When we first posted The Black Founder List during Black History Month, the world looked very different. Coronavirus was not being mentioned much in the news in the US, nor were Black founders.

Fast forward to today, the Black Lives Matter movement has begun to affect how people see the Black experience across every industry, even tech. This movement is pushing people to go beyond short term solutions, as the country has begun a larger discussion around how to address racism and make the startup, tech, and venture capital industry more inclusive for Black professionals.

Back in 2015 Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital, stated that the VC community is “an increasingly predictable and lookalike bunch that just seems to follow each other around from one trivial idea to another.” At the core of this problem are the people stewarding the capital — these people are supposed to be the arbiters of good ideas. Yet Black founders are consistently left out of this equation.

To celebrate Juneteenth, we’ve put together an initial list of Venture Capital firms that have led investment in companies founded by Black founders. These are our early allies in tech. We used the original Black Founder List as the basis and in partnership with Crunchbase expanded our data set. We’ve kicked off this list in the hopes that the venture community will begin contributing, helping make it the comprehensive source of truth around black investment.

👉🏾 The Black Founder List (Now Including VC Firms)

The vision for this database is to provide the ecosystem with data, analytics, and visualizations on leaders in the VC industry who are spearheading investments in Black founders.

This list was compiled by Fatima Dicko, James Norman (Pilotly), Mike Endale (Moxit), Sefanit Tades, and Yonas Beshawred (StackShare).

This is a guest post by a collective of Black startup founders based in The Bay Area.

In honor of Black History Month ✊🏾, a group of Black founders, VCs, and tech professionals put together the most comprehensive list of US-based venture-backed Black founders ever. We hope this will be an inspiration to a generation and serve as a running historical record of Black founders, both past and present.

The release of Jessica Livingston’s book “Founders At Work” has inspired many startup founders as she covers virtually every successful tech founder in recent history. It has almost become standard reading for many, but for most Black founders it fails to inspire as the stories a don’t feel inspired when they read stories about white founders- it’s too far out of reach. What would be more inspiring for them is reading stories about founders that look like them. We’re excited to share a comprehensive list of Black founders who’ve raised VC.

We captured almost every US-based, Black startup founder that has raised venture capital. We expect to look back on this list in a couple of years and be in awe at how much larger it has gotten. Our hope is that a subset of this list eventually turns into the table of contents for a book titled “Black Founders At Work” that somebody, some day, will write.

👉🏾 The Black Founder List (Venture-Backed)

There are a number of individuals that helped compile this list, key contributors include:

• Yonas Beshawred
• James Norman (Transparent Collective)
• Sefanit Tades
• Sydney Paige Thomas (Precursor Ventures)

- Black Founders, VCs, and tech professionals

P.S. If you know of a founder that is missing, please just edit the doc and we will make sure to add them to the list!

P.P.S. If you’re a fellow founder on this list, hop in this new Google Group 👉🏾 https://groups.google.com/d/forum/the-black-founders-list

Techish is a weekly podcast where hosts Abadesi and Michael Berhane break down all the latest tech and pop culture news. It's Tech-ish. Catch the latest episode on all good podcast apps

Abadesi and Michael are back breaking down Disneys new streaming service – is it a Netflix killer?

Following up from this tweet thread they also then discuss the controversy as to whether Jumia [recently gone public] is an African startup.

That’s followed by a harsh look at Alibaba Jack Ma’s CEO’s statement about a 996 work schedule – 9am-9pm six days a week 😲. Also, what is a startup – who gets to define it and is it purely all about growth?

And of course, they had to discuss Beyonce’s amaaazing Homecoming documentary and Donald’s Guava Island.

Listen here: Itunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, Overcast, Google Podcasts

This conversation is a snippet from this #Techish podcast episode between Arlan Hamilton [founder of Backstage Capital], and Michael Berhane [founder of POCIT], cleaned up and edited for readabilty sake.

I’ve always wanted to know when you first had the idea for Backstage Capital. What was the first thing you did?

Cried [haha] It didn’t happen overnight. I studied, I started my education to understand venture capital. I had to.

