofitting of broken organizations, but her company would have a different DNA. Think about it! If Amazon was founded by a Black woman, she would be in every conversation, in every jurisdiction and publication. She would be in the middle of conversations about what it means to be an employee. She would be in the center of legislation about competitive pricing. She would be in a trade delegation to open new territories. She'd be part of who folks need to talk with when strategizing if someone is electable. We have never had that as Black people. Maybe Vice President Kamala Harris must be talked to. Maybe Barack Obama must be at most tables, but what Black person has ever had to be talked to in the business world on a day-to-day basis? That's what we're trying to do. If we don't need permission, you don't need permission to grow your businesses and change the discourse and change the agenda.

We have to base the strategy on business, because businesses can happen quickly. When the three of us were born, there was no such thing as Microsoft. There was no such thing as Google. Our lives have been influenced and changed and made better in many ways because of the existence of these types of companies. And because of that, we also understand the impact that that can have in a single generation to change the very fabric of the world as did Amazon. Black women, women in general, Black men also, tend to hire diverse people. They over-index in terms of hiring people like themselves. They believe in their abilities, and they give them opportunities which then actually creates a bigger safety net, creates a bigger opportunity and ultimately creates a bigger pie for everybody. And that's what we're trying to do with my book. I’m saying, building a business has not proven to solve our problems. Building mildly successful businesses has not gotten us to the promised land. It isn't good enough to build a behemoth global company, if there is only going to be just one. Companies build billions of dollars’ worth of value every day. We need Fortune 500 companies. You don’t need permission.

Lewis: I've read that Black businesses are more likely to be sole proprietorships. How would these entrepreneurs, as you said in your book, “let go of small – think bigger and think global”?

Collins: In my opinion, we live in a miraculous time. I can see almost every article that was written yesterday, every profile of every executive that was written three years ago. I can find almost any information that I wish for free. We have a world in which the entrepreneur has become some sort of big celebrity. People who are building these businesses are almost like planets. They have their own gravitational pull. We have turned the executive suite into mass culture. Now the question as to whether or not individuals, say any individual little girl in Bridgewater, Connecticut looks at that, and says, I can do this or I've got some ideas about how to do that. And you know what, Jeff Bezos once was a person like me, and did something because he wanted to. Or someone looks at Pat McGrath and says – her mother liked clothes. She likes makeup. Now she has a multi-billion dollar empire. I can do that. I don't believe that we have to have examples that people can tangibly see, and that they have to be close by. I believe that we have to encourage people that the stories exist. Organizations like mine, Impact X, are constantly talking about the possibilities. Here is what you need to do in order to go from step one to step two and from two to seven. And here's a whole network of people out there who can help you. Take the Prince’s Trust, where I've recently become an ambassador for the Enterprise Programs. We talk to people who are just thinking about wanting to develop a business all the way through to organizations that have secured funding from various places. Then I say, this is what we can do in order to make it bigger, or to make you grow. Information is everywhere. It is free, it is accessible. Maybe it's about turning people's attention a little less from the voyeuristic and a bit more oriented to execution.

Arlene Brock: Many people think that the headwinds they must battle are so extreme and institutional. They just don't believe in the possibility of success in the way that your book is so incredibly optimistic.

Collins: That’s the interesting thing for me and it's a fair point. But is there any time in history that you would rather be a Black woman than today? In North America, for example, I would say there is no better time. And people did feel like as if they were fighting giants – the odds were insurmountable, the headwinds of slavery, the headwinds of Jim Crow, the headwinds of plain vanilla white supremacy which were unrelenting, seemed immutable and unbeatable. Then, I would say even if we didn't see all the change that we want to see, I think there is extraordinary change. Actually, there is more opportunity now. And besides what choice do we really have? Are we going to let the status quo stand? And it doesn't have to be all of us who make this choice to change the world. But there are some of us who have to make the choice that we're going to force a better outcome. And quite frankly, the majority of us who think this way, think that we are not just creating that for ourselves and for our families, for people who are like us. We actually feel as though this is making the world a better place, and that, in fact, the boats that are going to rise the highest are those of Black people, Black women, people of color, other people who are underrepresented in the world. Sure we are going to be the ones that benefit, but the rest of the world will benefit too. We’ll add a trillion dollars of GDP to the American economy annually. The American economy is going to improve. It's not just white people, but Black people will have an inordinate impact on that, which is also catalytic for future growth.

There are a lot of problems that we have to overcome, and those headwinds are strong and persistent, and are constantly finding new ways to creep in. We have to say that yes, all of those things exist, and if we look backward to our superhero ancestors, those superhero ancestors were able to make something work and that we are going to also. You know, I don't have time to focus on what can’t be done. I'm going to focus on disruption happening every day. I can be the agent of disruption. So that's where I’m going to focus.

Brock: You speak about our Superheroes so eloquently in the book. It's amazing what Black people have gone through and yet we've come out with many layers of understanding about humanity, about people, about situations. Our experiences of oppression were not for nothing. We still have hope.

