Kenny Welcome isn’t yet a decade out of Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business and he’s launched his own venture capital firm, KJW Capital, with the aim of connecting primarily Black people of wealth with investment opportunities, particularly in new businesses founded by Black entrepreneurs.
Welcome, 31, has set himself an ambitious target of raising an initial $100 million of assets under management, mostly through the connections he made while working for Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. as an investment adviser to wealthy clients.
Working in their New Orleans branches, Welcome — who was a nose tackle for the Green Wave (“I weighed over 300 pounds then but I’ve lost 100 pounds since,” he said) — specialized to a large degree on advising professional athletes, who have been notoriously vulnerable to dodgy investment pitches that have left many broke soon after their careers ended.
Welcome is starting off with two similarly minded colleagues:
Ryan Bates, a New Orleans native and Morehouse graduate who also worked in asset management at JPMorgan and now has his own property development firm as well as working for affordable housing developer IDP Properties (he led the Chef Tower Apartments on Chef Menteur Highway).
And former Green Wave teammate Carlos Wilson, who is a mergers and acquisitions consultant at PricewaterhouseCooper in Chicago and will join KJW Capital full time in 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What drew you to banking and wealth management in particular?
I grew up in New Orleans East and went to McDonogh 35. I was always good with money. So, when I ended up getting a full-ride football scholarship to Tulane and I became known as “the banker” to my teammates because I would lend money and charge interest. I would also advise people on the importance of the building credit. So, when I graduated (with a bachelor of science in business management and marketing), it seemed a natural fit to go into wealth management.
Why jump out of private banking after just seven years and go it alone with your own firm?
At J.P. Morgan, I was one of the first African American bankers they had hired in the region. I received a lot of support and I made a lot of introductions of wealthy investors to leverage partnerships with company founders and owners, many of them Black. I ended up being one of the founders of the bank’s Diverse Wealth Initiative.
(In the wake of the incidents of 2020, which included the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, JPMorgan joined many other American firms that were launching diversity-minded initiatives. This included the Diverse Wealth Initiative, launched in five U.S. cities, including New Orleans, aiming to help Black families build generational wealth.)
But I noticed gaps in how diverse founders and people of wealth lacked knowledge not only in how to gain access to financial capital but also in other areas, like social capital, knowledge capital. That eventually led me to think it would be a natural fit to start out on my own.
What is your investment approach, in terms of the startup or newer high-growth companies you’re looking to invest your clients’ money in?
My philosophy is to invest in founders who get stuff done. It’s the founders more than anything that you invest in. But it’s not only startups we’ll be investing in. We have really solid, really safe deals, too. I still have a solid network at JPMorgan and there is a good pipeline of deals that have already been vetted that we have access to.
Okay, but back to the startups and your aim to be a source of investment capital for area businesses, especially Black-owned, that have a lot of promise. You’ve mentioned your already have one you’ve invested in that you expect to be a big winner?
We do, we have a business that is closing on a Series A financing in January and is already in talks with (consumer goods giant Proctor & Gamble) for an exit at a really nice valuation. It’s a woman owner, a chemist. I can’t say what it’s called yet, but it is in the feminine care products business and been going for seven years. It should make a big splash.