The old guard, the people who are already there, perhaps they needed a little bit more of a shakeup when it came to their perspectives. And so some of it couldn’t be taught. The majority of it couldn’t be taught. So I wanted to understand the rules to know which ones to break.

So when did you feel confident enough to start sending e-mails out to people?

I started sending e-mails early on, and they were mostly because I was like “I’m learning so I’d like to learn from you.”

These are the e-mails that I get today, and I understand where they’re coming from. I always thought about adding value as you take value.

How do you offer value when you’re a complete outsider, and you haven’t got any connections?

I offered them perspective. I offered them access. I cringe at the thought now but the closest thing I can compare it to at the time was being a caddy. I can tell them which way the wind is blowing and tell them which club to use. That was what I was offering; “there’s a trend happening, and it’s going to happen shortly so let me navigate that for you.”

I offered that to a lot of people, and at the time they just didn’t buy it. They just didn’t think that that was necessary.

Now you fast forward three-four years. Everybody, in general, knows they need to be thinking about diversity.

How do we avoid it becoming a momentary trend which goes by the wayside after a couple of years?

Well, I’ve said one of the things that I feel I can offer to founders besides capital is the truth and my perspective.

I have said in the past that I do think it’s going to be this trendy thing to invest in the black and brown founder. Just as it has been for women. It’ll be this trendy thing that does go away. So I think it’s important for us, that as that’s happening to take full advantage of it [not to be reckless and not to be just doing whatever you can just to get some money].

I used to say that black is the new bitcoin [haha].

All of this work that everyone is doing [including Backstage capital, my fund] is going to lead to a lot of money being spent on Black founders which is awesome. I think that will happen between now and middle to end of 2020 and then I think as fast as it came in it will disappear, and the way that we counter that is by one knowing it. Be aware. The second is by enabling and catalyzing angel investors and VC’s of color today. We can’t wait till it runs out because then it’ll be too late.

So if people look at Backstage Capital and say oh I want to do that. Great. That’s why I’m doing this. I want there to be competition. I want there to be dozens of us.

We’re talking to more of the larger funds, and they’re hiring more women, and now they’re getting it. There was a day a couple of weeks ago where four women were hired as part as partners or principles at VC funds [including Backstage]. That would have been unheard of two years ago. It was like ‘oh I have to keep up now.’ So we keep cultivating and nurturing that. Those larger funds need to; they have to. There’s no question they need to be investing in people [not just in companies] and their next generation of talent who will write checks. If they want to be around [there are some people who don’t care about being around the past five years].

I just think that for you to be a solution you have to admit there’s a problem.

Are there still a percentage of people who see no problem.

You know I’ve learned there’s a percentage but is it’s a minority now. At least from what I can see and I get to see a lot of it. I get to see the Twitter version. And I get to see the real version.

Break that down for us.

The Twitter version is what investors need you to think of them.

Yeah.

And then the real version is what’s actually happening, who is actually writing the checks, Who’s actually hiring, who’s actually answering requests for things that move the needle. It’s a very different landscape behind the scenes. But more and more those two worlds are are matching up.

Thanks for reading! 🎧 For the latest episode of the #Techish podcast go here. For more 🔥 articles go to peopleofcolorintech.com, for jobs pocitjobs.com

written by Kimerie Green

For the past few months, I have been working as a Software Engineering Fellow at Khan Academy. This program gives engineers from non-traditional backgrounds the opportunity to build their experience by working on real products alongside full-time engineers. During my time as a fellow, I’ve had a chance to work with amazing engineers and work on projects that have had an immediate impact on Khan Academy’s users. I was attracted to this role because of my background working for education nonprofits. The fellowship has given me actual engineering experience while allowing me to pursue my passion for increasing educational equity for all learners.

A few weeks ago, we had our internal Healthy Hackathon where everyone across the company worked on projects related to anything from improving KA products, creating internal tools to make everyone’s lives easier, creating applications to improve greater society (beyond education), or anything that fosters curiosity, collaboration, and fun.