Collins: As an investor, I am focused on what sort of experience leads to what kind of consciousness. In turn, that consciousness leads to what sort of ability and that ability leads to what sort of investment possibility. That is why the unique experience of Black women – not merely surviving, but thriving – makes so much sense from an investment perspective. Also there is such generosity among Black entrepreneurs. They’re generous in that they want other people to see possibilities, too. We don’t want to be the only people getting rich. The intention is for other people to be able to follow the lead, to be able to tweak in other ways, but to be able to see in some ways what we see. That is a generosity that I do think permeates the experience of blackness that I’ve had, on both sides of the Atlantic, large and small countries.

Lewis: One of the things you mentioned as a missing ingredient is to buy Black, invest Black. Can you please expand on that idea?

Collins: We have to think of how to recycle capital within the community. How far does the Black dollar go before it actually gets cycled out of the community? Does it cycle only once – i.e. It comes in as a paycheck that immediately goes out of the community? Or does it get cycled into services, products, and businesses that are servicing the community itself? I’m trying to think about who are the shop owners in my particular area and which are the places where I might do a little bit of buying or trading. I grew up in Black neighborhoods until I went to university. You know, one hundred percent of my neighbors were Black throughout my life until I turned eighteen and was on my way to Princeton. Now I live in communities that have much diluted populations of blackness. The thing that I wanted to point out, though, is that I believe that the reason I even wrote that chapter was because I believe that every moment: we are making deliberate choices about what to do with our capital. And quite frankly, I think that among many Black people this is where we have internalized racism and internalized white supremacy that keep us from supporting Black businesses. The choices that we are making every day say what we actually think about ourselves. For example, what kind of people can you really trust with your money? If you need an attorney, for example in a major commercial negotiation, do you demand that the law firm assign a Black woman to advise you? Or if you say I want to wear fantastic clothes with the best designs, and you choose not go to a Black female designer but instead you go to a brand that you know has never employed a Black person in their history, then you are making a choice.

So I say to everyone who will listen. You are making choices at every stage. We have the opportunity to make very empowering choices. It's Black power. Every time you don't demand that a Black associate works on your case, you are not enabling that Black person to move up in the ranks. And if you're not helping to make things different you may be part of the problem, or at least have a problem, and that for me is the bigger point than Black pound day which we have here in the UK. It is good when we buy Black say every fourth Monday. There is something much more insidious when our instant reaction is not that Black people are the best for handling our important matters.

Lewis: Your book discusses your ten steps to Black empowerment and entrepreneurial success. As a concluding note, can you summarize the key to success?

Collins: At the beginning of chapter eight of my book there is a quote from Shirley Chisholm, who in the early 1970s, became the first Black woman elected to the US the House of Representatives representing her New York constituency. She later ran for President. Shirley Chisholm said, “If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” For Shirley Chisholm, just because the table is set and the places are already allocated, that does not mean that we should politely wait in the background until we are invited in. That’s just asking for permission. If we don't have a designated place, bring your folding chair, walk into the room, and sit down. Because that is where you need to be. It's good for everyone that you are there, and I think it's particularly important that this came from a Black woman, and chapter eight opens with it as a call to action.

Evidence shows that investing in women provides a consistent opportunity to outperform the market. They're more than fifty percent of the population in almost every country in the world. Very little venture capital goes to women. In my opinion, we can declare the book We Don't Need Permission a success when more women live by the mantra that they don't need permission in order to make the world what it can be.

It's like being in church and talking about heaven. In the Progressive Baptist Church community that I come from, the order of the day is to get off your knees and hustle because the world needs to be remade today, and it's not only up to God to do so at some later date. And it’s not about you getting a reward in some different place. You need to be doing things now, because you are the answer. And so when I think about topics of empowerment the certainty that we don't need permission is a big one.

It is a shot of adrenaline and a super focus on making the world the kind of world you wish it to be, and that can be through leveraging the tools of business. I think business is the underutilized tool, but feel free to use other tools. Just make sure you are not sitting around waiting. YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING. That’s the long and short of it.

Lewis: I think that's a great call to action to end on.

Collins: Great. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it tremendously.

Brock: Thank you so much for your time.

About the Authors:

Arlene Brock is a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow. Prior to ALI, she was Director of the African Ombudsman Research Centre that trains the 40+ National Ombudsmen throughout Africa. She previously served as Bermuda’s first National Ombudsman, a family magistrate, negotiation and mediation trainer (with late Roger Fisher’s Conflict Management Inc.), labour arbitrator and an insolvency litigator. Recently, she returned to Bermuda to revive The Adult Education School — a second chance for Learners who slipped through the cracks of traditional education.

Patricia Lewis is a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow and Senior Managing Editor of the Social Impact Review. Prior to ALI, Patricia’s executive career has spanned 25 years in investment banking and capital markets at Bank of America in both the US and UK. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Snowball Impact Management, a diversified, multi-asset impact investment fund, and as a mentor to early-stage entrepreneurs. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.