OPEN LETTER
Be Brilliant
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
My partner Loida Otero and I have been social entrepreneurs since 2007, when we started our first social good business called Sunset Interactive Media. We felt that kids from our Brooklyn neighborhood and neighborhoods like it were underserved by the education system in NYC, particularly when it came to STEM education. So, we wanted to democratize STEM education — especially for disadvantaged kids — by making games that taught kids STEM subjects.
The first product we worked on was a game called Max RollerJet, which would have taught math through a modern platformer experience similar to a game like Ratchet & Clank. We got a great start on it, too! We selected a game engine — even exchanging emails with the founder of Unity at the time! — got art produced, and designed a level. Ultimately, though, the barriers to entry for new entrepreneurs and for game development shops were too high for us at the time, and with no viable way open to us to distribute our game, we ended up pivoting to a digital agency model to survive. We lasted nearly 5 years before pulling the plug, realizing that we were not going to be able to reach our goal that way.
After that, I helped create Vonvo, a video events platform and donation tool for nonprofits. Fast forward a decade and since April, 2017, it appears we’ve been at it again, this time with a brand new mission—economic empowerment. We want to provide the same quality business education content, support, and investment to female, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ independent workers that your average middle to upper class straight white men get from startup accelerators and incubators across the country. Again, after failing so much, we find ourselves trying to fight back, level the playing field in some small way, and create positivity and abundance for underrepresented people in our own circle of influence.
You might ask, “But why?”
To Loida and me, the best way to fight back against the darkness is to shine a light all that much more brightly. We believe in this so much that it’s actually our company’s tagline at the moment, “Bring your light to the world.” To us, the world functions on two key, intersecting systems—law and economics. For us, the economic route makes more sense, and if we can help even one person build wealth and go on to help others, then it all will have been worth it.
You might also ask, “Okay, but why you? Didn’t you just say you’ve failed so much?”
Absolutely, we’ve both failed together and individually many times and in many ways. But each and every one of those failures has been a learning experience. We’ve accrued almost 4 decades of learning and (often painful!) experience between the two of us so far. Not to say we don’t have our moments of self-doubt—we do! I’m reminded of the beautiful words of Rudy Francisco:
“My brain is a revolver
with ‘Am I good enough?’
in every chamber.So I turn into a factory that
only makes the word ‘yes’.”
The only way we can truly and completely fail is to stop trying at all. We hope to put all of our accrued knowledge and experience to work for people like you, instead. So, you see, the real question isn’t “Why us?” but “Why not us?” I hope that you’ll also go out there and be brilliant, and when people ask you, “Why?” or “Why you?”, maybe now you have some more ideas for how you might answer.
