Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Bradford Jones is just 29 years old, but he’s already earned a reputation as an extremely quick study with an uncanny ability to overcome most any challenge facing him. It’s possible the first time Jones recognized this trait was when he was 9 years old, in the swimming pool at the Fox Hills community, near his boyhood home in Bloomfield Hills.
“I jumped in the deep end and came close to drowning,” he recalls. “I got pulled out, but right then and there, my mom said, ‘Nope, we’re not doing this anymore. We got to get you some swim lessons.’ ”
Years earlier, when she was working in a lab in the biology department at Wayne State University in Detroit before enrolling in medical school, she met Jones’ father. Her future husband graduated and focused on family medicine, but the couple eventually separated and Angelia Johnson Jones never finished medical school, turning her attention to her son as she pivoted to what has become an ongoing, decades-long career as a science teacher in the Detroit Public Schools Community District.
“My mom is deeply passionate about STEM and has had a tremendous impact on students in Detroit,” Jones says. “A lot of my life was her pushing me to read and do a lot of high-end learning. At the same time, she comes from a sports family with big athletes, so she pushed me into sports.”
Jones’ talent as a quick study kicked in during those swimming lessons at Fox Hills. He didn’t just learn how to swim; he mastered it.
After his first year of lessons, Jones was faster than anyone else in the pool, breaking records in multiple events before joining the North Oakland Family YMCA team and competing in the Junior Olympics in 2006.
There was just one problem.
“I hated swimming. I did not want to do the sport. It was like I was forced to do it,” Jones reveals. “I was obsessed with football, basketball, baseball — and then, when I was in middle school, I played every sport you can imagine.
“My parents didn’t want me doing tackle football, so I did flag football until eighth grade, when I finally played my first year of tackle for East Hills Middle School. I was scoring something like four touchdowns a game and was supposed to play varsity football as a freshman at what used to be called Lahser High School (today Bloomfield Hills High School).”
But Jones’ mother had her own ideas about where she wanted her son to attend high school.
“My mom tricked me into going to Brother Rice,” Jones says, with a wry grin. “She randomly drove me to the Brother Rice parking lot in August, during midsummer conditioning, introduced me to the football coach, and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to school here now as a freshman.’ My heart was broken. All my friends were at Lahser, so I was going through a really difficult time.”
Making the circumstances even more difficult for Jones was the battle his mother was fighting against cancer.
Jones persevered through the challenges, and played on the varsity football team as a freshman at Brother Rice.
“I was a safety, and was 6 feet and probably 190 pounds, so I was very big,” he says. “But with my mom being sick, it really set me off in a way that I didn’t want to play football anymore. I didn’t want to play any sports at all. I ended up asking my mom to transfer me back to Lahser, where all my friends were.”
It was at this point that Jones’ life became unsettled, even chaotic.
The transfer back to Lahser did, indeed, reunite Jones with his friends, but the move came at a significant cost: He’d planned on playing varsity football and basketball, but he had to sit out because transfer students were not allowed to play sports. And then he quickly became disillusioned with the educational environment at Lahser.
“I looked at all the seniors that were going to college, and I saw nobody on that list that looked like myself, African-American, and none of them were going to schools that I thought were respected,” he says. “That was the moment life hit me and I was like, Hey, this isn’t a competitive school for me. I gotta get out of here.”
Jones returned to Brother Rice, which also had a ban on playing sports for any students who transferred schools, and his anxiety increased exponentially over how he could pay for college without an athletic scholarship.
That’s around the time Jones crossed paths with Craig Doescher.
“He was one of the youth group leaders in my Bible study group at Kensington Church, and he was starting a company,” Jones says. “We got a chance to know each other and he started mentoring me.
“I did an internship with him, and he walked me through his warehouse, let me sit with the engineers, and showed me what it was like to actually work on the management side of a business.”
Doescher currently helms a financial consulting firm in Clarkston, but when he first met Jones he was immersed in the process of launching a startup medical device company. He says what most impressed him about Jones was the young man’s charisma.
“It was crazy,” Doescher says. “He was friends with the cooks in the kitchen at Leo’s Coney Island (in Birmingham), but he could also connect with these elite Brother Rice families. I pushed him heavily toward a business career because his people skills would be on display, and a big part of investing is building relationships.”
