A ninja, a Jedi, and a rock star walk into a bar. They take one look around and walk back out.
If you have no idea why ninjas and Jedis would be socializing, or pivoting, you’re probably clueless about the interactive software technology buzz across the country.
If the business news around Facebook, Instagram, and Groupon hasn’t clued you in yet, you need to be informed: We are living in unprecedented times in which entrepreneurs who have little or no money build empires out of thin air only to exit them 18 months later as millionaires. Or, they retain their equity and iterate, hoping to go down in Silicon Valley history as a legend on par with Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.
The only problem with that equation: African Americans don’t fit the mold. They don’t match the pattern. They’re not in the pipeline. They aren’t fundable. Or so “they†say.
Less than 1% of founders who receive venture capital are black. There is obviously a problem in the hi-tech software industry when there aren’t more black entrepreneurs with bankrolls.
But since 2010, that stat from CB Insights has been pounded into our brains over and over again until you start to wonder, “Aren’t there any successful black-owned and -operated tech companies?†You bet. And that’s what this article is all about: a celebration of the black tech renaissance.
Here we highlight a few digital mavens from the Bay Area to Brooklyn in industries as diverse as gaming, fashion, banking, and romance. Read on to see how they are shredding stereotypes with their nunchakus and light sabers.
The Muscle
In college, Benjamin Young started off in engineering but fell in love with computer science. He also started off weighing 175 pounds, but about seven years after graduating ballooned to 240. He shed the weight but retained his affinity for coding, which came in handy when he and his co-founders, Greg Coleman and Boomie Odumade, started Nexercise, an iPhone/Android app that encourages physical activity through competition, social support, and rewards both real and virtual. When the three partners saw that there was a market need, the former Wharton Business School classmates revisited the idea after graduation. Two years later, Nexercise’s 500,000 users are logging 700,000 minutes of physical activity per day.
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Rated five stars in Apple’s app store, the app uses location-based technology, time stamps, and other digital inputs to analyze behavior and determine the best way to motivate individual users. It uses “experience points†as a benchmark, not miles ran, minutes walked, or calories consumed. For example, users earn medals for aerobics on a rainy day, points for exercising with a buddy, or spot rewards just for using the app. The rewards are highly targeted advertising, and the Silver Spring, Maryland-based Nexercise gets paid by the companies to give them away. “We call it motivation in your pocket,†Young says.
The Medicine Men
OnceLogix, a company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, founded by Trinity Manning, Rod Brown, and Tyrone McLaughlin, provides software solutions for the healthcare industry. Their breakout product, Sharenote, provides Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant security to simplify client care at behavioral health organizations. Sharenote is used in more than 200 practices by clinicians who need to keep an audit trail of electronic health records.
The Restaurateur
Ola Ayeni founded Eateria, a digital loyalty marketing tool, to assist restaurant and other hospitality operators with retaining customers. Using e-mail, social media, and mobile apps, Eateria rewards returning customers with coupons instead of just deep discounts as daily deal sites do. The software provides owners with redemption information and ROI reporting.
The Romantic
Does technology kill relationships? Not so, says Zuhairah Scott Washington, 35 (pictured), a Harvard-educated lawyer who founded Kahnoodle in 2011 to encourage sustainable relationships. The iPhone app (it can also be used on iPad and iPod) uses gamification to intrinsically motivate lovers to speak each other’s “love languages.†Her affiliate revenue business model has won pitch competitions with Distilled Intelligence and Focus 100.
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The Career Counselor
Heather Hiles has spent 20 years helping educate underserved children. The former commissioner of the San Francisco Unified School District also ran SFWorks, a welfare-to-work program that placed 5,000 women in jobs. During that time, she realized that we are all lifelong learners and our experiences inside and outside the classroom contribute to the paths we take in life. In response, she developed Pathbrite, an e-portfolio platform that engages learners as young as elementary school age to highlight their best experiences and creations. Each student has a private account in which they can own a copy of what are called digital artifacts: schoolwork examples, test scores, and transcripts. Authenticated diplomas and certificates of completion will soon follow. The content can follow them from high school to college and throughout their careers.
