Henri Pierre-Jacques
Co-founder and Managing Partner, Harlem Capital. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounder@hpierrejacques ↗LinkedIn ↗harlem.capital ↗
Henri Pierre-Jacques co-founded Harlem Capital to invest in diverse, women, and minority founders across fintech, enterprise software, and AI. Before launching the firm, he worked in private equity at ICV Partners and in investment banking at Bank of America.
2shows
2appearances
42statements
9resolved
5supported
0contradicted
56%fully supported
11said about them ↓ Everything Henri Pierre-Jacques said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Pierre-Jacques: Calling Yourself a FinTech VC Specialist Is Meaningless
“Like, how can you be a specialist for 30 to 40% of the market? Like, being a FinTech investor doesn't mean anything. Like, there's multiple verticals. There's multiple differences.”
Harlem Capital aims for consistent 3x-5x net returns over single outlier wins
“And so for us, like we're not targeting to be that one coin based outcome, that one stripe outcome, like we're saying over time, how do we get LPs to know that we can consistently generate three to five X net returns.”
Institutional LPs prefer consistent 2x fund returns over volatile high peaks
“They don't care if you have one, five X. Right? Like, they'd rather take a two X over 10 funds consistently than a five X, one X, three X, two X, right? They want to know, do you know how to institutionalize and operate and have processes that allow you to bes…”
Pierre-Jacques: Diversity VC Funds Pre-2020 Focused Exclusively on Gender, Not Race
“You know, six years ago, diversity meant gender equality, right? Before George Floyd in America, all the diversity focused funds were women focused funds. There was no racial lens for, you know, investing.”
Pierre-Jacques: Silicon Valley's ecosystem does not exist for diverse founders
“Silicon Valley exists for other founders, but doesn't exist for the founders that we're serving.”
Being categorized as an impact fund drastically shrinks LP capital allocations
“Just from what we've seen from fundraising, once you get grouped into an impact bucket, usually their magnitude smaller than the main buckets. And so I think it changes how many dollars you get allocated.”
Top-performing venture deals frequently lack consensus conviction among firm partners
“It's really hard to get two or three people to have the same conviction on similar deals, but it doesn't mean that the deals aren't great because a lot of our winners were deals where we weren't both positives.”
Pierre-Jacques: 99% of VC Funds Lacked Black Partners in 2017
“I didn't want to work for a firm that didn't have black partners, which was 99% of all VC funds.”
Pierre-Jacques: Venture entry pricing only matters relative to fund size
“Ultimately, the price only matters based on the fund size, right?”
Pierre-Jacques aims to build Harlem Capital into a multi-billion global firm
“Like, I'm 30 years old. I want to do this for the rest of my life. I'm trying to build a multi-billion multi-asset class business globally.”
Pierre-Jacques: LPs Cannot Expect Emerging GPs to Fit Traditional Criteria
“I push back on LPs like you're looking for these check the boxes and like all GPS aren't going to fit into these perfect boxes of working in venture and, you know, doing a spin out, whatever it may be, or having a great angel track record, because they were al…”
Harlem Capital runs investment committees in reverse order of seniority
“One thing we do now is the junior person always goes first after we have investment committee. So we go associate to principal to partner to GP, right? And so for everything, for opinions, the general partners always go last. Because if the GPs talk first, eve…”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital aims to back 1,000 diverse founders in 20 years
“Our mission is to back thousand diverse founders and every founder we back obviously matters. Every life we change obviously matters, but I know we can do so much more and we set that mission. Of a thousand founders over 20 years for a reason, right?”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital is the 3rd or 4th largest Black-owned VC fund
“We're now the probably third or fourth largest black owned VC fund, which is kind of crazy.”
Pierre-Jacques: Nine-Figure VC Funds Must Secure 10% to 20% Portfolio Ownership
“When you start getting into the a hundred million, the nine figure funds, like that's where you have to start doing 1015, 20% ownership. Like the math just doesn't work otherwise”
Harlem Capital invests $1M-$2.5M for 10%-15% ownership in $134M fund
“So for us, a hundred and thirty four million dollar fund, we tell people we invest one to two and a half million dollars for 10 to 15%.”
Harlem Capital rejected Fund 2 LPs demanding rigid GP commitments
“And we had a few LPs in fund two that we didn't let in for, you know, Whether it was GP sake or other rules, because we just felt like they weren't really humanizing us, right? They're kind of were using us as a number.”
TPG anchored Harlem Capital Fund 1 and sourced three institutional LPs
“TPG was our anchor in fund one. Right. So one of our high net worths introduced us to TPG November of, Ninth, November of 18, and we had a bunch of conversations. We were doing this for five, six months back and forth, met probably 45 partners. It was a six-mo…”
Targeted contact research yields far better LP introductions than general requests
“When you ask LP for their introductions, they may give you one or two if they're really nice. Most of them are going to be like, okay, cool. And they'll never get back to you because they don't have the time. It's not my job to find the people in my network fo…”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital Requires Two Great Factors Out of Four to Invest
“Ultimately, if we have two of the four that are really, really great, like we're gonna invest. If you have three good ones, we might still invest, right? But we need two of them to be great at least.”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital can execute deals in 48 to 72 hours
“We do deals in as fast as. 48 hours, 72 hours. We can do a 30 page deck that fast.”
Pierre-Jacques: Only one or two firms backed diverse founders at scale in 2018
“Essentially there was like one or two firms Three years ago that we're doing this at scale.”
Harlem Capital automatically exercises pro-rata rights unless a startup significantly underperforms
“We typically do pro rata for most of our companies. I mean, unless you fall off a cliff, we're going to do pro rata, and we signal that to the founders. Part of, hey, we're leading Your seed round, we're going to be supportive in your seed plus or your series …”
The other half of the tape: Henri Pierre-Jacques's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 11 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jared Tingle 6Jason Klein 3Ted Seides 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 11
2021 11 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Henri's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder and Managing Partner, Harlem Capital | 1 | 32 | 50% 4/8 | full record on 20VC → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Co-founder and Managing Partner, Harlem Capital | 1 | 10 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |