The Power of Perseverance

Today, I’ve been the Founder & CEO of Centiment for three years.

Sometimes, my life where I grew up in Catford seems like the life of someone else.

I have broken so many barriers and achieved so many things that when I tell people I come from nothing they find it hard to believe. Me and my life are so different now that sometimes it feels like my life in the UK was the life of another person.

As a reminder I like to regularly look through pictures of my upbringing and remember the stories around each one. One particular picture that stands out is one of my entire family at Heathrow airport with all of our remaining worldly possessions in only four suitcases, preparing to fly to an unknown fate in the US, with the hope of a better life. Myself and my father had lost our jobs and my family were in the process of losing our home and all our possessions at the hands of the recession and mortgage crisis.

I think about the nature of what it is to have things, versus having people, experiences and purpose. Through my experiences at Centiment I have a very clear thesis on what that difference is, it boils down to two words:

Sacrifice. Care.

Diversity Theory

Human beings are actually wildly predictable, its why models such as the OCEAN and Myers Briggs have been as successful as they have been, the popular show Westwood even succinctly characterized that human beings can condense to only “ten thousand lines of code”.

One of the only areas where we are highly unpredictable and non-linear is when it comes to paternal and maternal instinct and familial survival, the patterns are highly predictable but the particular actions that conform to those patterns are not, especially when seen at aggregate group levels across nations and like minded groups of people. Examples of this are pretty much everything that happened in the first part of world war 2, where the solid banding together of nations across racial and economic lines ensured their survival against the odds.

This matters because I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what is really required to change the glaring imbalance in resources between founders of color in America and indeed the world, and everyone else. Essential to doing that is at some level being able to replicate the success that successful founders of color, like myself Arlan Hamilton and this list of people have had. However, part of that would mean other people of color making the same level of sacrifice made to achieve these milestones.

To be clear, that would mean the embodiment of the most operative version of those values — Sacrifice — continuing for endless cycles for multiple groups of people of color until equality is achieved, taking who knows how long and costing who knows how much to those people.

The alternative is to take care — the other critical path value — and cause it to exist at such a level in the people who can actually tip the balances, that this societal level of change is greatly accelerated by said people.

Two years into my startup journey, I was such a pessimist about the world having been through so much that I would have then answered that this is simply not possible.

Then, I experienced it.

Four kids of color from Harlem and a Catford boy came 11th place at one of the most elite spaces filled with some of the brightest and most educated and frankly, advantaged (non colored) minds in the world, MIT, against all odds, which by the way.. had never happened before.. in history.

Im going to tell that story, but I would really like to emphasize the reason why.

Care.

Care Theory

First of all, I cared and still do care immensely about these kids, referring to Jason, Carlos, Satyam and Ben and the wider CCNY Codes initiative which is something else that we fought hard to make happen and by its self is a historical thing.

With that said, for me, the exceptional aspect of care came in the form of other people, by that I mean powerful people, influential people, who did things for me and made things happen that were extraordinary. In hindsight, I have tried to understand what it is about me that allowed or inspired these people to do these things.

Maybe it was timing or circumstance, I initially thought, but I wrote those things off when I looked at the people who didn’t make it into the spaces that I had gained access too.

It drove me to try and think about my privilege, of getting the education that I did, being from where I am from and not being dead or in jail, being a man and other variables.

Ultimately after giving it great thought, I actually landed on something simple which emerges from the communication fallacy theory.

Will.

Will and Care.

Will + Care Theory

Will, when existing without purpose or deep inspiration manifests as great achievements rooted in self, sometimes that are very negative — think Hitler, Stalin and every dictator ever, they were really just imposing their version of the world, upon the world. The story of one if you will.

However when combined with a true purpose emerging from a mission, rooted in people or a true problem which is being resolved, will becomes a force for good. This is not intimated in the abstract sense, but in a very practical one. Sometimes difficult, uncomfortable things are undertaken because of true will resulting in great achievements.

Moreover, when combined with the texture of care and effective communication, powerful parties and influential people significantly differentiate actions and words from this place as a place apart from those of a person devoid of the combination of all three of these things and thus respond.

The best examples of this are Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill.

