Taj Eldridge has had a wild ride.
 
The investor and entrepreneur worked his way from a bank branch tucked inside a Texas grocery store to UBS Group in Beverly Hills before a turn of bad luck left him packing clothes in a Zumiez Inc. warehouse.
 
A decade on from that fall, Eldridge is an accomplished startup investor, head of investments at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator and managing partner of a mission-driven venture fund.

Eldridge, 45, said his colorful journey, and the bumps along the way, gave him the tools he needed to succeed in investing and in life.

“I feel like all those experiences,” he said, “all of that prepared me for this.”

Eldridge grew up in Dallas and attended college at Texas A&M University, where he majored in poetry and literature.

“I wanted to be a rapper,” he said. “My parents said, ‘I don’t care what you want to be as long as you go to college.’”

After graduating and struggling to find work as a writer, Eldridge settled on a job at a Dallas bank branch where he had previously worked summers. The Wells Fargo & Co. location was an early trial of the “in-store banking” concept, located next to the frozen foods aisle inside a local grocery store.
 
Despite the unglamorous work, Eldridge learned key skills during his time as a small branch banker. Chief among these, he said, was the value of storytelling in business.

“With banking, we would be looking at things like what your life is like before the loan and then what it looks like after,” he said. “It was really painting a visual picture for the client.”
 
This focus on communication and relationship-building, according to Eldridge, would later play an important role in his journey up the banking hierarchy.
 
Eldridge soon got restless in his hometown banker role. He decided that it was time to move on and “literally threw a dart at a big map” on his wall to determine his next move. The dart landed near Las Vegas, and Eldridge immediately put in for a transfer with Wells Fargo. By the time the bank responded, he had already been in Las Vegas for 48 hours.

“On Monday, I got a call saying there was a position open for me as an assistant branch manager in Vegas,” he said. “They wanted to do a phone interview, and I told them I could do it in person.”

Although he only remained in Vegas for a year, Eldridge said the move taught him the importance of taking risks in order to get where you wanted to be — a lesson he would apply throughout his investing career.
 
He moved to Los Angeles in 1999 to marry his then-girlfriend and stepped into a corporate banking role with Wells Fargo shortly afterward.

Eldridge’s banking career took off in Los Angeles. He was accepted into Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School, where he received his MBA, and was subsequently hired into UBS Group’s Beverly Hills asset management team.

“For a kid from Texas, that was definitely something my parents would write home about,” he said.

After several years building relationships and his investing chops at UBS, Eldridge moved to downtown-based hedge fund TRW Investments.

“That was when I started investing in startups on the side,” he said. “I got the startup bug in me, and I quit (after only six months at TRW). I left to work at one of the startups I had invested in.”

That startup struggled, leaving Eldridge without an income to help support his young child and pregnant wife. To bridge the gap, he got a job packaging clothes at a Zumiez warehouse.

“That was one of the lowest points of my life,” he said. “It was me in this warehouse with an MBA degree. It was humbling.”

Incubator opportunity

Despite his hard work, Eldridge’s original startup eventually failed. For the next five years, he was involved with a series of other startups before landing his next big role in the investing space.

“The University of California (Riverside) called me up and said that they were building this startup incubator,” he said. “They asked me to help run it.”

Eldridge agreed and set to work revamping the accelerator. He and several partners there also launched a $10 million investment vehicle dubbed the Highlander Venture Fund.
 
“That was the first time a true venture fund was created in the Inland Empire,” Eldridge said.

Two years later, in 2017, Riverside was ranked as the fourth-best city in the nation for minority entrepreneurs by Entrepreneur magazine. That same year, Eldridge was awarded “Innovator of the Year” honors by the mayor of Riverside. “It was a really great experience,” he recalled.

Less than a year later, however, Eldridge’s life would again be turned upside down.
In May 2018, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease. The damage had gone undetected for long enough that it appeared likely to be fatal.

“I was in stage-five kidney failure, which is the end,” he said. “I had to immediately go into dialysis. …  From 2018 until this moment, I go into dialysis at 3 a.m. each day.”

Not slowing down

Despite the life-threatening illness, Eldridge never missed a beat. He received and accepted an offer to lead investments for the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, or LACI, that same year. He also got involved with a nonprofit called VC Include, led by Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson, which is designed to train and mentor fund managers of color.

“Think of it like an accelerator for VC,” Eldridge said.

Alongside his ongoing work with LACI, Eldridge has also recently deepened his involvement with VC Include. He joined Robinson and Keith Malcolm Spears to form a separate fund called Include Venture Partners.
 
The entity will act as a fund of funds, investing in fund managers of color across the country. It will be dual-headquartered in San Francisco and South Los Angeles.

Include Venture Partners is targeting $250 million for its first fund. A portion of this has already been “soft-circled,” according to Eldridge, leaving the firm poised to start investing as soon as the second quarter of this year.

Through Include and his role at LACI, Eldridge hopes to pass on the hard-earned lessons of his career. “The Vegas trip told me to take risks,” he said. “The warehouse time told me that there is always a brighter day ahead.”

The entrepreneur even draws lessons from his ongoing battle with disease. Eldridge said he is open about his condition at work and often takes business calls while on dialysis.

“I tell founders, ‘If I can do this and still run my business, then you can do it,’” he said.