I recently had the privilege to attend a special event at the Rutgers Business School, a demo day for Black and Latinx founders that had completed a pre-accelerator program. From The Black and Latino Tech Initiative(BLT) and CUEED Pipeline to Inclusive Innovation, there were a total of 26 graduates. By the end of the event, I was left with two conflicting feelings – a sense of empowerment and disappointment. Empowerment: In the technology and investment world, we’ve been made well aware through many sources about the diversity problem. You can
You shouldn’t be CEO if the title matters more to you than serving your employees and team everyday. And I do not mean that BS ‘servant leader’ stuff. I mean understanding that you have taken on the responsibility of feeding the people you have convinced to join your team. And as much as that thought of failing all these people you have convinced to help you do the work petrifies you, it drives you to sweat for them every day. You shouldn’t be CEO if you get into the office
In 1878, Christopher Sholes was granted the patent on the QWERTY keyboard layout. He’d been granted the patent on the typewriter in 1868, 10 years earlier. His original typewriter had problems with tangling mechanical keys and the QWERTY keyboard was his solution to broken keyboards and frustrated typists. The QWERTY keyboard favored left-handed typists (at a time when most technology favored right-handed users) and placed less commonly used letters under a typists resting fingers. Sholes, thinking very much like a founder who wanted to sell a lot of product, ensured
Ten years ago you could probably count on one hand the number of angel investors, let alone funds run by people of color [although it is rare even today to see the profiles of female or minority investors in the likes of TechCrunch or Entrepreneur]. Nevertheless, we are starting to see articles showcasing the increased activity in this space such as: 20 Angels Worth Knowing for Minority Startups 15 Black Tech Investors You Need to Know The List of Black Women in VC 28 Black Founders and Investors Making an Impact
I am a 22-year-old woman in tech currently working as a Junior Data Engineer. Two months ago, I worked in a customer service role, and I was very fortunate to be offered this role as a secondment. I am now almost halfway through my secondment, working with a great team of people. I am learning about programming in Python and SQL and solving problems within Big Data. My life was completely different three months ago, and I am here to share my story with you. My background Just three months
In 2016 I discovered the library by our new home. It’s been amazing! I’ve been able to avoid buying books while being able to read them. Finding the library coincided with a lot of travel across the world. Throw on top of that a lot of time assisting startups, VestedWorld’s world-changing portfolio, and it’s made for a year filled with learning to do 3 things I love; improving company operations, reading and writing (culminating in Linkedin selecting me as a Top Voice for Technology and my publishing a book I
When tackling culture bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is important to understand how much we use AI in our everyday lives. There are quite a few applications, and while they all have different names, a few of them are becoming more familiar to the general public. There are fields such as machine learning, face recognition, computer vision, virtual and augmented reality. You can also find artificial intelligence in traffic lights, GPS navigation, MRIs, air traffic controller software, speech recognition, and robotics. The point is, unlike the 90s, when AI
This article is a follow up from our popular article ‘Get Paid to Write (Not Code) in Tech’ Behind the scenes of what a writer does at Google I call myself a tech writer because the field of technical writing has been evolving rapidly over the past few years. When I write for the user-interface of a mobile app, for example, I put on my user-experience (UX) writer hat. When I write specifications for a web application that developers need access to, I put on my technical writing hat. As
No day goes by without the announcement of some new and amazing technological advancement. Flexible robots, bionic humans, crime detecting streetlights, to name a few. But we’re still stuck in the paradigms of a culture created by, and based on, the old rules of industrialization that led to the occupational restructuring in the 1950s-60s. Four books I’ve read in the last few weeks — including ‘Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus’ and ‘The End of Average‘ — have made me question a few things about the current nature of ‘work’. Thankfully, our technology is
During an entrepreneurship talk, in Prof Darragh’s class while at Booth School of Business, I listened to Andrew Mason talk about ‘The Point.’ This was 2009 and Andrew talked about signing people up to collectively fight for or contribute to causes and initiatives that they cared about. Sort of a mass protest platform for the digital age. Andrew had amassed a list of do-gooders and would unleash it on all the necessary causes. It was similar to Change.org and had been started around the same time. Even if it was
