Earnest Sweat

Earnest is a proud native of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a graduate of Columbia University, where he earned a BA in Economics and Political Science. He completed his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management as an Evan Schechter scholar and Management Leadership for Tomorrow fellow.

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Earnest resides in the Bay Area with his wife and son. He is deeply passionate about increasing the number of underrepresented investors in venture capital and serves as a founding board member of BLCK VC.

Earnest Sweat, Founding Partner of Public School Ventures, has been a dynamic force in the venture capital landscape since 2016, continually innovating, building, and evolving. Under his guidance, Public School Ventures has grown into a thriving syndicate of over 750 members. This community brings together technical operators, go-to-market experts, family offices, and institutional LPs to invest in leading early-stage B2B enterprise startups.

He is a former Venture Partner at GreatPoint Ventures, where he is focused on investing in ‘value chaintech’ – startups that generate efficiency, reduce costs, or enhance the value of digital and physical assets. These software companies are improving high-tech problems, one of the greatest needs over the next decade, across real estate, retail, ecommerce, and supply chain industries. Earnest has led investments in companies such as Flexport, Flexe, Bit.io (acquired by Databricks), Lula and BookOutdoors. His entire portfolio has grown to a combined more than $14 billion in enterprise value and has increased on average 8.6x in post-money valuation, with six companies growing more than 10x. 

Today, Earnest leads an early-stage VC syndicate called Public School Ventures and is the Co-host of Swimming With The Allocators, a VC podcast with a fresh take on the VC- LP relationship, putting dynamics and insider topics on the table. For more on his background and current role check out this post here (and a twitter summary here).

Earnest is a member of Kauffman Fellows Class 26, and is serving his fellowship at GreatPoint Ventures under mentors Bill Tobin and Neil Sequeira.