Gillian Francis is a dynamo whose career has ranged from commodities trading to venture capital and building underserved communities with investment. At Open Squash, she also finds time to co-captain our unparallelled women’s program. Ditching early law aspirations for the buzz of finance, she mastered regulatory compliance, parlayed her acumen into enriching under-served markets, and now champions clean energy investments. First discovering squash as an adult, she found her match in its intensity and strategy, which parallel the foresight she’s always needed to succeed in business. Co-founding Rapid Ventures, Gillian is a force for economic empowerment and community building, and loves to challenge her opponents on the squash court. We sat down with her recently to hear more.
Born in London of Caribbean parents, Gillian’s aspirations as a young woman were to be a lawyer, doctor, or engineer, in line with her family’s expectations. She took anatomy classes and physics, then decided to focus on law, but somehow, ended up on the trading floor at a commodities brokerage firm.
“And I liked the energy of the trading floor,” she said. So, “I decided to continue trading commodities. I was on the compliance side, and that’s stressful, because finance bros are saying they want to make a trade, and I had to make sure it’s within regulatory compliance. And that toughened me up. It helped me be more assertive, to have more command of the room, and give me more confidence.”
At five-foot-four, saying no to finance bros was a formative experience. The firm traded oil and gas, orange juice, cotton, coffee, sugar, cocoa, and so on. French bank Société Générale bought the firm, then Gillian went to work for JP Morgan doing business development, expanding the firm’s futures derivatives trading practices into Montreal and other international markets.
“Then I decided I didn’t want to make rich folks richer anymore, and so I went back to business school, to Tuck business school at Dartmouth,” she said. “And that’s where I got introduced to squash.”
Gillian graduated, wanting to do venture capital in underserved markets, and went to Grenada for a year, trying to set up a private equity fund focusing on small and medium-sized businesses that didn’t have succession plans. Then she came back to the U.S. when one of the fund’s principals became an Ambassador to the U.S. and went to work at the World Bank.
“I still spend a lot of time in Grenada,” Gillian said. “There are some smart people in the Caribbean, and their access to capital and peer support is lacking. There’s a brain drain with people going to the U.S.”
Back in America, Gillian went to work at Citigroup, whose Community Capital group was focused on putting money back into underserved communities.
“There was a common brain drain theme where people became successful, moved out, went on to college, and never had the opportunity to come back to their communities where their success could have a magnifying effect,” she said. “Communities like the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, East New York, Detroit, New Orleans, North Philadelphia. These pockets where there’s a real disparity of incomes on a block—you have million-dollar homes right next to the public housing. And so, at Community Capital, I managed a portfolio of fund-of-funds, venture capital funds, equity, growth equity funds, as well as real estate funds that were targeting underserved communities. They were creating quality jobs so folks can have medical benefits and pensions.”
By deploying capital to other venture funds that could then invest in companies, Gillian helped create affordable housing and mixed-use properties. She pioneered the usage of new market tax credits to create more neighborhood infrastructure around new residential properties—including building Boricua College around some residential properties in the Melrose area of the Bronx.
Gillian moved on from Citi when she realized she wanted to be closer to the projects themselves. There was a lot of talk about energy efficiency, and Gillian and her Citi team had started to decarbonize some of the buildings her funds had built. Solar energy also began to come online. She invested in funds with a solar focus. That’s when she took the opportunity to work at Lockheed Martin on the energy efficiency side. She spent a decade with the firm working across a host of different capacities in renewable energy and energy storage. She’s stayed in the climate tech/clean energy space ever since, working as Managing Director at Uptake Alliance, an accelerator.
“That's when I started to see the real barriers to commercialization for early-stage startups in the initial scaling phase. They need to do pilot demonstrations, and they need funding for that. A significant barrier to commercialization is funding and non-dilutive funding is better for them because then they're not diluting themselves,” she said. “So Rapid Ventures, which is a venture studio that I co-founded, that's what we look at. We look at really trying to provide that non-dilutive funding in various forms.”
Those include Investor Tax Credits for solar and wind energy. There are also rebates. Gillian and her colleagues also bring technologies like solar to disadvantaged communities, “because that’s where we need to really decarbonize, and then with that, we can create economic development. We can bring jobs for this new energy transition to underserved communities. And then that's when wealth-building and [wealth] creation starts.”
Rapid Ventures is also forming partnerships with other entities such as local climate tech seed funds, like Launch NY, to build climate tech startup ecosystems across Upstate and Western NY.
But what about squash? Gillian has been a cross-country runner since she was nine, and loved it, but eventually got bored. After business school she had considered playing tennis, but at five-foot-four, she realized she wasn’t going to be able to serve like Serena Williams. Then she tried some squash camps, “and I fell in love with it.”
Gillian’s first squash camp was in Palencia, Spain where she mistakenly chose a WorldEnjoyer camp that trained top juniors in Europe. She got to meet and get instruction from squash champions Paul Coll from New Zealand and Nele Gilis from Belgium. But that came at the price of trying to keep up with juniors and doing three hours of on-court work followed by two hours of conditioning and strength training breaking for lunch and siesta and another three hours on court.
“This was for a week, and I realized I liked the intensity of that,” she said. “I like having my body feel sore from doing all those workouts. And I wanted to get better, and it was a big challenge for me, having been a runner and not having had much hand-eye coordination. Having a racket where you must be positioned and swing, and watch the trajectory of the ball, and think about where you want to hit it. You must think two or three steps ahead. And I realized ‘this is the perfect sport for me because it’s the same thing I have to do in business and finance’, and with the startup world, you must think three or four steps ahead.”
At this point, Gillian has been playing squash since 2018. She played her first opponent at the Rothenberg tournament in New York. During her first match she wondered why her opponent wasn’t hitting the ball to her like her instructors had after a year of lessons at the Westside YMCA. Although she had good technique, she realized that she needed to incorporate match play into her training if she was going to improve so she entered more tournaments and started to do better.
“When I started, I visited a lot of different squash clubs. I had a good experience at the Y on 63rd street. Everyone was super friendly, and they welcomed me in. Then I went to Cityview and had a membership there. Then the pandemic hit, and that’s when Open Squash opened in January. The other clubs weren’t open, so I tried Open Squash.”
Gillian had some lessons, wore a mask on court, and trained through the community’s adult academy.
“And then we started to think about how we can grow a women’s community. So, I’m co-captain of the women’s program along with Lauren, and I’m very involved, love the sport, love the community,” she said.
Open Squash has “the best women’s community in New York,” Gillian said. “There’s no comparison, and this is really
the hub for women that come to New York. We’re trying to get a pipeline of younger women that are coming to New York for jobs, maybe out of university, and start to offer summer programs for them. And now with the FiDi facility it’s a lot easier because we were getting a little crowded at Bryant Park.”
One of the Open Squash coaches, Ciara Richards, along with Gillian and Lauren leads monthly round-robins for women, which have been very popular among women of all levels. There are more women’s activities planned for the Fall, when the squash session starts.
“It's really intimidating to start squash in your 30s or in your late 20s where you can't even hit the ball,” Gillian said. “I mean, I remember the first time I started, and I was like, ‘this is going to be easy.’ I was swinging air for a really long time in that session. But I like how open the community is here. And you can still play those higher-level players because they’ll add conditions to their game, like they can only hit the ball above the cut, or whatever it is. And then you're both growing and that's what's really accessible.”
Thanks for sharing your squash journey with us, Gillian!
You can also watch a video version of this interview at our Boast About It show here!