A Minneapolis venture capitalist had the lease terminated on his office after a video, viewed 6 million times, showed him asking a group of Black entrepreneurs in the building’s gym to prove they were tenants there.
Tom Austin, the CEO and managing partner of F2 — a venture capital and private equity group — said he was going to call 911 on the men. Instead, he called the building’s property manager, and the racial profiling was recorded in the viral video, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
This is the third viral video this week showing either a Black person killed by the police, white people threatening to call the police on Black people, or a white person calling the police on a Black person.
On Monday, a video shared on social media showed a Minneapolis Police Department officer kneeling on the neck of a Black man who said he couldn’t breathe. George Floyd died in police custody. The four arresting officers have been fired.
Another viral video showed a white woman in New York City’s Central Park calling the police on a Black man after he asked her to follow the rules and put her dog on a leash. She has been fired from her job.
The racial profiling video shot in the gym was posted on Instagram by Top Figure, a social media and branding agency that is a member of the WeWork co-working space in the Mozaic East building in Minneapolis, owned by the Ackerberg Group. The video was later posted on Twitter.
The video shows Austin introducing himself and saying, “I’m a tenant in the building — are you?”
The men in the group reply that they are all tenants. Austin demands to know which office they work in. They respond that they don’t have to tell him. He threatens to call 911 and speaks into his phone, saying “There’s a whole bunch of people who don’t appear to be” part of the building using the gym.
“As you guys can see, we’re dealing with racism here,” a voice says on the video.
In an interview later, Austin said the men became “aggressive” when he confronted them, Star Tribune reported.
In the social media post, Top Figure said they pay rent to work in the building and do not often speak out about racial profiling.
“Normally we don’t speak out about encounters of racial profiling and age discrimination that we face day to day in our lives as young black entrepreneurs,” Top Figure said on Instagram. “Although today May 26th 2020 7:51pm we encountered a situation where a man entered the facility, a shared private gym that we utilize in our @wework @mozaic_east office located in uptown Minnesota.
“Granted we’ve been in this office space and have rented and grown our business for the past 1 year and half here. As we were working out this man approached and immediately asked us who we were and if “WE BELONG” in this building. Granted in order to enter the building you NEED a key card to enter EVERY part of the building which EACH of our team members individually have. We all pay rent here and this man demanded that we show him our key cards or he will call the cops on us. We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day to day basis and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation.”
On Wednesday, Austin said he is not a racist and regrets saying anything to the men. He said he suspected that the men were not all tenants because he saw one person in the group of five men using a key fob to let the others in.
“Should have handled it differently,” he said in an e-mail. “Not my job to have done anything.”
Stuart Ackerberg, CEO of the group that owns the Mozaic East building, said, “This is not how we do business. … I’m alarmed by what I saw.”
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Dr. Paul Judge, and inventor, entrepreneur and investor, tweeted, “The guy in this video runs a VC firm. If he thinks a group of African American males are out of place in the gym, imagine what happens when someone diverse shows up to his firm looking for investment. This is why diversity & inclusion are important in VC & investment community.”
Judge is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and founding partner of Atlanta’s TechSquare Labs.
After the gym confrontation, Austin said he and the men from Top Figure continued to work out.
“By the end of the night, we were on talking terms,” Austin said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry you thought I was being racist, but I was not. If you were a bunch of women, I would have done the same thing.’ ”
