Early Thursday morning, enthusiastic AfroTech attendees rushed into a conference room to see one thing: Hannah Bronfman, a renowned angel investor with more than a million followers on social media, in conversation with the founder and Blavity CEO Morgan DeBaun.

Bronfman is a wellness content creator, author, and investor in more than 70 companies, including beauty brands Topicals and Sienna Naturals. She is best known for also founding health, beauty and fitness marketplace HBFIT, which closed last year after eight years in business.

She told the AfroTech audience that she had learned a lot during her tenure as founder; she shared her journey and the knowledge she learned along the way. For example, she learned how to deal with co-founder fallout, which led to the closure of HBFIT. She spoke about the importance of community and urged the audience to always lean on their networks, whether for advice or just to connect.

It was by relying on her network that she found herself advising and mentoring founders, which led them to issue angel checks to their companies. Soon, she began growing an investment empire, both through angel investments and receiving equity in brands she would work with as a content creator. The audience for this AfroTech panel, filled with young black professionals and open only to all-access VIPs, media and senior executives, was interested in learning more. Less more than 5% of investors are black and the industry still appears opaque, even as efforts continue to make it more transparent and accessible to the next generation.

Bronfman and DeBaun also spoke about it, telling the audience that more people could become investors if they wanted to. An increase in the representation of black investors will lead to at least identifying the most successful black founders, experts say. This is one of the reasons why Bronfman decided to focus its investment on overlooked founders who receive dismal and decreasing amounts risk financing. The requirements to be an accredited investor are high, one must earn over $200,000 or have a net worth of one million dollars. But money wasn’t the issue for this particular audience, made up of business executives working in big tech. What they needed was guidance – a place to start.

She told them to start having conversations with people in their network, noting that many people around them are likely investors but just haven’t included them in any deals. “Only feel comfortable investing the amount you are willing to lose,” she told the audience.

Bronfman also provides a network, mentorship and a more hands-on relationship than an institutional investor would. She doesn’t mind cold emails and loves casual conversations that aren’t always focused on money.

“There’s a lot of strength in reaching out to someone and saying, ‘Hey, your career is something I admire and I’d really like the opportunity to talk to you,'” she said. -she declared.

In the meantime, she’s looking to become a little more than just an angel investor in the future: she says she’s ready to become an institutional investor.

In recent years, she has elevated special purpose vehicles (SPV) to participate in larger roadshows, allowing her to support now-unicorn Kindbody and emergency contraception company Julie. She had been thinking about starting her own fund for some time, but said it wasn’t until she saw the backlash over P&G’s acquisition of Black hair brand Mielle, where consumers accused the black founders of selling it to a white company, which Bronfamn was ready to take the next step.

“We have no holding companies for culture,” she said, meaning there are virtually no Black-owned conglomerates that Black brands could retreat to. “Where is our LVMH Noir?

His goal is to build that one day. But first, she says she’ll consider raising a fund, perhaps focused on Series A, with the goal of writing $1 million to $3 million in checks. “And maybe one day I’ll get to that holding company.”