The Success Genome
Jewel Burks Solomon
← browse
Founder · Capital · Technology · $1–10M

Jewel Burks Solomon

Founder of Partpic, acquired by Amazon; co-founder, Collab Capital · b. 1989 · Nashville, Tennessee → Atlanta, Georgia

entrepreneurial middle-classtwo-parentNashville, Tennessee
Cost of failure 3 / 10
soft landingnothing to catch a fall
Headwinds 8 / 10
clear runagainst the current

Two calls made by hand, not formulas. how we score →

Summary

A broken tractor part she couldn't identify for her grandfather turned into a computer-vision startup.

She raised a modest $2.1 million despite a Google resume and a White House demo, then sold the company to Amazon on undisclosed terms at 27. She has spent the years since running a venture fund built to close the exact capital gap her own fundraise ran into.

Coded record
industryTechnology
talenthigh
connectionssome
outcome size$1–10M · band 2
path typeFounder · Capital
childhood householdtwo-parent
immigrant generationnone
educationcollege degree
credential fundingfamily-funded
startup capitalwage-savings
took outside investmentyes
kept ownershipno
public scrutinynone
ⓘ Hover any row for its definition.
Subject cooperation: public-only · last reviewed 2026-08-22

How it happened

iThe family business

Her grandfather, Bill McDaniel, started businesses in Mobile, Alabama in the 1960s. Her father managed the convenience stores, a laundromat, and real estate that came out of it, and her mother ran her own insurance agency for 25 years. She worked in the family businesses from the time she could talk and count, and never seriously considered doing anything but running something of her own.

iiThe problem

She studied business at Howard, interned at Google the summer before her senior year, then worked Google sales for two years after graduating in 2010. A family move to the Atlanta area put her in a customer-service job at an industrial-parts distributor, where she saw how badly suppliers struggled to identify the parts customers needed. It hit home when her own grandfather's tractor broke down and she couldn't help him figure out what part to order.

iiiThe bet
Turning point

In 2013, at 23, she took the money she'd been saving for an MBA and put it into a company instead: Partpic, cofounded with Jason Crain, a Google colleague, built around visual search for hardware and mechanical parts. She kept working through it, first at Google, later as a Google entrepreneur-in-residence, so the startup was never her only income.

ivThe sale

She raised $2.1 million, only $350,000 of it from venture firms, the rest from angels, and most of her investors passed when she needed them to reinvest. She liquidated her own stock to cover the gap. In May 2016 an Amazon employee saw her CTO present the technology at a deep learning conference, and by October she and Crain had sold the company to Amazon on undisclosed terms. She was 27.

vWhere it landed

She became the first head of Google for Startups in the U.S. in 2020, then co-founded Collab Capital, a venture fund for Black founders that has raised $125 million across two funds. She's said publicly there's "no pipeline problem at all" when it comes to who deserves the capital, only a problem with who gets it.

Can you replicate their success?

Partly

The Partpic path is genuinely repeatable: a real problem seen on the job, a modest amount of capital, and a day job kept running underneath it so the founder was never fully exposed. That part doesn't require being well-connected or independently wealthy. The harder part to replicate is what came after. Collab Capital exists because she and her co-founders could raise fund capital from institutional LPs in the specific window right after 2020, when interest in funding Black entrepreneurship spiked. By their own account, raising the second fund five years later was "incredibly hard" and took nearly two years against a cooler market and LPs with other priorities. The founder-to-fund-manager pivot is open in principle, but the capital behind it is not guaranteed to stay available at the same scale.

Required conditions
1 A real, specific problem encountered through ordinary work, not a market scan
2 Enough of a day job or side income to fund the startup without going into debt
3 A credential or employer name that gets a first meeting with investors
4 Willingness to keep fundraising through repeated rejection
5 For the fund-manager pivot specifically, institutional LPs willing to back underrepresented-focused funds in the current climate

The coded evidence

Thirteen groups, every claim sourced
Feeds cost of failure
Parent Occupations
High confidence

Mother Valinda Burks ran her own insurance agency for 25 years. Father William Burks managed convenience stores, a laundromat, and real estate that had come from his own father.

Original CNBC article; fetched via the Wayback Machine, cited at its canonical URL.

↗ cnbc.com
Parental Self Employment
High confidence

A parent worked for themselves, the strongest known predictor of founding.

Original CNBC article; fetched via the Wayback Machine, cited at its canonical URL.

↗ cnbc.com
Lineage
High confidence

Her grandfather, Bill McDaniel, started a string of businesses in Mobile, Alabama in the 1960s. She's described that as a genuine feat for a Black man to pull off there at that time.

Original CNBC article; fetched via the Wayback Machine, cited at its canonical URL.

↗ cnbc.com
Income For Schooling
Low

not established

Not established. coded.credentialFunding of "family-funded" is an inference from the family's business income, not a documented tuition arrangement.

↗ en.wikipedia.org

Structural context

founder lens · venture capital

The cost-of-failure score comes from this person's own money and circumstances. But who they were in America carried its own weight, the same way their household or income did, and it shaped how hard the path was just as much. That part isn't in the cost-of-failure number. It's here instead.

headwindwoman

Startups founded only by women have drawn about 2% of US venture capital, a share that has barely moved in a decade. Raising money as a woman was harder than any one record shows.

↗ techcrunch.com
headwindBlack

Black-founded startups got roughly 0.5% of US venture funding in 2023, while Black Americans are about 14% of the population. That gap holds no matter where a founder personally started.

↗ techcrunch.com

Among the people recorded here — women: 54 · Black subjects: 58. Representation here is who reached these outcomes, not equal odds of reaching them.

Controlled comparisons

Each holds one thing constant and varies another, so the difference is the point. A list of similar names wouldn't tell you anything.