Resource Stories: ESO Ventures

Alfredo Matthew, Ben Wanzo and Martha Hernandez all came to their interview wearing black shirts. “Initially I didn’t get the memo,” Alfredo laughed, “so I quickly changed my shirt so I could fit in.”

Ben and Martha are native Oaklanders, born and raised in East Oakland, Alfredo is from New York City.  Aside from all being bootstrapped founders of their own companies in the East Bay, the three founders of East Oakland-based ESO Ventures have seen their paths cross many times over the years at the intersection of social justice and Bay Area entrepreneurship.

It all comes down to synchronicity, and seeds that were planted long ago of three fierce entrepreneurs growing together. That led to a thriving local entrepreneur support organization that recently got a grant of $8,000,000 from the state of California to grow East Oakland’s startup scene.

Heart, Mind and Soul

The way they put it, Alfredo is the heart, Ben the mind, and Martha the soul of ESO Ventures. One thing they all have in common is that they’re entrepreneurs focused on empowering people of color.

Alfredo began his career as an educator at a New York public school, and moved to Oakland in 2009 where he continued his career in an East Oakland charter school.  His frustration with the economic outcomes of his students lead him to shift approaches to youth development to work at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.  His passion for entrepreneurship led him to found Working World LLC, a business consultancy focused on the intersection of education, workforce development, and entrepreneurship.

Ben was born and raised in Oakland. After college he forayed to New York and London to work in finance at Morgan Stanley, before returning to the Bay Area for his MBA and learning the ropes of economic development while working for former Sacramento Kevin Johnson in Oakpark. In 2011 he founded a startup, Teach Bar - a “Starbucks meets Apple Genius Bar”, where community members could drop in to get tutoring at affordable rates.

Martha, for her part, was also born and raised in Oakland. She worked at the CORO Program of Public Affairs in San Francisco before creating a startup, madeBOS, a career pathing app for low-wage workers in sectors like service, retail and construction. She remembers struggling to raise funding for the startup, or to close partnerships with major employers. “I wasn’t the executive they expected,” she said. “I didn’t have the pedigree.”

The three crossed paths again and again over the years. “Entrepreneurship is in our blood, and we kept running into each other,” Alfredo laughs.  Alfredo followed Martha’s startup career and ran into her at Silicon Valley pitch events, and early on wrote an article in a local paper about Ben’s company.  When the City of Oakland and Merritt College hired his company, Working World LLC, to develop an entrepreneurial pathway in East Oakland he knew who to turn to.  Together they came up with an idea to combine their passions and skill sets to create a new kind of business incubator in East Oakland.  It started as a project in the Fall of 2020 with their first incubator, and in April of 2021 they launched ESO Ventures Inc. as an entrepreneurship support organization to provide the confidence, competence and capital so that any Black or Brown person can pursue entrepreneurship.

Supporting entrepreneurs in blind spots

ESO Ventures is focused on serving a type of entrepreneur in East Oakland who typically falls into investor blind spots. Their standard cohort member is a local business that generates less than $50,000 annually; their alumni range from baby fashion lines to restaurants to pet supply stores. Half of the founders have a high school diploma or an associates degree.

This is an intentional choice. “There are so many accelerator programs already out there focused on high-growth, high-tech startups,” Alfredo says. “We are different from everyone else because of who we serve and how we do it.

The first cohort ran in September 2020, with thirty East Oakland founders meeting virtually. They went through Entrepreneurship 101, learning how to do a three year strategy, product market fit, and financial planning. They also plug into a peer network; founders retain coaching and advising services after the accelerator ends, as well as access to a six month digital marketing certificate program at local Merritt College. There’s also a community Discord channel that’s taken on a life of its own. “They still meet Wednesday at 6:00 pm without us,” Ben said.

Martha says that the curriculum is designed to help entrepreneurs navigate the world of funding and strategic partnerships – so close in the backyard of Silicon Valley yet so far away for those without built-in networks. She wished she had that when she was developing madeBOS.“Our goal is to make founders conversant in a language they were never exposed to,” she says.

She gives the example of a founder, Jasmine, who invented a homebrew facial hair removal cream that was popular in her family. She sat on the idea for more than a year, until she came to an ESO Venture strategic planning session. “She was sitting on a product, on a gold mine, but didnt know how to exploit it, how to set business goals, customer persona, relabel things, create a website.” With ESO Ventures help, she’s sold over a thousand bottles, and is on her way to $100,000 in revenue. Ben recounted: “Without us, the bottle would be sitting in her own bathroom.

Ultimately, one of the biggest value-adds ESO Ventures brings is simple representation. “We show founders in Oakland what is possible and what their ideas have the capacity to become,” Ben says. “Founders don't typically see their stories and faces in the founders they see coming out of Silicon Valley, so they assume they can’t be winning in that entrepreneur journey.”

Martha adds: “So many have given up on their dreams just because they haven't heard anyone else say ‘This is freaking brilliant, and we can be there with you,’” Martha says. “We want founders to know that not only can you do this, but you’re going to do this.”

“We want to be that place where BIPOC entrepreneurs can fail, and still have the confidence to try again. We will be your first yes.”

An $8 million landmark

In August 2021, ESO Ventures received major news: they were receiving $8 million from the state of California to “develop, launch and scale small businesses in East Oakland”.

The funding came from recently-passed legislation, the “California Capital in the Community Act”, a legislative response to the fact that nearly 500 local businesses have closed in East Oakland since the start of the pandemic. 

Ben, Alfredo and Martha plan to use this public investment as seed funding for a revolving loan fund to make the first investment in ESO entrepreneurs.  Over the next ten years ESO plans to help launch 3,000 businesses that will create 60,000 jobs for Black and Brown community members in underinvested communities.

“The people that are in our cohorts, they are incredibly invested in their community,” mArthsa says. “You see a real communal feeling across the board in Oakland. And that’s how we manage our cohorts. Good ideas are not always supported by networks and connections. We want to change that.”