We Did Not Come This Far to Stay Here

A Letter from Martha Hernández, Co-Founder & CEO, ESO Ventures

There is a question I get asked a lot: how do you know your model actually works?

My answer is always the same. Look at who applied.

When ESO launched the City of Oakland Green Accelerator this spring, over 100 businesses signed up for 25 seats. Not 25 people curious about a workshop. One hundred businesses, operating, revenue-generating, Oakland-rooted, competing for a spot in a 52-week program designed to move them from the margins of the green economy into the center of it. We had to turn away qualified founders. That is not a recruitment problem. That is a supply problem. There is not enough infrastructure designed for founders at this stage, and the demand proves it.

That is everything ESO was built for. Twenty-seven Black and Brown founders, 18 of them headquartered directly in Oakland Opportunity Zones, all connected to sustainability and green business practices, now moving through a full year of structured curriculum, capital access, and procurement readiness support, with the City of Oakland sitting at the table as an active co-delivery partner, not just a funder. By Phase 4, city representatives are in the room helping our entrepreneurs understand how cities buy, how to write a winning bid, and how to earn the certifications that open procurement doors. That is infrastructure with a direct pathway to government contracts.

This is what ESO has always been trying to build. And we are just now getting to the place where the world can see it clearly.

Let me back up for a moment, because the foundation matters.

In 2025, we made a deliberate choice. After rapid expansion in 2024, we scaled back capital deployment volume and doubled down on rigor. We strengthened milestone tracking. We tightened capital-readiness thresholds. We refined cohort sequencing. We improved revenue per employee. We deployed 52 loans totaling $1.9 million through our Capital in the Community Fund, a median loan of $24,000, 44% at zero percent interest, and 72% of that capital went to founders who had never accessed outside funding before. Our funding rate grew from 23% to 39% over three years, even as our standards went up.

Impact without discipline is fragile. We chose discipline.

That discipline is what made 2026 possible.

This year, we are expanding to Los Angeles through our partnership with Workforce Innovation Labs and East Los Angeles College, bringing the ESO Next curriculum into a community college setting and reaching a new geography of founders who deserve exactly what we built. Workforce Innovation Labs has been with us since the beginning of ESO. We are enhancing an ecosystem and supporting student and community entrepreneurs. ESO is an important piece of the ecosystem by unlocking capital for those who are eligible. This public private partnership can serve as a model for other communities.

California’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI), Kaiser Permanente, Wells Fargo and Latino Community Foundation, to name a few, are not just names on a letterhead. They are operational and programmatic partners who are currently helping ESO deliver our ESO Next curriculum to entrepreneurs who would otherwise never see it. Those relationships represent the kind of institutional trust that takes years to earn and has to be honored every single cohort, every single session.

And the Green Accelerator with the City of Oakland is the clearest proof yet that ESO's model is ready for what comes next, new cities, new geographies, new sectors. A 52-week program of this scope typically costs $250,000 or more to deliver at full scale. The partnership with Mayor Barbara Lee's office brought critical support that made launch possible, and that institutional signal matters. When a mayor shows up, sends her team to co-deliver curriculum, that is not a photo opportunity. That is a city putting its weight behind a model it believes in. We made it happen because the model works and the partners believed in it before it became a proof point. Now it is a proof point. And the conversation we are already beginning to have, about what it means to bring this model to other cities, is the most important conversation in our pipeline right now.

Here is what I want people to understand about ESO in 2026.

We are not a nonprofit managing a grant portfolio. We are not a program that ends when the cohort graduates. We are a for-profit company that has built a repeatable, licensable, data-driven operating system for entrepreneurial infrastructure, and we are actively moving toward the partnerships, contracts, and geographic expansion that will prove it can work anywhere there are under-resourced founders and a city that wants to change that.

The racial wealth gap will not close through awareness. It closes through ownership. Through businesses that hire, that generate revenue, that compete for contracts, that build intergenerational wealth in neighborhoods that have been systematically excluded from doing exactly that.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies, at current rates it will take the average Black family 228 years and the average Latino family 84 years to reach the wealth white families hold today. That is not a gap. That is a design. ESO is not interested in managing that timeline. We are interested in disrupting it, one entrepreneur, one loan, one city contract, one neighborhood at a time.

That is what we are building. That is why we are still here.

If you are a city, a CDFI, a foundation, or a corporate partner sitting on the question of whether entrepreneurial infrastructure like ours belongs in your strategy, the answer is yes. And I would love to talk.

Build where you are.

Martha Hernández Co-Founder & CEO, ESO Ventures

Enjoyed this story? Subscribe to our newsletter to receive more updates directly to your inbox.