B. Pagels-Minor is a former Apple employee who specialized in product management. Minor realized there was a funding gap for minority-led startups and decided to become a venture capital investor.
As the founder and CEO of DVRGNT Ventures, Minor, who uses the pronouns they and them, spends most of their time searching for financial and technology businesses to fund.
What inspired you to launch the investment firm, DVRGNT Ventures?
My wife and I were very fortunate people because we became debt free in 2021. I was able to kind of take the time off after we had our first child to think about what I liked best. It was the combination of consulting with people, so there is something amazing about talking to brilliant people. What ended up happening is that I would meet these individuals, and I would start consulting with them. Every once in a while, I’d find one that I thought was an investable company. What that means is that there’s a high likelihood that they might become a billion-dollar company or something like that. However, when you think about it from an investment, you’re looking for companies that can become Google or Apple-sized companies. I started investing personally many years ago and I invest in different funds, I would invest as an angel investor or through some of those crowd-sourcing platforms. When I kind of brought these companies over I was just like, “Well, this feels like a billion-dollar idea. They’re doing something really interesting and compelling that I think is going to help a lot of people.” [What] I kept finding [out] was because they were from areas like I’m from, like Chicago, Milwaukee and Atlanta. they’re from these out-of-the-way cities for the people that I typically met on the coasts. People who are in California or people who are in New York, really couldn’t wrap their heads around investing in them. Again, I prefer a data-driven, logical approach to investing, because that’s how you de-risk your investment. It’s a higher likelihood that I’m going to get a great return on my money because I am using independent third-party data to make this decision.
How can the community get involved?
If you are interested in investing, you will check out my website, there’s a contact us page, [and] it asks you if you’re an investor because then it gets routed to me versus my team. … Because of my fund and how we work, we do require people to be accredited investors. There are several ways to be an accredited investor. You can go to the SEC website, which tells you how to be an accredited investor. One [way] is by how much you make a year, either individually or by who you’re married to. Another one is how much you have from your net worth. Other ones are based on which types of certifications you have yourself. The main requirement for my fund is just to reach out to me and also be an accredited investor. Then you can participate if you like.
