Rodney Appiah co-founded Cornerstone Partners after experiencing a lack of diversity in traditional investment firms, helping pool capital among Black professionals to back diverse founders and positioning himself as one of the early Black UK investors to deliberately organize an angel syndicate around underrepresented talent. He brings structured growth and later-stage investing experience from investment banking into early-stage VC, applying that analytical rigor to very early rounds while maintaining a founder-centric approach that distinguishes him from purely startup-native seed investors.