Last week Untapped Founders (“Untapped”) had its fireside chat with our special guest, Kelvin Beachum Jr. who is a unique combination of an Angel Investor & professional athlete of the NY Jets. As the first of anything, it was a learning experience that will set a precedent for the upcoming events we have with Kai Bond, Monique Woodard, and others. Personally, I am most appreciative that he came out to speak with us and give advice at the co-working space Electropositive in Brooklyn. For any J. Cole fans, the analogy
I’m focused on solving a problem I’m passionate about and delivering venture sized returns for my investors without a VC firm, but it wasn’t always that way. The photo below is from early 2014 when things were much different, especially my dependency on the idea of what VCs represent. Looking back, I can genuinely say that I was always jealous when I read about these massive venture-backed rounds for competitors like Sosh ($10m+ raised from VCs), YPlan ($35m+ raised from VCs), Foursquare ($230m+ raised from VCs) and countless others, not
A far from an exhaustive look at Latina investors making strides in tech, but here are a few faces I thought warranted a signal boost. Jomayra Herrera Follow here: @jomayra_herrera Post-graduation from Stanford, and after a stint at a large edtech startup, Jomayra Herrera joined the Emerson Collective, a social enterprise started by Laurene Powell Jobs to dramatically transform the U. S. education landscape. Herrera identifies promising entrepreneurs committed to closing opportunity gaps, and driving the diligence process. Lisa Cuesta Follow here: @lisacuesta Lisa Cuesta is a principal at NextGen Venture Partners, a
A long overdue article on the immense black entrepreneurial talent in the UK tech scene. Here we feature founders across sectors as diverse as beauty, event discovery, medicine, artificial intelligence, and IOT. Some have raised money, others are bootstrapping, some are running large agencies, others lean teams. Celebrate their stories. Sharmadean Reid @sharmadeanreid What more can be said about Sharmadean Reid? The founder of WAH nails an amazing salon in West London that integrates technology across the customer experience, she also is the co-founder of futuregirlcorp.com an events organization to support young female
On a trip to Uganda for a friends wedding, I took a random stroll through Kampala. I’d never been before and wanted to get a feel for the city. If I was hoping to escape work, the universe had other ideas. The first left I glance I see the familiar logo of Andela. Running POCIT, there are certain amazing companies and organizations you consistently hear about, Andela being foremost among them. With existing investors including Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, and Spark Capital, their reputation proceeded them. I had to see
Volunteering has been something I’ve been doing since I was in high school. I volunteered in spaces that truly resonated with me, my passions, and personal mission. I am a proud volunteer for Girl Develop It’s Boston Chapter, and I try to engage with the communities locally to provide opportunities to get more girls and women exposed to technology and the diverse array of career opportunities within it. Outside of my markup language skills in HTML5 & CSS3, my technical skills consist of Python and JavaScript (and both of their
In FIVE days, I’ll be graduating from UC Berkeley. I’ll have completed 16 consecutive years of grade school. Knowing what I know now, here is a breakdown of what I wished I had learned during that time. On average, students in California spend 6.24 hours in school and roughly 181 school days per year — that’s 1,086 hours of schooling per year. Multiply that by the 16 years of schooling, give or take a couple hours here and there. I’ve spent 17, 376 hours of my life in school. That’s
How do we find ourselves in a world where there are so many firsts to be had for women of color? There are so few doctors, engineers, filmmakers that reach the level of success and recognition that even some of our other sisters seem to receive. On my level, there are VERY few, in fact, let’s say there ten sisters of color on college campuses leading a vocal and influential charge. Not because they don’t have a voice but because they are overlooked when someone asks, who should lead the
In the first installment of this series, we talked about strategies for learning to code when you’re starting out. Now we’ll move on to a topic that has been the source of blood, sweat, tears, and flipped tables for many a developer… Debugging, also known as the “why the $#!%* isn’t this working?” phenomenon. Stuck on a Coding Problem? It’s impossible to describe just how demoralizing it can be to try and fail at bug fixing. If you haven’t yet, at some point, you will feel like a prize idiot despite
Coding is damn hard. When you’re just starting out, coding is hard as hell. There’s just a lot of stuff to learn in web development. Front-end or back-end? React, Angular, Ruby, .NET? AJAX, JSON, SQL, MySQL, noSQL?? You may feel at times that you’re drowning in technobabble. Thanks Data, that helps a lot. The good news is, you can get good at coding. The bad news is, you are not going to master it in 12 weeks. Sorry if you’ve been told otherwise. Now, you can certainly pick up some of the
