Nipsey Hussle’s Business Partner Carries Out ‘Our Opportunity’ Investment Initiative

Nipsey Hussle and his long-time business partner, David Gross, had a vision for an investment initiative that Gross has kept alive following the Grammy Award-winning rapper’s untimely death.  

Born Ermias Joseph Asghedom, Nipsey and Gross founded Our Opportunity, a grassroots investment initiative that was started in Hussle’s neighborhood in L.A., but the plans are to extend Our Opportunity’s reach to inner cities around the country like Atlanta, Chicago, Washington, DC, and New Orleans.

In October 2019, Gross launched the #InvestorChallenge to introduce the organization and to encourage new investors to get involved. According to its website, Our Opportunity is a community facing organization focused on spreading economic opportunity throughout inner cities via direct engagement and impact. The objective is to identify and implement grassroots initiatives that work locally and scale them nationally. The objective was to open 1,000 new accounts and since December 2019, 450 new investors have opened accounts with that number increasing within the past month.

Gross told Complex about the decision to do the #InvestorChallenge, “We want it aligned with our impressionistic vision and objective for our communities, which is to encourage the mindset of investment, ownership, and entrepreneurship broadly. But it was actually a reaction to [another social media campaign]. On Mondays, I used to do this thing on social media called ‘Market Mondays.’ I would answer specific questions about what was going on in the capital markets or financial markets. The reaction I got was so strong, but the majority of the questions I got were from people who would say, “I don’t know anything about investing, but how do we get started?” So it was just a response to that.”

“Trae Tha Truth was the first person who reached out. He was like, ‘That investor challenge when you do it, I want to give, too.’ It was super organic. Then we realized that other people would do it. Then a few other people reached out to me. It didn’t start off as being some structured, organized thing, but because of the buy-in that we got, we had to give it some structure and build it out.”