I worked on a project called “Read-to-Me” that used Mozilla’s Web Speech API to read widget content created in Perseus aloud in our Early Learner products. This minor improvement allows young learners who are still building their reading skills to have additional support when completing exercises on our platform. I was excited to work on a project that would better help all early learners regardless of their backgrounds. Many of the gaps in achievement that form between low-income and students of color and their more affluent counterparts begin in early childhood. This project aligned perfectly with my desire to increase equity in education. Additionally, I was able to work with/learn from two experienced engineers and play around with a cool experimental web technology!

I had so much fun working on this project, but it wasn’t without challenges. Perseus is one of the most complicated parts of our codebase, and it was hard to decide where and how the API should be used in existing code that had a lot of complexity. We didn’t end up shipping Read-to-Me (it needs a few rounds of code review and some design help), but I am proud of what we were able to achieve. Through this project, I learned a few lessons that I hope will continue to support me as I continue to grow and reach my fullest potential as a software engineer (and hopefully this will be significant others too):

Endless Curiosity Beats Getting the Answer Right Away: One way that I have learned to persevere through tough spots is by channeling my curiosity about the problem I am trying to tackle. I spent a lot of time looking at Perseus code (probably too long) figuring out how it works under-the-hood and mapping it back to behaviors I saw in the exercise editor. A lot of it didn’t make sense, but eventually, I was able to figure out a suitable place in the code to implement the API. It wasn’t perfect, but it ended up being enough to help my hackathon team move forward with our project. There’s a world of technical challenges out there just waiting to be solved. Be open and willing to dive in even if it means going through multiple iterations before reaching a solution.

Try it. You’ll Like it: I’ve been very hesitant to try experimental technologies. Because I am early in my career as an engineer, I fall into the trap of wanting to become excellent at React, or some other established technology before diving into something new. The reality is one could spend a lifetime learning to be really good at something, and engineering is one of those professions where one must always learn new things (or even refresh on old concepts). Playing around with the Web Speech API made me more excited to explore other experimental technologies in web development. I learned that as I continue to build upon fundamentals, I should make space for joy, fun, and exploration in coding.

It’s Okay to Break Things: A part of learning, growing, and understanding tools/technologies are being in the muck before we have clarity around how something works, where something should go, and how something should be built. Sometimes we don’t know the path forward, and we still have to be okay with saying, “onward” until a solution crystallizes. When learning, we must break things and experience confusion. I’m pretty sure I spent most of the hackathon debugging weird error messages as a part of figuring out how Perseus works than I did create an elegant solution. It was only by breaking something that I was able to figure out how to move forward. This lesson will probably be the most difficult to live out every day in my work because failure is hard, even for individuals who have a cultivated a growth mindset for a long time. Although I don’t intend to take down an entire website for the sake of learning, there’s something to be said for having the courage to try things even if it means they won’t necessarily work out. There’s so much learning in our shortcomings. I hope I have more of these moments because it means I’m learning and growing not only as an engineer but also as a human.

Who knew I would gain so much from a hackathon! I’ve had an amazing experience so far as a Fellow at Khan Academy, and I hope to carry these lessons and so much more throughout my career. Onward!

Originally published on Khan Academy’s Engineering Blog. Catch Kimerie’s other articles on Medium

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Computer Science & Politics Student at NYU, Former Facebook Intern: www.fadumoosman.com

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

My name is Fadumo. I’m going to be a third-year student at NYU, New York University. I study computer science and politics. This past summer I was at Facebook working with a product marketing manager as well as a civic engagement team. What I eventually want to do is work at the intersection of programming and government, making government more efficient.

What interested you in technology as a [vehicle] for you wanted to do?

I started college two years ago as a biomedical engineering major. I wanted to work with medical devices. I’m originally from Somalia, and so coming from a background of knowing that there are people that didn’t have access to simple medical devices, it got me interested in the idea technology but nothing to do with programming. So, I came in on my first-semester taking bio and chemistry courses, and I was like, “When I can build things?” And they were like, “Oh! You’ll do that in grad school, just take your science classes for now.” So, I lost interest in the field of tech because I thought that was the route to go.

