Jamaal Glenn

I remember the day my father graduated from law school. I was six, too small to see the stage past the people in front of me, so I watched him on a projector screen from the back of the overflow section. When they announced his name, my mother cheered so loudly I was embarrassed. His cheering section was just us: my mother, my baby brother, and me.

He had returned to law school in his mid-forties, balancing night classes, a full-time job, and a young family. My mother taught sixth-grade social studies. Between them, education was non-negotiable. They paid me to read books, summer vacation became an extension of the classroom, and at dinner, every opinion had to be defended.

After law school, my father joined the Denver City Attorney’s office. Before dropping me at school, we sat in the same corner booth at McDonald’s. He drank coffee, I ate hash browns, and we talked about how he used the law to serve the city. He helped me plan my first run for student council. I didn’t realize it then, but those conversations were about service, responsibility, and legacy.

My father died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma five days after my tenth birthday. The ten years I had with him still shape me.

My mother raised my brother and me on a teacher’s salary and kept the rules exactly as they had been. The reading, the summers, the dinner-table arguments. Nothing got easier, and nothing expected of us changed.

I discovered writing in seventh grade, recounting Denver Nuggets games in a daily journal, and later edited my high school newspaper. That sent me to the Missouri School of Journalism, the first in the world and still the best. My nineteen-year-old logic also told me journalists don’t make much money, so I paired journalism with a major I assumed would pay: finance. Wall Street didn’t recruit in Columbia, Missouri, but a nonprofit that existed to get underrepresented students to Wall Street got me in the door at J.P. Morgan.

I spent three years there, through the height of the financial crisis. Bankers who had worked through Black Monday and the dot-com crash told me they’d never seen markets behave like this. Watching it up close, I formed strong convictions about where Washington and Wall Street collide, and I started writing about them. I taught myself web development and built two sites publishing my own commentary alongside the best policy and political reporting I could find. By 2009, the audience was large enough that it became a business.

I was still running it two years later when Stanford called. I sold the company’s assets and left for Palo Alto.

Stanford, and later Harvard Kennedy School, widened my view of the world. They were also a study in contrasts. The names on Harvard’s buildings belong to people who died decades ago; at Stanford, many belong to people still alive. My business school classmates had extraordinary analytical horsepower and drive. My Kennedy School classmates had a genuine idealism about improving the world. I’ve spent my career since trying to hold both.

I spent the next decade investing other people’s money, mostly billionaires’ money, through family offices and foundations built on technology fortunes. It sorted itself into one conviction: I’m good at moving capital to companies that need it and can’t easily reach it. I left to build JG Holdings, my investment and advisory firm, around exactly that.

I have thought about what kind of father I would be since I was ten, because I knew better than most children how much time a father might get. My wife and I spent six years trying to have children. Our son and daughter arrived together, and we still marvel that they’re ours. I think often about how much to cushion them from the world and how much to prepare them for it through challenge, the way my parents did at our dinner table.

I’ve been fortunate, and almost none of it was luck. People and institutions intervened in my life on purpose and pointed it somewhere better. I feel an obligation to do the same, through the boards I sit on, the capital I help move, the students I teach, and whatever comes next. It’s what my father was telling me in that booth, years before I understood it.