A Rallying Cry for Black Founders

Keep pushing. You’re an inspiration.

My son will be starting college next year so last week we did a tour of his future school. His favorite subject is Maths and he wants to be a concept artist and video game programmer, something I couldn’t even dream to do. I am incredibly proud of him.

You can therefore imagine our excitement when it finally came time to see the computer science room, towards the end of the tour! At the entrance of the room was a wall with pictures (the image above) of “famous people in CS/Tech” and below was the composition:

18 White men (most founders of Tech companies … you can easily guess who they are)

5 White women (most of them in Academia)

1 Persian man (Pierre Omydiar, founder of EBay)

I will state the obvious: I was disappointed there were no persons of color on that board.

We need more people of color founding, building and leading companies, including Tech.

But here’s the problem:

There aren’t many people in the world that would take on an endeavor knowing they have less than a 2% probability of success. Yet, this is the level of VC investment that goes towards startups with at least one Black founder. I’m not saying VCs provide the only path of success to creating a company, but VC-backed ventures stand a much better chance.

Innovation comes from everywhere, people of different backgrounds, cultures, sex, gender, sexual orientation, countries, etc and this diversity ought to be celebrated and fostered.

So as we celebrate yet another Black History Month here in the UK, I’d like to say if you’re a Black founder, you have my utmost respect.

Keep pushing beyond the doubts, the rejections, and everything between “no, you shouldn’t” and “no, you can’t”.

Be an inspiration to little girls and boys, like my son.

Happy UK Black History Month.