I then joined the ‘women in tech’ group at NYU and all these gals that were studying CS. They were combining CS in business. I was like, “Oh! You can do that?”

That’s how I switched to computer science because I thought I could work on the programming for medical devices. And lo and behold later on I took a political class, and I’m like, “Wait, this is interesting!”

Being a Black Muslim woman my narrative has always been reflected in politics but not necessarily in the way that I’d like it to be. I got really into politics and picked it up as a minor. Then I figured that there was a way I could combine the two when I attended Grace Hopper for the first time last year, last October. I heard the CTO of The United States talked about how they are making the immigration system much more efficient, how they trusted their young interns to work on such things. I was so used to the idea of needing a lot of expertise and a lot of jobs under my belt to ever be taken seriously. So, seeing these people that were just a couple years older than me, making such a significant impact on the stage made me switch again. I guess it came from the place of wanting to help people and wanting to take control of my narrative and story.

What was your perception of the tech industry before you entered it? Has it changed now since you started dabbling in it?

Yeah, kind of. What’s interesting is my dad was a software engineer, he’s still into engineering a bit, but I grew up hating wherever he worked at. I didn’t ask him much about it, but I just heard phone calls with coworkers, saw the kind of work he was working on, even visited him when it came to “Bring your kids to work day.” It all seem like a boys’ club, not even only a boys’ club, my dad was the only person that looked like himself. I didn’t know that I was too young to ask, “Hey Dad, are you comfortable? How’s the work life, and everything?” But soon after I entered the engineering school when I was a biomedical major, even in my writing courses, I would be the only girl, the only person of color in classes. That never really bothered me because I grew up in an area where my family would be the only ones that look like us. It was the attitudes of my classmates, I would hear sexist jokes, just people never taking me seriously when I told them I was an engineering student. I hated it.

I hate to be pessimistic. I would always be the one to be like, “I don’t care if I am the only one, it doesn’t get to me.” But imposter syndrome got to me, at the end of the first year, I was like, “Is this the place for me.” Even though there are a lot of girls that are in pre-med or people of color in pre-med, even then I felt isolated, and so it was joining the ‘women in the tech’ community. Joining Twitter helped me. I made so many friends that I haven’t even seen in person yet. I’ve had excellent conversations in regards to how do you care for oneself, how to balance being where we’re at, and being OK with needing to step back, and accepting failure sometimes.

Even though my dad was a software engineer, I had never coded before college, so I think you’ve seen this before, it feels like other people have been coding since they were in diapers. I would say things have changed in regards to how I approached different situations. If I enter an event, and I can tell I’m the only one there, I take a deep breath, maybe tweet about it [laughs].

How was your experience with Facebook?

This summer was interesting! I’m sure you’ve heard all of the awful things that have occurred in regards to what’s going on in the nation, and what’s been going on forever, but now people have been using live video on Facebook and recording instances. It’s interesting being a black intern at Facebook this summer because I knew the company noticed what was going on and reached out to us interns.

I felt like a lot of us interns it was the first time being in a place where it’s like, “OK! We’ve always criticized these companies, but now we are here, so what can we do about it.” I feel like we’ve got a whole lot of things done outside of our day to day jobs. After the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shooting, we created the vigil and moment of silence, and the company supported it. What I found absorbing was, we intern got the ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner on Hacker Square in the middle Facebook and everything, and all these articles came out about how Facebook was pretending to care about ‘Black Lives Matter,’ etc. We were like, “What, no. We, the black interns made that happen.” But then PR was like, “Oh, no it’s fine. We have bad stuff written about us all the time; you guys can’t say anything about it.” We’re like, “Huh, are you serious?” It was the whole bureaucracy thing again, and I’ve seen it time and time again being in college and everything. I got to see how interns could make a difference and come together when it comes to things like that. I can also see how things can be twisted quite easily.

