Teresa Clarke Black Millionaire: Why I Resigned From Goldman Sachs
A lot of quizzical looks have come my way as news of my resignation from Goldman Sachs has spread. Why am I leaving a lucrative career as a managing director at a prestigious firm and one of the few senior African-American investment bankers on Wall Street to devote my full energies to the high risk dot.com world? Why am I not just outsourcing the re-launch of Africa.com, the Internet portal that I've owned for almost a decade?
The answers are love, love of Africa, and an unquenchable desire to change the way the world views Africa.
Most people think of Africa as a continent stricken with poverty, disease and wars or as a land of giraffes, lions and elephants. Yes, tragedies exist on the continent. Yes, tourism is a vitally important industry. But Africa is so much more.
This summer, the FIFA World Cup will focus the attention of all soccer fans on South Africa, at the same time business and media thought leaders will gather there. This is a perfect time for Africa.com to help the world know and understand the people whom I've met.
A typical American tourist, I first visited South Africa 17 years ago, just as apartheid was coming to an end. I've never gotten over the way I was welcomed by both black and white. In Cape Town, I entered a Thai restaurant and the owner reassigned his top waiter to my table. He sent over his best bottle of wine. I was the first black person who had ever dined in his restaurant, he told me, and he wanted to make sure that I had a positive experience.
I found a South Africa that was filled with warm, loving and forgiving black and white people and they embraced me. Now, it's my turn to return the embrace, by helping South Africa and the other 52 countries on the continent seize the future, using the medium through which most people access information today, the internet.
Mine has been a world of mergers, acquisitions, and high finance. I know how to assess risk and evaluate economic opportunities. Africa is the next untapped investment destination. Africa boasts more than 20 stock exchanges and some of the fastest growing economies. China, Russia and India are among the countries investing heavily in the continent and yielding impressive returns - on average 30 percent, compared to 16 to 18 percent in other developing countries.
Yet the investment opportunities in Africa are not without risks. Capital costs more when the perceived risks are high and the only way to mitigate those risks is transparency and information.
For the first time ever, investors and business leaders will have one-stop shopping on Africa.com for the best sources of information about each of the 53 countries on the continent. Not only will they find daily news reports from each country, but also unbiased, detailed country reports on political rights, civil liberties and sustainable economic opportunities thanks to our collaboration with two internationally recognized standard setters, Freedom House and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.
With our 200 specially curated videos, Africa.com will be a multi-media portal through which the world will get to know Africa, as well as a way for Africans to get to know one another.
It's a huge risk, but love is always risky.
Bob Johnson, Founder of BET and Charlotte Bobcats owner
Bob Johnson, Founder of BET and Charlotte Bobcats owner
Johnson grew up in Freeport, Ill., as the 9th of 10 children. He majored in history at the University of Illinois (B.A., 1968) and, after studying public affairs at Princeton University (M.A., 1972), moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Urban League. He began cultivating valuable political and business connections that later helped him bankroll his vision of creating a black-owned cable television company. As a lobbyist for the nascent cable industry from 1976 to 1979, he noticed that the large African American TV audience was going unrecognized and untapped. Johnson built BET from a tiny cable outlet, airing only two hours of programming a week in 1980, to a broadcasting giant that claimed an audience of more than 70 million households.
In 1991 BET became the first black-controlled company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. BET thrived in the 1990s, adding more cable channels and expanding its reach through new film and publishing divisions, music channels, and a Web site. Viewership expanded along with the product line, while major media companies began to invest in the growing network. After taking BET private again in 1998, Johnson and his partners sold BET Holdings to the giant media group Viacom in 2001 for some $3 billion, though he remained at BET as its chief executive officer. The sale made him the first African American billionaire. Johnson then formed the umbrella group RLJ Companies, which operated widely in the media, sports, gaming, real estate, and hospitality industries.
After attempting to purchase a National Basketball Association franchise throughout the 1990s, Johnson was approved as the owner of an expansion team in Charlotte, N.C., in 2003 (the city's former team, the Hornets, had just moved to New Orleans, La.). The new team, called the Bobcats, began competition in 2004. Johnson's purchase of the franchise, estimated at $300 million, also included the Sting, the Women's National Basketball Association team in Charlotte. Johnson launched C-SET (Carolinas Sports Entertainment Network), a regional sports and entertainment cable TV network, in October 2004. In 2006 Johnson, along with the film producers Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein, created the company Our Stories Films to develop family oriented movies aimed at African American audiences.
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