How This Austin Founder is Cracking The Code for Diversity In Tech
“Keep Austin Weird” is a fitting slogan for a city that embraces the eclectic. Set against the backdrop of graffiti murals, an established food truck culture, and amazing weather, the south central Texas city is layered with the kind of culture and personality that makes it mecca for creatives.
This reality is particularly evident each spring as the city swells with approximately 72,000 registered attendees from 60+ countries for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, Music, and Film Festival. The interactive segment of the festival is the most prominent technology trade conference of its kind. Major corporate endorsements and a distinguished reputation for being at the cutting edge of technology has made it the ‘holy grail’ for techies worldwide.
An abundance of talent and relatively low housing costs, in addition to the absence of state income tax has nurtured a fertile ecosystem for tech startups and industry giants like Apple, Dell, and Google. While bursting with opportunity, Austin is not immune to the lack of diversity that permeates the tech industry as a whole. The good news is that the relatively young market has the advantage of agility for startups to proactively implement diversity plans at ground level.
The city also benefits from the tactical steps that more established companies are taking to build an inclusive tech culture. One such example is Google’s partnership with San Francisco based nonprofit, CODE2040 which operates with a mission to activate, connect, and mobilize the largest racial equity community in tech. Together with Google for Entrepreneurs, over the span of three years, the non-profit provided a residency program in Austin designed to help remove the structural barriers that prevent the full participation and leadership of Black and Latinx people in the innovation economy. The results were powerful. This kind of focus on fostering diversity creates fertile ground to maintain a thriving and healthy tech industry in the heart of Texas for years to come.
When it comes to fusing Austin’s startup friendly atmosphere and the progression of diversity in tech, Nnamdi Orakwue could be a poster child for the movement. The The Ivy League educated son of immigrants spent 15 years at Dell and IBM, most recently as VP of Dell Software Group, before parlaying his expertise in the tech space as Founder & CEO of Cocolevio — one of Austin’s top Software Development firms specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Big data, the Internet of Things (IOT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML).
Not only does the Brooklyn native embody diversity in tech, he is intentional about balancing his client portfolio to support projects which provide tech solutions to solve problems faced by marginalized communities.
A prime example of this is Cocolevio’s partnership with Fair Count, a 501(c)(3) organization founded by former Georgia House of Representatives Rep Stacey Abrams. The Fair Count App seeks to empower pathways to greater civic participation in communities labeled “hard-to-count” and achieve a fair and accurate count of all people in Georgia and the nation in the 2020 Census.
Partnerships like this benefit from the passion, perspective, and empathy that comes from intentionally nurturing a diverse team of techies and creatives who possess an intimate understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve.
With tech entrepreneurs like Nnamdi migrating by the thousands to America’s second fastest growing city to take advantage of the plentiful opportunities in the burgeoning land of milk and honey, there is no doubt that the city poised to become the next Silicon Valley will take a dominant role in steering the next phase of the tech revolution with startups like Cocolevio leading the way.