It was an exciting summer; I would say I liked being there, and I felt like I made an impact. I would say there’s a lot of work to be done, and the company was open to being criticized by us interns like, “Maybe you should do this, maybe you should do that. We understand you have long-term goals, but there is an immediate funnel of talented black and other people of color that you could tap into, maybe you’re not using all the right recruiting processes to get to these people, but we know them because they’re our friends.” And, they listened. I would say I would come into it with an open mind, and just knowing that you have to push a little, and they’re not going to deny that having a diverse workforce is something that’s beneficial for sure.

Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?

I would say, my dream job would be to work at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. I feel like they have the power when it comes to having the President by your side. You can advise the president: “Hey, you should say XYZ to Silicon Valley to make this, and this happen.”

I would also like to be my own boss. I’ve learned so much just working on my own. Last semester a couple of friends and I put together this website quickly about having our peers respond to disasters [such as the Syrian crisis that’s still ongoing]. We felt a lot of our friends were apathetic, and I’m still indifferent from time to time. The world is pretty sucky, so we built a one-stop shop for our friends to contact their official representatives, donate to different trusted organizations, or just learning more about issues. And so I’m like, “Hey, maybe I can just build my products in the future”, they’ll need funding, so we’ll see.

What tips would you give to a younger self, perhaps three to five years ago?

I would say reach out to strangers even if you feel they are super experienced and won’t have time for you. Even if you have to pull the ‘student card’, they’ll listen to someone younger asking for advice.

I would say be open to change as cliché as it sounds. If you told my freshman year self that I’d be dropping pre-med, wanting to work in politics and that everything that I told myself since I was a little kid wouldn’t necessarily come right. It would be very nerve wracking. So I’d say be open to change.

The last thing I would tell myself is to take care of yourself, it’s easy to get caught up with things, [and I understand as being a student you have to pull all-nighters to get things done] but it’s not worth the stress. Especially if you feel like you’re always comparing yourself to other people and what they’re getting done. Everything will work out; that’s something I still tell myself.

Is there anything that you want to plug?

Right now, no. Just follow me on Twitter, my name is Fadumzz on all handles; I love to tweet.

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By POCIT co-founder Michael Berhane

I never grew up ‘technical’. I remember an exasperated friend having to explain the concept of MSN instant messenger [I feel old] to me around the mid-00s. Long story short, I didn’t have a clue. Computers were something I used like everyone but barely understood. I just wasn’t that ‘computer guy’ growing up.

So how was it that I’ve ended up as a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup, then as lead developer/founder at POCIT?

It all started with an idea for a website I had back during my Business undergrad degree at Kingston University. Paying developers as a student is an expensive business.

After a while, the thought crept into my head ‘how hard could this be? I can do this sh*t myself’. Arrogance and cheapness are a lethal combination.

So I picked up a dusty copy of ‘websites for dummies’ from the library and started off with some basic HTML/CSS. Not programming languages per say, but they got me into the swing of things. The rest of the book covered JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. Countless hours later, things began to make some sense. What started out as ‘a means to an end’ became fun. I had found a discipline/craft that was equal parts logical and creative.

I wish I could say that it was entirely rosy after that. It wasn’t. I wanted to give up several times. ‘Impostor Syndrome’ [read this great article by Buffer CTO for more on that] was a real thing for me. A nagging feeling that I wasn’t good enough, that this wasn’t for me, that I’m pretending to be someone I’m not. Those feelings never completely left me; it was just that those voices in my head became quieter with the endless hours of practice.

Fast forward a few years later and my ‘website idea’ was long gone, but the skills had remained. I wasn’t working as a developer, but in my spare time, I was still plugging away. In the end, I decided to make the full career-switch at the ripe old age of 24 [ancient in comparison to the tired trope of the 12-year-old hacker]. What I needed was a bridge however to the tech world. In the end, it took the form of a masters in computer science. In hindsight, it wasn’t necessary, and I was already more than capable. The need for academic validation was probably the last remnants of my ‘impostor syndrome’.

Tips

Enough of the origin story. Down to tips for anyone also on this path.

