Being Underestimated is Your Greatest Advantage with Arlan Hamilton
The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show
Chase Jarvis
4.8 • 641 Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2020
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Your time is now. Amidst the crazy, the unprecedented, the chaos - being underestimated is your greatest advantage. As Arlan Hamilton frames it: a privileged background, an influential network, and a fancy college degree are not prerequisites for success. She inspires us all to defy other people’s expectations and to become the role models we’ve been looking for.
Arlan joined me live on a special episode CreativeLive TV to share her hard-won wisdom and newly released book It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage.
If you’re not familiar with Arlan’s work, let me catch you up. Arlan Hamilton built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a fund that is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Started from scratch in 2015, Backstage has now raised more than $10 million and invested in more than 130 startup companies led by underestimated founders. In 2018 Arlan co-founded Backstage Studio which launched four accelerator programs for underestimated founders in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and London.
In this episode,
* a framework to turn being underestimated into an advantage, including finding & using your voice, overcoming fear, and being yourself
* pursuing your dreams during difficult times
* why your voice and your ideas could not be more important
* and much more
Enjoy!
Today's episode is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world's largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world’s top experts -- Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy Award winners, New York Times best selling authors and the best entrepreneurs of our times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, what's up? It's Chase. Welcome to another episode of the show. My guest today is going to open your eyes, your ears, your heart, and your brain. Her name, Arland Hamilton. And you're probably familiar with her. Maybe you saw her face on the cover of Fast Company magazine. |
| 0:22.3 | She founded backstage capital. |
| 0:24.6 | She has been on this show before, but this is an incredibly different conversation than the one we had last time. |
| 0:31.7 | She invests in underestimated founders, which means by that is people who are typically not in the world that venture capital, |
| 0:41.2 | I think it's something like 90% of venture capital goes to white men. |
| 0:46.8 | She defines underestimated founders rather as women, |
| 0:51.0 | people of color, |
| 0:51.5 | and members of the LGBTQ community. Prior to her role here at |
| 0:57.4 | backstage capital, she founded and published in any magazine called Interlude. And before that |
| 1:03.9 | was a tour manager for bands under the Atlantic Records label. This conversation is so timely and so inclusive that you absolutely must listen to it. |
| 1:19.0 | If you are not interested in raising venture capital, I don't blame you, but there's |
| 1:24.9 | so many ways this conversation's relevant, specifically finding |
| 1:28.9 | your why. |
| 1:30.3 | And Arlen, for example, she went from being on food stamps to having a multi-million dollar |
| 1:35.5 | fund and investing in a hundred companies in under three years. |
| 1:40.5 | Talk about a transition. |
| 1:42.0 | So this truly is for everyone. If finding your why, if pursuing that |
| 1:48.1 | through any means possible and creating success for yourself, if any of those things are on |
| 1:53.5 | your list, this conversation is for you. We also talk about her new book called It's About |
| 1:59.4 | Damn Time, which I loved all kinds of dog-eared corners, underlined, highlighted stuff. |
| 2:07.3 | I just, I love the book, and I know you will too. |
| 2:10.1 | And what I love is the incredible detail we talk about specifically how she's done some of these things. |
... |
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