Tracy’s varied experiences from out-of-this-world space travel to the music industry — combined with her tech savvy — opened doors for her in the late 1990s. She was invited to join a venture capital fund focused on early-stage tech firms.
While in that position, she noted a pattern. “Two million dollars would go to white guys all the time, but everyone else got very little — even though this was the opposite of demographic trends in the US.” She also noticed that very few people of color were coming through, so she decided to start her own firm.
Tracy already had an impressive resumé, but notes that “women of color never think they are enough.” So, she earned dual MBAs. Her firm launched in 2008, but everything fell apart with the financial crash, so that plan was shelved, and she found herself regrouping, searching, and moving on.
She landed at the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office where she helped raise capital for affordable housing. Not space travel, not cool tech venture capital funds, and not a firm of her own, but it eventually led to a position as a senior advisor to the mayor for strategy. She focused on increasing exports from LA to help the regional economy there.
At the Mayor’s Office, she also worked with the Brookings Institute to work on increasing “exports” nationally to diversify and therefore help stabilize the US economy. This looked like an important direction to her. She felt that diversification was important. She tried to attract other investors. None came forward, but she was undeterred, so as she said, “I knew these types of companies were a good risk and spent the next four years to launch a fund myself.”
In 2018, Tracy launched The 22 Fund, a social-impact venture capital and advisory firm that invests in tech-based manufacturing companies to increase their exports. The firm sets itself apart by intentionally including women and BIPOC led firms, allowing it to deliver high return on investments, as well as, notable social and economic impact.
Tracy knew launching The 22 Fund was not going to succeed by “trying to make White men feel guilty and do the ‘right’ thing.” She saw The 22 Fund as an opportunity to grow women’s and people of color’s wealth and use the power of their wallets to change the world. She is now in the process of raising $100M to do just that.
“I look up to my collective ancestors, different people give us different things — like my parents and grandparents from Mississippi, like the picture of MLK and Thích Nhất Hạnh in my office, Amanda Gorman to Maya Angelou, my BIPOC female friends — and how much they do with so little. I am always trying to learn from all of them all the time, never just one.”