1. Pick a project, be it an app or website, and learn how to build it, as opposed to just reading coding books. Easier said then done I know for a complete beginner, but this way is much better than just picking up and sifting through ‘Python for dummies.’ Your motivation will wane at times, and have a project will seriously help in that regard.
2. Keep going. *Rocky music plays in the background*
3. Google/ Stack Overflow are you new best friends.
4. You will be over-awed at first with all the new things you’ll have to learn; that’s normal.
5. Think long and hard before spending serious amounts of money on coding boot camps or degrees, all the information you need is available online, either for free or cheaply.
6. Speak to as much self-taught dev’s as you can. If they can do it, so can you.

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Written by Camille Eddy

In my role as a machine learning intern, I go to work every day and start my job. I turn on my computer and start looking at my next tasks. But what was quickly unavoidable is the realization that the field of Machine Learning has a problem. In this article, I hope to outline why as a black woman, helping to make the next intelligent robot is a massive deal. And why we need to bring more underrepresented groups into this ever important field.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning is rapidly being incorporated into our daily lives, but there’s an underlying problem that’s not being addressed. The area of machine learning is not very diverse. Artificial intelligence is about teaching machines to think, come to conclusions, and execute actions on their own. But what information forms these actions? How does the machine decide between two different choices and can the bias of a creator infiltrate a computer’s thinking?

The answer to that last question is yes.

One shocking example of this bias was when Google’s image service mistakenly categorized Black people as gorillas. Most artificial intelligence is tested on data provided by the researchers. While Google stated that their algorithm was tested with images by employees of different races, there was obviously a lack of data to detect and distinguish darker skin tones from lighter ones. AI expert Vivienne Ming told the Wall Street Journal that some systems struggle to recognize non-white people because they are trained on Internet images that are overwhelmingly white. Would this have happened if more ‘people of color’ were on the development and research teams? Diversity in the machine learning field may minimize these types of incidents by ensuring wholly represented data sets are used during the most critical states of AI development.

Overall, diversity in artificial intelligence prevents the technology from becoming a tool that perpetuates biases and stereotypes. In a recent New York Times article, Kate Crawford [Principle Researcher at Microsoft and Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media] stated that unless we are vigilant about how we design/train machine learning systems, we will “see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.” And a Quartz Daily article on this subject reminds us that outdated ideas about gender and race tend to take root in places where there is a lack of diverse perspectives.

That brings us back to my story. I recognized that I have landed in a great spot to influence change in Artificial Intelligence, by bringing my diverse experience to the research I am working on and encouraging my fellow peers to take an interest in the field as well. Additionally, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently penned an article on Slate stating that “we need to stop predicting the future of AI and create it.” And that is what I hope to do in the continuing years of my career.

In summary

• AI would greatly benefit from a diverse group of researchers who provide good data sets to test from.
• There is a lack of diversity, but we can and must change it to prevent stereotypes from taking root in the software applications we use every day

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Kanyi is a Venture Partner at Collaborative Fund: kanyi.me

How did you become involved in tech?

I got involved in technology accidentally. I was at Stanford studying philosophy and a friend of mine at the graduate school of business was working on an app. I was one of the people who was helping him out and over the course of the process I found myself enjoying the energy and dynamism of the work. I ultimately ended up leaving school to go work with him.

How did you become a VC afterwards?

I actually ended up doing a couple of startups after that one. Once I fell into the startup world I couldn’t quite fall out of it. Every road I took was yet another effort at trying to innovate. I had done that for about five years, give or take. I had been through two venture-backed startups, and had ultimately exited both of them.

I was back at Stanford finishing undergrad and working on a graduate degree when I was connected to the founder of the firm where I’m currently working. He had just started it six months prior and we started working on a very casual basis. It became apparent that our styles complemented each other and that we enjoyed working together. As time went on it was clear to us that we ought to do something more permanent.

