How Greenwood Became the Most Hyped Startup in Black America

Ryan Glover and Paul Judge knew nothing about finance, but 700,000 believers joined their exclusive waitlist. Can their fintech actually repair centuries of racist banking?

- Brett Pulley and Jordyn Holman

Over the past year-and-a-half, 700,000 people have added their names to the waiting list of a financial startup named Greenwood as if it were a sneaker drop. Some thought it was an actual bank created by Atlanta’s most prolific activists—Andrew Young Jr. and his modern-day civil rights counterpart, rapper Michael “Killer Mike” Render—that was trying to fix the racial wealth gap. Others thought it was a hot new secured credit card for the unbanked, a spin on Russell Simmons’s decades-old RushCard. Then there are those who saw their favorite former Real Housewives of Atlanta star Tanya Sam fronting for Greenwood on Instagram, where the brand now has 166,000 followers. Many signed on simply because the mere mention of Greenwood— named for the 1921 massacre of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” which was thrust into national consciousness when its 100-year anniversary arrived not long after the murder of George Floyd—had become the most effective shorthand for a Black financial reckoning.