Good morning, Broadsheet readers! There's new research into the lack of women CEOs, team Australia fights equal pay in soccer, and Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan has an exclusive report on an early VC network selling itself to a nonprofit. Have a terrific Tuesday!
- Non-profit venture. In 2011, entrepreneur Natalia Oberti Noguera founded a for-profit company called Pipeline Angels to bring more women into the male-dominated world of private investing through networking and bootcamps. It was a small but high profile early effort to address a huge (and ongoing) problem: The lack of female investors exacerbates the persistent lack of money backing female founders, especially women of color and those who come from other marginalized groups.
Over the next decade—as Silicon Valley’s growth exploded, but the percentage of venture capital invested in women remained stubbornly tiny—Pipeline Angels continued trying to rebalance its corner of this unequal financial ecosystem. Today, the company has trained hundreds of women and nonbinary members to become early-stage investors.
But now Oberti Noguera is handing off the reins. She has sold Pipeline Angels to the nonprofit Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership (IFEL), run by cofounder and CEO Jill Johnson, The Broadsheet is exclusively reporting.
Terms of the deal, which closed in late June, were not disclosed. IFEL had net assets of $985,849 at the end of 2021, according to tax filings. Pipeline Angels members have invested about $8 million since 2011 in about 120 companies, including Mahmee, CareAcademy, and Goalsetter, according to Oberti Noguera.
The sale is “bittersweet,” says Oberti Noguera, who will continue to consult for Pipeline Angels through 2024. Her company counts more than 540 graduates of its angel investing training programs, including managers and executives at PayPal, Citigroup, and Howard University.
But the pandemic forced Pipeline Angels’ training camps to go online; then they went on hiatus for the first half of 2022. As Oberti Noguera marked ten years of running her company, while trying to scale up its digital growth strategy, she came to realize that “what got you here won’t get you there,” she says. As she looked for buyers, “what got to me, with respect to Jill, was an affinity when it comes to values [and] representation.”
Johnson already had decades of experience working to close the wealth gap for underrepresented founders. The daughter of Black entrepreneurs, who ran a newspaper publishing business in New Jersey, Johnson started her career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before she and her father cofounded their Newark-based nonprofit in 2002. Today, IFEL already has programs specifically supporting women of color entrepreneurs and Black angel investors.
“I'm very focused on these issues at a systemic level,” Johnson says. “We want to see this system of how people think about investing, and how they think about making decisions, change—so that in the next 10 years, we're just not having the same conversation about access to capital.”
Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan
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