In the meantime, I was at a bit of crossroads regarding what to do next. I had thought about doing another startup but I realised that I didn’t have the right motivational set, and that I really enjoyed the process of supporting the entrepreneur and learning about finance and capital deployment at this stage. I ended up staying as a VC, and we raised another fund (and then we raised a subsequent fund). Next thing you know 4 ½ years had passed! [laughs]

What did you mean by you didn’t have the right motivational set to do another startup?

That’s an interesting question. There was no problem I was uniquely well-suited for, nor was there a problem that I felt I had to solve. At the time, it was my belief that the only appropriate motivational kernels for starting a company were to be a person who really understood a problem (because of a a unique set of experiences, networks, skills or context), or to be someone who had extreme passion about a problem.

I’ve realised that is not necessarily the case; I’ve since backed off of this a little bit, and have a less dogmatic point of view about this now. Some of the more interesting companies that I’ve been a part of as an investor have founders who have created a startup just for the sake of it. So I don’t think that’s actually all that bad anymore. But what I worry about then and still worry about now are the people who want to start a company for the glamour, or with a belief that it will look like “The Social Network” when [in reality] it’s often maxing out credit cards, spending more time in Excel then you want, and taking meetings with people who will disappoint you over and over again–things that are fundamentally unglamorous.

I will say particularly as it relates to people of color, black women in particular are over-indexed in terms of being startup/small business founders, which is funny because the statistics suggest that they are the least funded demographic. But I think one of the reasons why that’s the case is that necessity is the mother of invention. Also, if you don’t fit the demographic profile for hiring in your industry, maybe you go out and do it yourself.

What would you hypothesise is the reason behind the statistic you mentioned, pertaining to that lack of funding for women of color?

There are a couple of reasons. One reason is that venture networks, and in general social networks (and venture is a social network just like any other one is) are very insular, demographically and culturally. The average member is a white male who went to a top 10 school for higher education, and probably for high school also, and has spent the vast majority of his career socially connected and oriented to other folks who are like that. In venture there is a nasty habit where a lot of people will only take a meeting if there is a warm intro, and intros can only be warm if you’re in the right social context.

Secondly, venture is so instinct-driven because there isn’t a lot of data that you can dig into to make a bet on whether Instagram or Hipstamatic is going to succeed. There is too much entropy in the analysis; it tends to be gut-driven. The thing about gut is that it’s very prejudiced; there’s all sorts of hidden and unconscious bias that we’ve all taken in and used in our decision making. To that point, venture investors love to fund things that validate their own assumptions about the world. Either they validate things that are consciously held assumptions or validate things that are unconscious assumptions. When you don’t have a diverse population who’s doing that decision making, then you won’t have diverse assumptions that you’re drawing from. As a result, if someone breaks that pattern it’s harder for them to get funded. That’s really frustrating, as venture is fundamentally an outlier-hunting business. The companies that succeed are the ones that break pattern almost by definition, and yet pattern matching is so endemic to how venture gets done. So I think there is a structural challenge with the industry as it’s set up right now, and its lack of diversity is a critical part of why that challenge persists.

What were your misconceptions about tech prior to working in it?

I thought tech was much more meritocratic than other industries. That is very much not the case. A lot of people in tech would argue that it is, but my strongly held view is that it’s not. Even though everyone has access to a mobile device, connectivity, internet, educational resources and access to each other, these networks are not as open as one would think they are. You’re rewarded on the basis of being inside of those networks often. If you look at the demographics of the new leadership in tech–and not just from a racial, gender or socioeconomic point of view, but just in terms of who they’re mutual friends are–so many are friends of friends of friends (and so forth).

In some industries it’s all about who you know. Tech claims to be the opposite, but it is strongly about who you know.

So there is meritocracy in terms of tools, but not in funding and that’s the key differentiator in this case?

In funding it’s not the case, in hiring it’s not the case. I think that we are in a talent business, and that the money follows the talent, but talent is not judged objectively.

It’s funny because I do believe that a great company can be started anywhere, but as of today I still feel like the vast majority of great tech companies are built in the same places that they were built 10 years ago.

If you had a magic ability to change one thing to improve the situation what would it be?

