Black Female Founders
What I learned from attending a #BFF event and pitch practice
I am a white straight man from a privileged background. My experience engaging with the black community is minimal. So when I was invited to attend an event for black female entrepreneurs, I didn’t really know what to expect.
A little background:
Xina Eiland co-founded Black Female Founders to provide resources to black female entrepreneurs, specifically to address massive disparities in venture funding for women of color. According to Project Diane, black women founders received a total of 0.2% of venture funding between 2012 and 2014. Coverage here, here, and here.
Women in tech, and diversity in tech, are becoming regular conversation topics in my world. (It helps that my girlfriend is a woman, and works in tech.) Technology firms, in general, have done a poor job of incorporating diversity of thought and experience into their work forces; companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and many others are now starting to report employee statistics. The data are not encouraging.
I believe diversity — of thought, background, and experience — is valuable not just in technology, but on any team. More diverse voices, working collaboratively towards the same goal, will result in better solutions. There’s a growing amount of research to back this up, but it also just feels intuitively right. You can reach the needs of more potential customers with your solution if you understand the needs of more, and more varied, potential customers.
So this is a problem I want to help solve.
But I didn’t really know where to start.
Lucky for me, Andrew met Xina and made an introduction. Xina is wonderfully positive, helpful, knowledgeable, and funny. By day, she runs her own PR firm based in Arlington, though she has clients all over the country. BFF is almost like a passion project on the side. In a way, it’s fitting — many of the founders we met at her event started their businesses, or planned to start something, as a side project.
You can see immediately why women who join her organization will succeed: she’s the type of person that will truly help members move their businesses forward with the right encouragement, advice, and connections. (It’s worth noting that her two co-founders also possess a wealth of knowledge, experience, and community and industry contacts.) She and her co-founders are credible and driven. And they’re living the ideals of the community they are building.
The event: pitch advice and practice
Black Female Founders hosted their first event a couple weeks prior, and got an enormous response: 150 women showed up to engage in conversation and listen to a panel discussion. This, their second event, was more specific: a moderated discussion and presentation about pitching — in business competitions, or to angel investors — and a chance to practice your pitch in front of a panel of women business leaders from the DC area.
Around 30 women attended the pitching event, and I was pleasantly surprised at how friendly and approachable the attendees were in networking before and after the meeting content. I’ve been to a lot of networking events in a variety of industries; this was by far the friendliest.
Diverse businesses were represented: a photo-booth operator, a school carpool company, a math-tutor app developer, a media consultant — the list goes on. Each entrepreneur had different goals for the meeting (not everyone was pitching) but the folks I spoke to at the end said they learned a lot about how to think about their businesses, and how to pitch those businesses to potential investors. In short, attending the event added value.
I learned a lot, not just about pitching to investors (which follows a particular formula), but about the black community in general. For example, it’s difficult for people who aren’t white to find products and services that speak to them. I never thought about how hard it might be to find dolls that look like your child. Or how you might need specific hair products, but not be able to find them.
It never occurred to me that black-owned businesses are much more likely to re-invest in their communities, and are much more likely to hire people of color than their white-owned counterparts.
These things I learned simply through a couple of hours of listening to pitches, questions, and discussion about business. Lightbulbs went off, kind of like — well, duh Alex, of course these things make logical sense, if you had thought about them. And that’s both a little shameful, because I hadn’t, and also very exciting, because now I am. I don’t have all of the answers. Who does? But I do feel like I can be a part of the conversation. Listening. Learning. Talking with people. BFF put on a great event with people that were inviting, kind, interesting, and fun. For me, it was a good place to start.
What’s next for us
First, I’m really excited to continue working and speaking with Xina Eiland and the women who started and are a part of BFF. They were all so welcoming and inclusive; I intend on joining their events in the future whenever I can!
Second, Andrew and I are thinking about ways we can empower black women founders to enhance their businesses, or hatch new ideas, through utilizing codeless tools. Our expertise in building great software products — without code — could help reduce or remove the barrier to entry for more black female founders, and hopefully start chipping away at the seemingly intractable race and gender disparities in tech and venture capital.
Finally, I hope to find and take advantage of more opportunities to engage with and learn from founders and small business owners that don’t look like me. Three hours with Black Female Founders inspired me, and challenged me to think outside the box. I think I can improve as a businessman, and person, if that challenge continues.
How you can get involved
Black Female Founders is just getting started. They will be hosting more events in the future on a variety of topics, in the DC metro area and beyond. I encourage you to check out their website at blackfemalefounders.org and sign up for their mailing list.
More importantly, if you agree that diversity in tech (and even business) is a problem worth solving, find an organization in your area and reach out. Meetup.com is a great resource, and there are quite a few women- or minority-oriented groups that meet regularly around the country.
People are kind, helpful, and welcoming when you make an effort to reach out.
Learn something new. Feel a connection. Get inspired.
