Jon Blackwell

CPO, SoLo Funds

Jon has dedicated his life towards helping entrepreneurs across the globe. He started out at Silicon Valley Bank working with early stage technology startups but his passion quickly lead him to leave banking behind and move to Kenya where he worked in microfinance. After returning to the US, he co-founded Tala, a mobile credit scoring and lending company. He’s spent 7 years as Chief Product Officer where he lead all product development, strategic partnerships, and expanding the business throughout Eastern Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He then continued his work with entrepreneurs by mentoring founders through Social Venture Partners, a non-profit accelerator. He is currently the CPO at SoLo Funds (Techstars ’18). Jon holds a MPP from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Economics from Virginia Tech.

Articles by Jon Blackwell

The LinkedIn Playbook: How Startup Founders Can Stand Out & Scale

This LinkedIn Playbook is based on insights from a recent one-time Mucker Growth Session webinar featuring LinkedIn growth experts Alec Paul (Founder of SalesBrand) and Kyle Williams (Founder of Brickstack)....

DeepSeek vs OpenAI: Comparison Breakdown and What It Means For Your Tech Startup With Dan Cleary

In this recent webinar of our Mucker Growth Series, we discussed the evolving AI landscape with Dan Cleary, founder of PromptHub. He provided an in-depth breakdown of DeepSeek vs. OpenAI,...

Building Product Without Knowing Code With Adam New Waterson

In a deep dive into AI-driven product development, Adam New-Waterson, a former CMO turned Chief Product Officer and now solopreneur, shared how non-technical founders can harness the power of AI...

How To Build An Automated Sales Outreach Engine For Startups with ColdIQ

Many B2B startups (and even larger organizations) are unable to be successful with their outbound sales strategy because they take a lazy, “batch-and-blast” approach. In a recent Mucker Growth Series...

Navigating the AI Sales Tools Landscape To Grow Your Startup With Blue Bowen

We had the privilege of hosting, Eugene “Blue” Bowen, Research Principal from G2, one of the leading software marketplaces and review sites that cover a broad range of B2B solutions....

Compensation Benchmarks for Early Stage Startups with Peter Walker

In this Mucker Growth Session, Peter Walker from Carta reviews insights and compensation benchmarks for early stage startups gathered from Carta’s extensive dataset of nearly 50,000 startups. In the evolving...