Prior to meeting Doescher, Jones thought he wanted to pursue a career in medicine. That goal quickly changed, though. “The moment I did my internship with him, I got obsessed about entrepreneurship,” he says.
Once Jones was cleared to compete in sports at Brother Rice, he decided to focus entirely on swimming, where he had first made his mark as an elite athlete.
That led to another crazily circuitous sports odyssey for Jones, who was recruited to swim for a small college in Kentucky. But when his mother’s cancer returned, Jones transferred to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to be closer to her.
“The U-M swim coach told me, ‘Hey man, you’re fast, but our roster’s packed,’ ” Jones says. Surmising the situation, he played the last sports card he had.
“I hadn’t touched a football since freshman year of high school, but I started training three times a day — lifting, running, and doing routes and footwork to walk onto the Michigan football team.
“The first day of tryouts, I’m competing with a bunch of other kids, and I literally raised my hand to play every position on that team for Jim Harbaugh,” Jones says. “They wanted me to play linebacker, I played linebacker. They wanted me to play safety, I played safety. They wanted me to play receiver, I played receiver. I just raised my hand for anything, trying to prove myself.
“And then Coach Harbaugh walks right up to me and says, ‘You’ll be a linebacker,’ and that’s how I literally got on the team. That was the best thing that could have happened to me, (and) the hardest training I ever had playing on that football team and being part of what we consider being a Michigan man.”
Jones earned a letter on the 2017 team. “The greatest memory of the whole experience was seeing my mother in the stands at the Big House.”
Almost equally important was being listed as an Academic All-Big Ten honoree, which came soon after another interaction with Harbaugh.
“My nickname on the team was ‘Wall Street,’” Jones says, grinning, “because after I made the team in the spring, I got an offer to do an internship for a venture capital firm based in New York.
“I told Coach Harbaugh, and he looked at me and said, ‘Venture capital? Man, I always wanted to do that. You should totally take that opportunity. Go work on Wall Street and come back in time for summer camp.’ ”
Jones not only made it back for football camp, but he was right back on Wall Street after graduating from U-M in 2019, working fulltime as one of two people recruited directly from the university.
“I worked at Insight for three-and-a-half years, and had an amazing run as a software investor, deploying over $600 million of equity in a bunch of software companies,” Jones says.
“After that, SignalFire, a very innovative AI-native venture firm out of Silicon Valley, was looking to build their New York office. It was a bunch of Google engineers who came together and took the concept of Google search into searching for talent to invest in. They brought me on as a principal in 2023, and my job was to find founders and CEOs and help them build AI companies from scratch.”
During his two-year tenure at SignalFire, Jones headed the New York office while overseeing investments in startups like Tofu, Shade, Joist.ai, and Invoke.ai.
He also secured positions on the boards of Harvard Business School’s Rock Summer Fellows entrepreneurial program and UpRound Ventures, the VC firm operated by students at U-M.
Soon after, Jones made his biggest move yet as the founder and CEO of his own yet-to-be-named company in his hometown.
“The aim is to build on the momentum of the New York City ecosystem I’ve been part of, while also contributing to Detroit’s growing venture and technology community,” says Jones, who is currently spending time in both cities.
“The venture will involve prominent people from Detroit, both those leading in the city and others in New York and Silicon Valley. The focus is not only on building something successful, but also on making it intentionally impactful.”
With the emergence of artificial intelligence and his experience in high-tech companies, Bradford believes he’s got an investment that addresses something that’s not currently being done in the market, says Doescher, who adds that the necessary capital for the venture was raised by Jones in record time.
“The common wisdom is you’ve got to hit the ground for months at a time in order to do this, but he was able to raise his seed capital with a couple phone calls,” Doescher says. “Brad just has a very unique talent, and has always inspired people to follow him and build relationships around an idea.”
Jones is confident his idea will have a significant impact in Detroit, and far beyond.
“I want to continue my connections to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but I want to bring something back to my city, man, because Detroit has been everything to me,” says Jones, who will soon announce plans for his next venture.
“My family’s from there, my closest community is there, and I think there’s really great talent in Detroit. The tough part about Detroit is all the great talent leaves. So if I can start setting a trend to get folks back who are great young talent and actually starting to build in the city, I think that can be a positive trend (in the) long term.”
