There are people whom you hear about from afar and when you meet them, your disappointed by the hype that precedes them. During our last fireside chat with Kai Bond, this was far from the case. Kai showed up and not only lived up to his reputation but exceeded it. A little background for new readers, at Untapped Founders, we are a support & networking community for Black and Brown Entrepreneurs focused on giving advice and making warm-introductions. The mindset of the organization is that when we bring our knowledge and
Shelly Bell has lived many lives. She’s a computer scientist, a former high school teacher, a performance poet, a community organizer, a founder, and a CEO. She has two successful apparel printing businesses: MsPrint USA—through which she creates swag for clients like Amazon and Google with a team of women designers and printers—and Made By A Black Woman, which celebrates products made by Black women. Every project Bell undertakes is designed to empower women, especially women of color, which is why two years ago, she began her latest enterprise, Black
A conversation with the hilarious ex Googler and now stand-up comic and author Sarah Cooper. We talk her career transition, Trump, Beyonce and Jay-Z and her brand new book: How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women I think the obvious question to start with is how does one go from being a Googler to a comic/author? It was all based on a viral article that I wrote called “10 tricks to appear smart meetings” I wrote while I was working at Google as a
We hear the story of Shereen Messi, the technical lead of Re: Coded Iraq [a program that creates future tech leaders of Iraq and Turkey], She coaches fellows to become incredible Android and full-stack developers in class and throughout their client projects. “I always loved science and math, but when I was a kid I didn’t know that one day I would go to college. None of my family members went to university or even high school. As a kid, I thought that people only go to middle school and
“From a young age, I always learned to look at the situation that you’re in and consider what a faster, more innovative approach is.” This mindset has guided Fereshteh Forough on a pretty remarkable path, launching Code to Inspire, the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan. While a deep passion for rebuilding Afghanistan drives Fereshteh, she was born in a refugee camp in Iran. Her parents were forced to leave Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in the early 1980s, and the first time she stepped foot in her home
Erika Hairston grew up playing video games like Dance Dance Revolution and Need for Speed with her older brother, which sparked her interest in learning more about tech. When a high school research project led her to a documentary produced by Stanford University, entitled She++, about the lack of women in tech, Erika knew she wanted to change that reality. She took her first Computer Science class in college and hated it. Instead of being discouraged, she remembered the documentary, which prefaced that computer science wouldn’t always be easy, but
Tell us a bit about yourself? So I’m Aniyia Williams, and I wear a couple of hats. One of them is being the executive director of Black and Brown founders. Which is how I spend most of my time these days – its a nonprofit that helps Black and Latinx people launch and build tech and tech-enabled businesses from the lens of doing that with modest resources. Our whole principle is pushing profitability over fund-ability and doing everything from the lens of if you never saw a dollar of investor money
If you told me at the start of 2018 that by September I’d find myself sitting in the London Mayor’s office at City Hall recommending policy changes for greater tech inclusion I would have said, “I wish!” And yet last Wednesday, alongside 25 other black women founders in London tech’s scene, I sat at a roundtable discussion with Deputy Mayor of London Rajesh Agrawal, Leapand London & Partners. Our objective? To outline actions to ensure black women entrepreneurs are not excluded from initiatives that support startups and scale-ups in London.
BetterCloud are hiring for a whole bunch of roles on pocitjobs.com. Check it out! Tell us a bit about yourself? Sure. My Name is Mosi Platt. I’m a security compliance manager at BetterCloud. I joined the company on March 1st, 2018. Before joining BetterCloud, I was a governance risk and compliance consultant for 16 years. What’s your typical day like? So a typical day for me, the first thing I do when I come in and check email and check slack messages. And then I will start working. We are
Tell us a bit about yourself? Hey Michael I’ve been following POCIT since one of your first publications, and I’m pretty excited to contribute to the community. A bit more about me – I was born in Chicago, spent my childhood in Mississippi, and grew up in Seattle. Over the past 11 years, I’ve worked as an Engineer, or Team-Lead focused on building web-based business-to-business and consumer apps. These days my home is split between Barcelona Spain, where I’ve lived since 2014, and New York City where since 2017 I’ve
