NEW YORK, NY
Earlier this year, the founder and CEO of The Folklore (a software company that helps small brands sell globally) crossed $6.2 million in venture and angel funding raised for her company. By most standards of startup comms strategy, that's a hard-won and legitimate reason for a milestone post: the "here's what I learned raising capital as a Black woman founder" format that performs reliably on LinkedIn.
Rasool didn't write that post. Instead, she built The First 200: a documented index of the first 200 U.S.-based Black women founders to raise $1 million or more in venture capital. It launched in late June, and within weeks it had been picked up by Inc. and AfroTech, with the 200 founders on it having collectively raised more than $4 billion. Rihanna is on the list, at $310 million raised for Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty. So is Toyin Ajayi, who raised $891 million for Cityblock Health, and Etosha Cave, who raised $929 million for the carbon-transformation company Twelve. So is Denise Woodard, who raised $25 million for Partake Foods and made history in the process as the first Black woman to publicly raise $1 million for a consumer foods startup.
The difference between the milestone post Rasool didn't write and the index she built instead points to something a lot of executive brand-building advice gets wrong — especially for underrepresented founders, who are told constantly to be more visible, more vocal, more present, without much distinction made between visibility that serves the founder and visibility that serves anyone else.
For executives, "build your personal brand" tends to be two moves: tell your story, or celebrate your win. Both are legitimate. Both are also, structurally, about you. And both carry a cost of every post asking to be seen as an exception, a first, or a proof point, which adds to a kind of exhaustion. It's visibility that is tied to one person's ongoing performance rather than to anything that persists after the post scrolls by.
Rasool's move was different in kind, not just in generosity. In her own words, describing what led her to build the index: "As founders, we're constantly chasing the next milestone, solving the next problem, and recovering from the next setback. It's easy to forget how much progress has already been made." That's not a humblebrag dressed up as insight, it's a specific observation about how founder content works against its own subjects. The format rewards momentum, but not collective memory. Every founder is incentivized to talk about what's next, which means nobody is documenting what's already happened.
The First 200 fixes that by building something citable. A journalist writing about Black women in venture capital now has a source. An investor benchmarking a deal has a reference point. A founder preparing her own raise has 200 comparables instead of zero. None of that requires Rasool to keep talking about herself — the index does the work, and it keeps doing the work long after this news cycle ends.
It would be easy to read this as a story about generosity, and stop there. But there's an argument underneath it that's more than that: progress is real, and it is chronically undercounted, because the infrastructure for tracking it has never existed. That's a verifiable claim, not a mood. It's the difference between posting "representation matters" and building the dataset that makes the case for you. One is a sentiment anyone could write, while the other required Rasool to actually do the unglamorous work of research, verification, and design, and it's the kind of point of view that holds up to scrutiny because it comes with receipts attached.
That distinction matters for how thought leadership gets built generally, not just for underrepresented founders. A point of view that only exists as a sentence is cheap to produce and cheap to forget. A point of view that comes attached to an artifact — a dataset, a tool, a framework, an index — is expensive to produce and hard to argue with, which is exactly why it travels further and lasts longer.
The lesson isn't "go build an index." Most founders don't have the bandwidth, and copying the tactic without the underlying logic just produces another form of performance. The useful question is narrower: what do you already know, or have access to, that nobody else has documented yet, and would be more valuable to the people around you than another post about your own year?
For some founders that might be an index like Rasool's. For others it's smaller and more immediate: a shared doc of the investors who actually wrote checks for founders like you, with real numbers instead of vague encouragement. A breakdown of the specific objections you heard in fundraising meetings and how you answered them. A running list of vendors, lawyers, or operators who've proven reliable for founders at your stage. None of these require a launch or a press hit. They require picking one piece of hard-won, specific knowledge and turning it into something a peer can use without you in the room.
That's the actual test of whether a brand-building move is about you or for others: does it still work if you stop talking? Rasool's index passes. A milestone post doesn't, because the value expires the moment the news moves on. The founders whose authority compounds over time are, overwhelmingly, the ones who've built something that keeps proving their point after they've stopped making it.
