Colorwave Turns 2: Reflections On Our Progress and What’s Next

We previously shared more about why we started Colorwave in early 2021, but as we celebrate two years in operations, I’d like to dive into my personal journey to Colorwave, a few lessons we have learned along the way, and why we’re excited to keep building and growing this community.

Contents:

• Colorwave’s origins: Stepping out on faith and passion
• What We’ve Learned: Highlights from Year 2
• What’s Next for Colorwave
• How You Can Support Our Work

Colorwave’s origins: Stepping out on faith and passion

It was August 2020, I was coming down from a high in my personal life-finding weeks before that I would be a first-time father. Professionally, I felt I was in purgatory. I was a mid-level manager at an international education holdings company working on an initiative to accelerate online learning at HBCUs. Unbeknownst to me, when I took the job earlier that spring, this work would be rather important in 2020 as many educational institutions were faced with serving students online for the first time. In a short amount of time, my team and I were able to create meaningful impact training more than 400 faculty members across over 20 HBCUs in leveraging online platforms to serve their students. On the outside looking in, I had everything a young professional could want. I was making ‘good’ money in a stable, corporate job, doing mission-oriented and impactful work, and beginning to build my personal family legacy. Yet, something was missing.

Earlier that summer, I’d told a friend that I was ready to step into entrepreneurship. There were a number of small-midsize business ideas I’d been ruminating on during the year and I felt an urge to make that jump. That same August, a close friend and mentor, Leandrew Robinson, reached out asking if I’d consider leading a new initiative he and a few other business leaders were developing to broaden access to the innovation economy for underrepresented communities.

The idea was still in its infancy and needed a leadership team to move the idea from concept to execution. After talking with the other business and civic leaders involved, I was sold. It was time for me to leave my notion of ultimate ‘stability’ and build something that didn’t exist — Colorwave.

What was particularly alluring about what would become Colorwave was the problem that what we’re trying to solve is very acute and proximate to my experience as a young professional. While growing up in the era of multiple tech booms in the late 90s (AOL, Netscape, eBay, Amazon) and early 2000s (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Skype, Youtube), a few things were clear — there was little understanding of these nascent technologies within my networks and community as a Black man and almost no pathway to finding a job at these companies as they were born and continued to grow. Despite being a student in the Bay Area at one of the top places to find talent, UC Berkeley, these companies and industries might as well have been on Mars in terms of our two worlds being connected. The net effects of this as a mid-career professional is that many of my peers went into ‘stable’ jobs in government, legal, nonprofit, healthcare, etc. mainly due to these network and access gaps that existed. While others went on to make large or mini-fortunes by working in venture-backed tech, myself and my friends remained locked out of the career and economic upside that can exist within this segment of the economy.

Armed with this proximate understanding of the problem, I jumped on board, initially serving as an advisor to the organization and then taking on a leadership role in November 2020. We officially launched our first program, the Colorwave Fellowship, in January 2021 with 22 fellows. This program was designed to help working professionals from traditionally marginalized communities better understand the venture-backed ecosystem, help them understand what it’s like to work in a venture-backed business, help them search and prepare for open roles across the ecosystem, and connect them to growing companies via our venture and startup partnerships.

The success of our first fellowship cohort has led us to new heights. In roughly 2 years, we’ve supported more than 300 fellows via this program, over 5 cohorts, across 40+ different cities. More than 100 alumni of the program and counting have found roles across the innovation economy. Fellows value the quality of the experience giving it a 92% quality rating and 100% would recommend.

Beyond these positive outcomes, what we’re most proud of is our ability to build an authentic community of professionals, investors, and growing startups who are interested in broadening access to opportunities for traditionally marginalized communities in this space AND are committed to building a more inclusive future of early and growth-stage tech.

As we celebrate two years doing this important work, I am reminded that faith, passion, and tenacity is often the basis of change and innovation within our society. Without these key ingredients from our initial set of board, team members, and early supporters, we would not have gotten to this point today. We are in the early innings of helping to create the future of tech we desire to see, but would like to share some early lessons and what’s on the horizon for Colorwave going forward.

