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
I like to talk to youth the because they give an unfiltered and honest perspective on society. I had the privilege of talking to rising seniors of a top-notch academy in upper Harlem. Part of our convo went like this: Me: “Do you know who Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman are?” Them: “Yes, Steve Jobs is Apple! Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook!” Me: “Great! Do you know any famous Black or Latinx business men or women?” Them: pause………”Yes! Dr. Dre, Puff Daddy, Jay-Z!” Me: “Ok nice. Final question.
Tell us a bit about yourself I’m Marcus Carey. I am the founder of a company called Threatcare. We do this thing called breach and attack simulation. It’s a cybersecurity term. That means that we imitate attacks on networks, to see if people’s security controls actually work. Who is your target customer? Yeah, so target customers are enterprise customers, the people that have invested in cybersecurity tools. How did you get into cybersecurity? When I was 18 years old, I joined the U.S. Navy and went into the cryptography field.
Earlier this week, I decided to leave the London-based Pre-seed accelerator programme, Entrepreneur First (EF). I was a member of the 10th London cohort. EF is a startup accelerator backed by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), Greylock Partners, Mosaic Ventures, Founders Fund and Lakestar. Their USP is that they invest pre-team and pre-idea (truly pre-seed in every sense). I originally joined EF, because I bought into the opportunity presented that ‘EF is one the best place to find a co-founder and build a globally important company.’ It is important to
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? I am Alex Fefegha, co-founder and head creative technologist at Comuzi. We are an experimental research agency working at the intersection of emerging technology and culture. We help our clients answer questions about the future and experiment with emerging technologies with the purpose to build a better world. We identify blind spots, coming up with high-quality research tangibles in order to develop real-world opportunities. How and why did you get involved in tech I got involved with tech because the
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
A lot of founders and VCs give advice to startup founders after they’ve become millionaires and notched some wins, which certainly produces some helpful tips but also loads of success bias. On the other hand, some of the best advice I’ve gotten is from fellow entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of their startups, just like me. I can’t consider myself successful yet, but I can say I have some experiences worth sharing with other entrepreneurs. One of the most frequent things I get asked is “how did you raise the
Five years ago I was leading strategic partnerships for a World Bank agricultural research institution. I was “living my best life”, travelling all over the world and making an “impact” — at least that’s what I thought until I found myself on a rooftop in Nairobi, Kenya with a filmmaker, a designer, and a restaurateur who would change my life forever. That night, inspired by the courage, drive, and resilience of my peers I realized that disrupting the narrative on Africa in a way that did not involve “selling poverty”
For the first time ever, someone besides my father gave me money do something. It was not just anyone either, it was the CEO of Y-Combinator Michael Seibel. The money is being used towards empowering Black Entrepreneurs in a monthly group I am organizing, but his contribution represents something fundamentally important that is hard to obtain — empowerment. Starting a successful venture is a complex undertaking that requires more than just the idea, but a good team, a strong network, strategy, capital and other important attributes. Black Entrepreneurs face a greater challenge
Culture can be defined as customs, social forms, beliefs, and practices exhibited by a group of people. When it comes to the African American, we had to develop our own unique culture starting from slavery almost 400+ years ago. It was nothing short of miraculous after everything was taken away from us, we recreated our own identity from scratch. While our culture has many positive features that heavily influences mainstream trends, it also carries negative aspects that may prevent us from moving forward. One such aspect is our reluctance to
