Founder to Funder
Jewel Burks Solomon built her AI startup on Google's payroll, sold it to Amazon, and
Most founder stories open with a clean break: quit the job, raise the round, bet everything. Jewel Burks Solomon’s opens with a paycheck she never gave up.
She built Partpic, a computer vision AI startup for industrial parts search, while still on Google’s payroll. The arrangement was the whole strategy. She sat down with her mentor inside Google and negotiated a role that had no precedent, something she calls entrepreneur in residence. The job did not exist. They made it up.
For three of the four years she spent building the company, she ran the startup during business hours and did her Google work at night and on weekends, from Atlanta. She funded the prototype with her own savings and won pitch competitions to get in front of the investors she wanted. Amazon acquired Partpic in 2016.
The acquisition was engineered, not stumbled into. When investors kept misreading the company as a sales startup rather than the deep tech it was, she stepped out of the spotlight and pushed her technical co-lead, Dr. Nashlie, onto the stage, cold-pitching a conference on its lack of female speakers to get her there. Amazon Corporate Development was in that room at a deep learning conference in Boston. Five months later the deal closed.
The second act is what makes this an Owner Mode story. Jewel pitched more than 200 investors during her own raise and mostly heard no. That experience became the founding thesis of Collab Capital, the $125M venture fund she co-founded and now leads to become the investor she never had.
Three takeaways from the conversation
Ask for the arrangement, do not assume you have to exit
Jewel describes negotiating an entrepreneur-in-residence role that existed on no org chart, inventing it with her mentor so she could build during business hours while Google paid her. The leap was never all or nothing. The move that let her start was the ask, not the resignation letter.
Count the floor before the leap
At 23, Jewel did not frame her risk as fearless. She mapped her actual downside first: no mortgage, no kids, a mom with a spare bedroom if it all burned down. The worst case was survivable, so she could go all in. Her read is that courage is doing the math on your floor and finding you can live with it.
Engineer the room when you have no network
With no investor network and a company the market kept misreading, Jewel built her own access. She realized pitch competitions were judged by the exact funds she wanted, so she entered the ones they judged and won her way in front of them. When the deck got read wrong, she handed her technical co-lead the stage and let the engineering speak. The move that wins is sometimes the one that takes you out of the frame.
Watch the full conversation
About this guest
Jewel Burks Solomon is Managing Partner of Collab Capital, a $125M venture fund investing in the future of work, healthcare, and commerce. She previously led Google for Startups in the U.S., where she deployed more than $45 million to Black and Latino-led businesses. Earlier, she was the founder and CEO of Partpic, a computer vision startup acquired by Amazon in 2016, and she is a marketing graduate of Howard University.
Resources
How Gravy Wealth helps high earners shift into ownership: gravywealth.com/launch Take the complimentary Ownership DNA Assessment and see how you compare to other professionals making the shift. Methodology reviewed by Archie Jones, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. go.gravywealth.com/DNA Subscribe to Owner Mode on YouTube: youtube.com/@gravywealth The Owner Mode podcast on Apple, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts live: gravywealth.com/podcast
Owner Mode publishes a new session every Monday. New here? Subscribe to follow along.
The Owner Mode Memo breaks down the sessions. Gravy Wealth brings the pathways, the tools, the operators, and infrastructure to shift from earner to owner. Explore it at gravywealth.com.