Black women have played a pivotal role in Tiana Tukes’s career trajectory.
Originally setting her sights on building a long-term career in journalism, a friend suggested a professional pivot and Tukes realized she could have a bright future in finance. One of her biggest champions in the shift was Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital, a firm centered on start-up founders who are women, are people of color and/or identify as LGBTQ.
“I met her not too long after I graduated from Morehouse College, and her story resonated with me,” Tukes tells ESSENCE. “We shared many parallels. She’s an openly queer woman who experienced homelessness, housing insecurity, and a lot of similar challenges that I’d experienced in my own life. It was really inspirational to see how she built her firm from the ground up, even notwithstanding her own challenges she had personally.”
Over time, Tukes went on to hold positions in investment, operations and partnerships with some of the country’s most prestigious fintech and tech companies including Silicon Valley Bank, Plume Clinic, Sequoia Capital, Accenture, and Spotify among others.
After making her mark in the corporate sector, Tukes co-founded LGBT VC in 2022, a global nonprofit dedicated to empowering LGBTQ investors. Despite having immense experience and insight into the inner-workings of VCs, Tukes’s mission wasn’t to launch her own—but to teach others how to use capital to better their own lives.
“I made that choice because I knew the industry needed infrastructure,” Tukes tells ESSENCE. “When I started my career in venture years ago, I knew that intrinsically, it would not be easy for me. Go figure. I’m Black, I’m a woman, and I’m also transgender. So, I think all those things, I’ve worked at the leading, no, the number one firms in venture {Sequoia Capital} and I know first-hand how competitive of an industry venture. But even working in that firm is all the more competitive. I knew I had to fight tooth and nail for my place there and all the while, I also knew it didn’t have to be that difficult. It didn’t have to be as hard. So founding LGBTQ VC was truly a labor of love that I’m immensely proud of.”
She’s since left the organization, but Tukes says she “so deeply proud of the legacy built there, particularly around supporting the next generation of investors.”
While there, she spearheaded programs with the New York City Mayor’s office in which the organization supported its summer youth employment program, particularly queer and trans, youth of color, immigrant families, low-income families, and really exposed them to careers that otherwise they wouldn’t have known about in philanthropy, in law, technology, in business.
Now, she is lecturing at Spelman College in entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor. She says it is a full circle moment in many ways.
“Black women have played a pivotal role in my career, and this is truly my way of giving back to them. And the students are why I do what I do. I’ve met some really phenomenal young women and students at large who are going to change the world.”
Tukes’s class centers on the Black entrepreneurship mindset in which students from all years and classes could sign up, indicating the deep desire for the course, as well as its wide breadth.
“It’s a demonstration of the dynamism of the students themselves as well,” Tukes says. “They all have this mission to build something worthwhile. And I’m really lucky and privileged to have had the chance to work with them.”
After accomplishing so much all before the age of 30, the 29-year-old says she is working on a book focused on key learnings from various Black women in business based on hundreds on conversations Tukes has had throughout her career. The takeaway?
“I believe every black woman has a responsibility to rise to the throne that she’s been given,” she says. “She has her life, which is her kingdom, and she needs to take ownership of it. She needs to have clarity of vision because she was given a gift. It’s her responsibility to govern it accordingly. And once she understands that there’s nothing outside of her that can ever disturb or take away from that sovereignty, that birthright, oh, my gosh. That’s the richness of life. When you understand that you are sovereign before anything else, no one can take possession of that. I care immensely about Black women taking back their power and owning it and not being afraid of it. Because so many of us are afraid of our true power. That’s what I’m here for.”