Both effective orators and educated men (communicators), the thing that propelled them into the limelight and helped them do the things that changed the world took place when inequality and war (inspirations of will) combined with the needs of the people they represented, people of color and the British people, required them to take the prior two tools (communication and will) and temper them with the deep authentic affection for a group of people (care), which then casued them to have the affect that they did.

To be clear, it is the multiple existence of all of these factors simultaneuiosly that has the affect it does, not the singular action of one.

It is the bringing together of these things that enabled me and Team Centiment to do the things we did last year.

With no further dithering, that is what the rest of this article will be about.

The objective of me telling this story is to help the reader understand a small sample of what it takes to win as a PoC founder, engineer or change-maker and hopefully be inspired to reach out to one that you know and help them.

For every one of us at a gala or getting an award, there are hundreds of thousands, millions even who do not have a voice, resources or any acknowledgment.

Beating the Odds

The MIT Media Lab is the only place in the western hemisphere of its kind, it is the place responsible for Touch Screens, Haptic Feedback Devices, GPS and Wearable technology.

It is the seat of some of the best minds in the world.

Like many of those places, the set of requirements to even get there can be a bar for people of color from economically challenging circumstances that can be one that is difficult to reach.

However myself and my team had met and exceeded that bar, which meant were were accepted to compete in the Reality Virtually AR/VR Hacktathon, the largest hackthon of its kind in the world, it is the Olympics of software engineering, MIT, Stanford, Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and other top universities are where many of the attendees come from, which is where my aforementioned theories first come into play.

On about four separate occasions, through no fault of the individual people involved, the weight of the imbalances in the world meant that without the will and care theory, we would not have been there.

There is a very rigorous selection process for the Hackathon, as part of that no one, or very few people from non ivy or red brick universities had even ever been allowed to attend.

A great deal of attention and assessment was paid to our application and made of my teams skills and it was here that by invoking the historical and emotional significance of what was occurring to the people in a decision making position that I was able show the talents of these young men to help guide them through said assessment.

Tests and Barriers

Its important to note here that without the aforementioned theories being applied in situations like this, these are the kinds of points in a story similar, where the story simply ends. There were challenges facing my team to even get a chance to get a assessed to get in the door to get to compete that without a will and caring based communication style to assessors, simply would not feature into the decision making processes, some of these were financial, which I solved by getting CCNY to sponsor travel costs and others had to do with emotional, economic and other variables.

We passed.

I mentioned it already but its worth reiterating, once getting the chance to compete, challenges such as where we were going to stay, what were going to eat and how were were getting to Boston then made themselves known, I saw these as tests as well, because for all of us thats what they were.

For this I think it’s best to quickly summarize where Centiment was. We had had begun to run out of money despite the fact that we were making revenue, we had raised money but I was facing what any founder faces but acutely what founders of color face, the gap between achieving what they call product market fit (which we had done) and making the metrics and milestones required to be funded by a VC, which of late due to recent market changes have trended toward the higher end and Series A companies as opposed to seed, which means for black people they are pretty much impossible.

The important thing to note here is that I was tired and exhausted from running a 20 person company employing many kids of color from CCNY on a shoestring budget, being in a difficult financial position myself and feeling the pressure of literally being the first man of color to run a company like mine and achieve the milestones I did, ever.

With all that said, it was just another test and.. I passed.

Im skipping a lot here but in the interests of expedience I will review what I am skipping.

• The dedication of the entire CCNY administration and many students as well as David Wysoki in supporting me to make this happen.
• The dedication an support of many close friends like Callie Leone.
• The litany of financial, emotional and other challenges that many of the team faced at that time and all of the amazing things they achieved in spite of those.

We passed every manner of test you can imagine, including needing to get a hold of a high end EEG headset, which was provided to use by Google at the last minute.

The we got on the train to Boston, set up our accommodation and tried to mentally prepare ourselves to compete at the Olympics of VR/AI

We got to the entrance to the Hackathon and the whole team was excited and… due to an administrative error were told we were not supposed to be there and we needed to go home.

More in the second post that is on the way….

Micah is a visionary technologist with an intersection of skills consisting of data and algorithm understanding, HCI-centric digital technologies, financial services, financial engineering and media services.

He has over 10 years of experience (up to SVP) across companies like Aon, Barclays, NBC and Viacom. Micah has a deep technological understanding and also a strong commitment to social causes; at the center of Centiment and FilmFundr are the need to level the playing field in media for minorities.

R Hackathon