Jessica Norwood is the founder of RUNWAY, an organization that uses entrepreneurship to close the wealth gap in Black communities by providing pre-seed and friends-and-family capital to fund Black-owned companies. A financial activist and social entrepreneur, Norwood is a Center for Economic Democracy fellow, a lifelong fellow of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and Southern University College of Business, the Political Power Fellow of the Hip Hop Archive at the Hutchinson Institute of Harvard University, and a recipient of the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship for Economic Disruption.

Rodney Sampson is the CEO and executive chairman of Opportunity Hub (OHUB), a multi-campus entrepreneurship center and tech hub. OHUB serves as a startup pre-accelerator, coding boot-camp, and angel investing platform for founders from underestimated and under-tapped communities. Prior to OHUB, Sampson co-founded several media and technology companies and was a partner at TechSquare Labs, the tech hub and seed-stage venture fund that created the Atlanta Startup Battle. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a venture partner at Draper Goren Holm, and a professor of entrepreneurship at Morehouse College.

This appearance by Jessica Norwood and Rodney Sampson is part of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. Join us virtually at youtube.com/ecorner as we bring founders, investors and industry influencers to center stage and invite them to share what it takes to become a disruptor.

Jessica Norwood

Rodney Sampson