“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
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? I am a Filipina American born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. More recently, I pulled up stakes and relocated to Brooklyn, NY. I am a UX Researcher at 2U and am also a full-time graduate student at the University of Southern California, pursuing my Master of Science in Integrated Design, Business, and Technology. As the predetermined career trajectories for Filipinos are typically a nurse, doctor, engineer, or lawyer, I realized that my passions and interests never did
This conversation between Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton and Michael Berhane is from this #Techish podcast episode. It has been edited for clarity. 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
Tell us a bit about yourself I’m a 27-year-old Egyptian American writer working and living in New York. I work as a freelance copywriter, specializing in product, marketing, and web copy, and when I’m not doing that, I write creative works of fiction and journalism. I enjoy my work and take a lot of joy from helping people communicate efficiently. The world of tech piques my interest because I love working with brands and products that are new to the market, innovating the way people live. In the last year,
Tell us a bit about yourself? My name is Sheena Allen. I am from a small town in Terry, Mississippi. I started my first tech company in my senior year of college; the company was called Sheena Allen apps, now I’m actually onto my second startup which is a company called CapWay, which is a financial technology company. We are a mobile first, and we focus on the unbanked and underbanked millennials. What was your journey with starting CapWay? I was working on my first company. It was doing pretty
