It did make investments that cash, in keeping with the countersuit, buying Holler in December 2023, and investing $14.5 million within the messaging platform.
A tangled internet
As you may need picked up on, a lot of the melodrama right here stems from the entangled nature of the varied companies concerned.
Dennis was chairman of the board of Group Black throughout the time it allegedly withheld funds from Essence and Afropunk.
And till his resignation in 2024, Montaque was the CEO of each Group Black and Holler throughout the time that Dennis’ group alleges Group Black withheld funds in an effort to put money into Holler.
However in a twist, Dennis was additionally a big investor in Holler. That signifies that—and try to sustain right here—Dennis is suing Group Black, an organization he cofounded and led as chairman, for alleged nonpayment to Essence and Afropunk, firms he now owns, as a result of Group Black had allegedly used the owed funds to put money into Holler, an organization during which he had invested.
Holler’s property are nonetheless owned by Group Black, although the messaging platform is not energetic. Its former URL now directs to a Vietnamese streaming web site.
An unsure future
Looking back, the commingling of those numerous enterprise pursuits now looks like a fraught proposition. On some degree, the businesses merely gave the impression to be handing across the identical greenback in a circle.
This type of monetary maneuvering isn’t unusual amongst startups, the place money is in brief provide and the main target is on constructing one thing quite than turning a right away revenue. Plus, Essence, Afropunk, and Holler are the precise sort of firms that Group Black was attempting to assist—even when their homeowners occurred to learn from that assist.
Sadly, on this case the tripartite administration of the corporate, mixed with every founder attempting to serve each the pursuits of their portfolio firms and the pursuits of Group Black, appears to have backfired.
Group Black, to its credit score, continues to be alive and kicking. Bough is working the corporate now, and final month he introduced the launch of Portrait, a enterprise with a mission just like Group Black however with a give attention to minority audiences extra broadly. Group Black will now grow to be Group Black Holdings, Bough stated in a LinkedIn post.
Personally, I hope that Group Black can persist. It was and is a corporation with an necessary mission, nonetheless muddled which may have grow to be amid this energy wrestle. Through the years I’ve spoken with dozens of Group Black workers, and all the way down to the one all of them believed within the work they had been doing—a refreshing anomaly in an typically disillusioned business.
I do know that for a lot of within the Black media neighborhood, Group Black has been at instances a polarizing group. Some operators believed it sucked up all of the oxygen within the room after which didn’t execute on its core promise. However most Black media executives I’ve spoken to are conflicted on the difficulty: vital of its operations, however nervous its failure would have an effect on funding for different Black media firms.
For the second, the fallout from the state of affairs is no less than contained to its inside stakeholders. But when Group Black itself collapses, the blast radius of its implosion may very well be a lot wider.
