We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrice King Brickman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Patrice thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I had been investing in women-led businesses for a few years in VC when I came across a woman-led company with a DAF on her cap table, and thought Wow, I can invest money sitting in my DAF? That taps into a whole other bucket of capital to support women and diverse leaders. At that time, there was $143B sitting in DAF; there is $250B today.

I thought if we could tap into that kind of capital, we could finally start to move the needle on the pernicious statistics of how venture capital had been flowing in our country for decades.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I founded Inspire Access in 2022 to address the investment gap that exists in our country today, which has been a longstanding issue for decades.

I find it absurd that less than 3% of all venture capital in this country flows to women and diverse-led businesses. That 97% of the capital is being invested in one very narrow demographic. Those statistics imply that all great ideas originate from a very narrow demographic. We know this is not true

It’s a privilege to build a vehicle that allows people to mobilize their philanthropic capital, making mission-aligned investments, while growing their future giving.

I am super proud to be involved with the brilliant founders we support every day, who are starting incredible companies, solving some of our most pressing problems.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I was looking at a deal that I wasn’t able to do, but I was helping the founder get the appropriate capital. We were on the phone one night, and she asked if I had heard of a company named Daintree Capital, as it was also in the DC area, and the founder is a woman named Alisha Griffey

I had not, but when I clicked on her website, I knew I wanted to meet her and learn more about what she was doing, which sounded (and is) brilliant.
I filled out the form at the bottom of her site to inquire, but with no real ask or offer, which must have seemed super odd to Alisha. Fortunately, she was at a place in her journey of wanting to bounce some things off a peer, so we ended up meeting.

She happened to have a woman with a DAF on her cap table, which intrigued both of us, and sent us down a proverbial rabbit hole together exploring how we could make this work, and mobilize exponentially more capital to these companies than either of us could do alone. As there was $143B sitting in DAFs at that time. Today, there is $250B.

Had I not met Alisha, this work might have gone undiscovered to me.

Part two of my CO-Founder story is that when I was getting started in all of this, my daughter was home for a time working remotely. She had done her capstone on Philanthropy, what is broken about it, and DAFs in particular. I knew she was eventually leaving her current job to head back to graduate school, so I poached her to detour and come help me launch Inspire. Leah brings all the patience and brains that I did not have; we made an incredible team, and the organization was built because of her.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I believe our reputation is built almost entirely on trust. I feel that people trust the altruistic reasons we do this work, and they should. They are trusting us with their capital, they know how seriously we take that, and they trust that we will do our very best in every situation, and are quick to own what we know and do NOT know.

I am always saying, “I don’t have that answer, but I will find out”. goes a long way. We cannot solve everything, but I will sure as heck try!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://InspireAccess.org
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrice-brickman/