Porter Braswell

Why We Chose Him: 

There are a whole lot of amazing facets to Jopwell and Porter Braswell, not the least of which is he turned the need and desire to increase diversity in the workforce into a profitable business model. He also changed the whole conversation around it from preachy PR buzzwords into one about the long-term profit and success of industry and society. His reasons for starting that journey were pretty inspiring as well. 

As the CEO and co-founder of Jopwell, Porter Braswell created a profit-driven infrastructure to create a sustainable stream of thousands of connections between leading companies and Black, Latinx and Native American students and professionals. 

Porter Braswell is an amazingly diverse person himself. He was on the varsity basketball team in college but, once he realized he had zero chance of making it in the NBA, he set his sights on the financial industry after college. Jopwell originated from the frustrations he experienced at Goldman Sachs, where he was often asked to support diversity recruiting efforts in addition to his trading responsibilities.

He quickly realized there was a challenging gap between the desire to recruit and hire underrepresented talent from communities of color and the available solutions to reach those at scale or a level that traditional nonprofits and government programs were succeeding at. Then, a personal tragedy after a close family member passed away gave him the nudge he needed to turn that into a business.

“This was a realization that life can end at a really early stage,” reveals Porter. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Am I meant to be a person that buys and sells currencies. Is that my calling?’ As a person of faith, and that matters a lot to me, I started to really examine what am I meant to do with the time that I have here on this planet.”

When he really started thinking about it, he came to a very important and groundbreaking realization that would inspire and direct the whole objective and design of Jopwell.

“I constantly came back to, ‘I am a product of diversity recruiting initiative and efforts,’” explains Braswell. “I have been very fortunate to go to very elite institutions where I have had access to incredible professional opportunities. And, despite my day-to-day job to be paid to be in the markets, I was consistently asked to go back and recruit others that looked like me. So, I thought there had to be a more efficient and effective way where I can assist not just financial institutions but all institutions with diversity recruiting. I saw it was a major pain point. It was something I was passionate about. And when I took a step back and thought about what I could do with this time that I have, balancing business with making an impact was really attractive to me.”

Enter capitalism, and a company. He and one of his former colleagues, Ryan Williams, believed there had to be a better way to connect top talent with employers while building a diverse professional community into a profit-driven opportunity. So, they left Wall Street to build Jopwell in 2015 and partnered with more than 100 companies, including Spotify, Peloton, UBS and the NBA, among many others, to build and nurture more inclusive workforces throughout their organizations.

“I knew that there were a lot of incredible nonprofits that existed in this space, and they have been doing incredible work for decades. My realization that I had was that a lot of publicly traded companies have worked with these nonprofits for years but that nothing has changed. And when you take a step back and you examine why that is the case, it’s because nonprofits are not set up to do things at scale, for many different reasons.” 

The result was that even when companies were working with multiple nonprofits to achieve their goals on this front, there just wasn’t enough of a reliable supply of candidates from nonprofits to make a real difference.

“So, my insight was, ‘A: Why is this a nonprofit? We are solving a business pain point here. Any other business pain point that you are solving is not going to be a nonprofit. So why should diversity recruiting be a nonprofit? The second thing was that, in order for us to reach scale and do the things that we needed to do, we knew we needed resources and capital.” That meant showing potential investors a success rate in terms of changing the equation and getting more diversity into the workplace. 

Flash forward seven short years later and the result is hundreds of thousands of members and tens of thousands of people actively in the application process through their company. “It’s been an incredible journey,” says Porter. “Once you decide you are going to do something and you are doing it for the right reasons, I think the world works for you.”