Hard question. I would put as many female decision makers at the funding table as possible, ideally at least 50/50. I would have a funding table that proportionally represents the populations of creators, because right now it doesn’t. When was the last time you saw a Latino VC? Yet how many Latinos are there in the US? What kind of sense does that make? It’s bias.

But I think game recognise game; if people are using unconscious biases to make decisions, then one of the ways to structurally avoid there being these permanent intrinsic biases and exclusions within the industry is to proactively diversify the decision making.

With regard to your fund, what sort of spaces interest you?

I am looking at companies at the intersection of good/profit. That tends to favor those industries that touch large numbers of consumers on a regular basis: financial services, food, healthcare, education, transportation and some CPG (consumer product goods). We like to invest in companies that are building aspirational brands; brands that envision a world where we are the best version of ourselves. Companies that can do that with really great storytelling and design are going to win the future.

What advice would you give to a young person who wanted to enter tech?

Follow up with interesting people you’ve met, offer to help them and don’t except anything in return. If you don’t have a good memory for faces or names, write people’s information down and keep track of them. Access to people and having good instincts for when and how they are moving, and having a capacity to invest in them in as constructive a way as possible, will reap benefits down the line in ways that are invisible now.

Shameless plug?

No, not really [laughs]. People should just reach out to me via email/twitter. I like to meet people. I’m always eager to chat or to evaluate an idea.

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written by Joshua Ogundu

When I had an idea for an app, I was starting at a deficit. I was an undergraduate economics major with an entire network full of business folks and people pursuing medicine- a computer science student was nowhere to be found. Since I had no idea of where to start looking for possible co-founders, I took a position as the Director of Member Relations of the Entrepreneurship Association at Michigan State University to expand my reach into the greater MSU computer science community. While reaching out on behalf of the entrepreneurship Association and The Hatch, which is Michigan State’s student incubator, I met my first co-founder Yoseph Radding. He would make up for my lack of technical knowledge, and I would bring product and business knowledge to the table. Not too long after we met our third co-founder, Brendan Carlson, through a friend. With this addition, we finally had everything we needed which was business knowledge frontend and backend development and three people who believed in the product’s success.

What I quickly learned is that as a non-technical founder it is not simply enough to get a team together, you also have to get to speak the language of the technical people you are working with.

I learned early on when we sat in meetings and went over what features we wanted to implement and how long they would take, that I still had the mindset of a business founder meaning I still thought a process or decision could get changed around or completed in a matter of hours or days. I had to change the way I thought about business and product in general and this took full immersion into what we were doing. Whenever they were talking development, I would sit around and just listen, so that I could pick up bits and pieces to see what I did and did not understand. What I did not know I Googled and researched. The less I tried just to be “The business guy” and the more I tried to learn everything about what we were doing, the more comfortable I felt speaking to them about our product and the direction we were heading toward.

I wanted to become fully immersed so that even if I was not writing the code, I could articulate about the technical aspects of our product. Aspects such as, which programming languages we should use, where we go for our server space, what is more, cost and time efficient for an MVP: IOS, Android or a web app. I even started to try teaching myself Swift, which is Apple’s new programming language. The reasons being so I could better understand development and empathize with my team, not so that one day I can be a world-class software engineer. Attempting to create various products like a Fahrenheit to Celsius calculator and gross salary calculator taught me the extent of my gaps in knowledge. Actively working to fill them has helped me become a better founder and partner.

I also have a few tips to guide you if you find yourself in the same boat I was in when- you know what to build but not necessarily how to build it:

1. Reach out to those who you know have the knowledge you seek
2. If there is someone you could see yourself partnering with build a legitimate relationship before asking him or her to join your team, since startups are all about relationships.
3. Be proactive in filling the knowledge gaps you may have whether they be technically or otherwise
4. Learn the Lingo
5. Bring more than an idea to the table. If you are a b2b company, bring potential clients or already signed customers for your product. If you are a b2c company bring a list of beta users you have collected to show that there is real interest in the product you are building, basically show the technical people you are working with that they can just focus on what they do best, and you will handle the rest.

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