What We’ve Learned: Highlights from Year 2

1. Diverse talent is here…..and ready to contribute — Over the years, there have been a few prominent naysayers that the reasons many startup and public companies look so homogenous is that there’s just not enough racially diverse talent out there. Through our program and recruitment process, we’ve found that talent is equally distributed, but companies have to know where to find them. Many of the purveyors of the ‘lack of diverse talent’ sentiment lack the connections, networks, and relationships to attract those candidates to their companies. We have found that once candidates understand a company’s business, learn more about the organization from current employees, and trust the organizational culture, they are more likely to eagerly apply for roles and once hired, stay in those roles and recommend their peers for openings. We believe that by building broader relationships with organizations like Colorwave, MLT, dev/color, Colorstack, Techqueria, The Knowledge House, and NSBE, to name a few, you can start to expand your talent pool and create inclusive pipelines of candidates as you grow your company.
2. Representation matters — Following the lesson above, representation is key. Underrepresented candidates are more likely to show interest and explore your company when they can see people that look like them in key roles across a company. In our programming, we make it a priority that at least 70% of our industry speakers come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. We also see that when companies that engage with us, bring in diverse voices to connect with talent, they tend to see a higher level of interest from candidates by way of applications and follow-on connections with people employed at that company.
3. Underrepresented talent doesn’t need to navigate their career in silos — More than 50% of our fellows are first-generation college graduates and over 70% are first-generation corporate professionals. While this often marks these individuals as trailblazers for their respective families, navigating their careers can be challenging with no one at home or in immediate proximity to discuss their pathways. Beyond the industry network we have created, the other key benefit that Colorwave provides is the ability to bring underrepresented professionals together to better define potential pathways, find resources and connections related to various career paths, and to generally have a community supporting and advocating for your career success. Despite the proliferation of ‘social networking’ technology in society, that deep personal peer connection is often lacking and that is what participants often say makes the Colorwave experience meaningful.
4. Progress will continue to be measured financially and via actions — The summer of 2020 and the death of George Floyd spawned a number of financial and racial justice commitments across industries — including the innovation economy and venture. Large tech companies like Paypal, Alphabet, and Amazon have started to make good on some of their promises by getting dollars into the hands of diverse fund managers who often invest in founders from diverse communities. Delivering on those types of promises are key, but there are more deliberate actions traditional VCs can take, which is simple as backing more diverse entrepreneurs. As I write this post, it’s hard to ignore some of the recent, prominent venture funding mishaps like FTX and Fast, who received hundreds of millions and billions in financial backing, when in Q3 of 2022, groups like Black founders received $187 million or .43% of the $43 billion dollars deployed during the quarter. As we move beyond well-researched commitments, funds can make good on those promises by investing in founding teams from traditionally marginalized communities, encouraging their portfolio companies to track and share diversity hiring metrics, and connecting their companies to pipelines of diverse advisors, board members, and talent. Startups can do their part by working to build diverse teams as early as possible, creating inclusive work environments for all employees, and building hiring structures that interview, hire, and retain employees from underrepresented backgrounds.
5. Being a startup nonprofit is very much like being a startup company — For the bulk of these two years, we’ve surprisingly made such great progress with a lean team of three full-time employees and a number of contractors and volunteers. We’re a scrappy bunch with huge ambition and have done more, with less. As chronicled in recent years, nonprofits led by Black and Latinx directors trail white-led organizations in budget size by 24% and net unrestricted assets by 76%. We have spent the better portion of these two years with months of cash on hand and with very lean spending habits. As we seek to grow our impact, fundraising is an area where we hope to continue to grow our capacity and effectiveness to propel us to hit our full vision of impact.

What’s Next for Colorwave

Looking ahead to 2023, we plan for 2023 to be another year of accelerating our impact.

1. Quality Fellowship and Community Growth: In 2023, we plan on doubling the size of our community of fellows. This year we implemented a multi-time zone model hosted by alumni and supported by program staff. This model enabled us to scale our live fellowship, supporting roughly 100 fellows in our most recent fellowship cohort in the Fall 2022. Next year, this model should enable us to serve multiple cohorts of 100–150 via live format. In addition to the live format, we are also thinking of other ways to grow our talent community with quality, which includes offering an on-demand alternative for those interested in joining our network and exploring certain affiliate pathways to joining the talent community.
2. Supplemental Programming for Alumni: As our alumni community grows, we continue to explore ways to accelerate their career pathways and continue to build and maintain the sense of community developed during the fellowship. Next year, in partnership with an emerging venture fund, we will grow our Founders Accelerator programming that we piloted in 2022, designed to help pre-seed/seed stage Colorwave alumni founders improve their product, business model, and investor pitch. For other alumni, we continue to provide career coaching, negotiation support, and opportunities to hear from respected industry leaders via our speaker series. We will also be doing more in-person events and networking as the pandemic further subsides.
3. Thought Leadership Around Early Stage Tech for Diverse Communities: During these two years, we have noticed a key element of our work is peeling back the curtain within the venture-backed ecosystem and helping the communities we serve truly understand how things work, where to find resources and experts, and understanding the numerous pathways to career fulfillment and economic upside that exist in tech. We plan to expound on that via various content creation via social media, Medium articles from fellows, and even potentially launching our own podcast.
4. Strategic Fundraising Relationships: One of our goals as a leadership team is to help redefine what a modern nonprofit looks like and can do. With this in mind, we are looking to find grant and philanthropic partners who see the value in our work and model to-date and who want to help us build a community that can further transform the careers and economic outcomes for our fellow community.

How You Can Support

• Donate [Financially] — We are kicking off our annual Giving Campaign which helps us kickstart our programming for 2023. Consider donating what you can here!
• Donate [Time] — If you would like to lend your voice or expertise to Colorwave’s talent community in the future, sign up here.
• Partner [Fund or company] — If you want to join in what we’re building to broaden access to underrepresented professionals, we are connecting with new partners in the coming months. Sign up here or email partners@thecolorwave.org.
• Follow [the Wave] — Follow us on Linkedin, Twitter and Medium to track our progress!