Inner City Entrepreneurs Want You
As some of you know, my first real journalism job was helping to launch and manage a youth-focused community newspaper based in Roxbury, Mass., which qualifies as part of Boston’s inner city (both geographically and figuratively). Small operation, which means a lot of my time was spent hustling for advertisers, which typically were local businesses. In all my conversations with these enterprising entrepreneurs, I never heard terms like “venture capital” or “growth capital.” I did, however, often hear the term “bank” with some sort of expletive preceding it. The problem, of course, was on both sides of the proverbial coin: The inner city businesses had no idea how to access the private capital markets, and the private capital markets paid to attention to inner city businesses.