“I believe students should own their own data, whether it is an essay, a video they created, articles they wrote for the school paper, or transcripts,†says Hiles, who at the Clinton Global Initiative last year pledged to donate 1 million free portfolios to public schools and underserved children.
Some 25 institutions of higher learning, including Stanford University and the University of Illinois, have officially adopted Pathbrite. Now with ACT, a leading provider of pre-college and career readiness tests, as a strategic investor, Pathbrite is the only e-portfolio platform in the market that provides electronic copies of students’ ACT test scores.
But it’s not just for show. Hiles employs psychometricians to analyze the data and help portfolio owners optimize their next steps. Pathbrite currently targets those who are in the higher education space, but Hiles’s goal is for the software to be truly mainstream.
“We are all working on a body of knowledge that is unique to us,†says Hiles. “With these portfolios, I think we can…take data about what you know and help you…visualize your path for future success.â€
The Buy Black Guide
Janine Hausif’s iPhone/iPad app, Around the Way, uses a smartphone’s GPS to locate black-owned businesses within a defined radius of the user’s location. Along with partners Sian Morson, a mobile development expert; and Eric Hamilton, who heads business development, Hausif, 29, forged an 18-month exclusive partnership last January with the U.S. Black Chamber Inc., which will offer its 240,000 members premium listings beginning this spring.
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The Pipeline
Founded in April 2011, Black Girls Code is Kimberly Bryant’s vehicle to fill the “T†in the STEM pipeline. Last year, while still working full time in the biotech industry, Bryant corralled 400 volunteers to help host workshops that taught various aspects of Web-based technology including mobile apps, design graphics, digital filmmaking, and robotics to 800 girls in nine U.S. cities.
Best City for Blacks in Tech?
Ninjas, Jedis, and rock stars? Don’t forget cowboys. Austin, Texas, is looking more and more like America’s next tech boom city. It was ranked No. 2 by the Milken Institute on its Best-Performing Cities 2012 because of its growth in jobs, wages and salaries, and technology output over a five-year span.
If wrangling, steering, and branding are a cowboy’s forte, then there is no bigger cattle call than South by Southwest Interactive. Known as the launchpad for Twitter and Foursquare, SXSWi is one of the tech world’s biggest events. Some 25,000 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and industry leaders descend on Austin every March to see what is trending in tech circles.
All Old West puns aside, Austin is no ordinary Texas city. It is the birthplace of Dell Computers and home to the University of Texas, where the state’s center for innovation, the IC2 Institute, lives. Now with DreamIt Ventures, NewMe, and other accelerators and incubators in the area, the tech atmosphere in Austin is hotter than its average summer temperature of 85 degrees.
Helping black entrepreneurs leverage it all is Natalie Madeira Cofield, 31. Since stepping into position as president and CEO of the Capital City African American Chamber of Commerce nearly two years ago, Cofield’s goal has been to get the chamber more deeply involved in Austin’s tech ecosystem. The chamber recreated a black technology council that includes representatives from Dell, Samsung, Apple, and Facebook as well as the city of Austin’s chief technology officer. And Google has signed on to sponsor the initiative. “It’s important for the next wave of black entrepreneurs to be in line with the highest growth industries in the country,†says Cofield.
What else does Austin offer? The cost of living is so much lower, that it gives startups a real chance at work/life balance, says Gina McCauley, an award-winning blogger and the organizer of Blogging While Brown, an annual conference that brings social media, blogging, and tech experts together for education and collaboration.
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The Chamber has drawn attention to Austin-based companies such as software and game developer Heatwave Interactive and SalesVu, a mobile point-of-sale, software-as-a-service that has 15,000 registered users worldwide and has grown 30% month-over-month. The Chamber honored Pascal Nicolas, 35, SalesVu’s owner, for his business prowess and foresight to put SalesVu’s services in the cloud and thereby reduce clients’ costs. Black Enterprise and Dell were also honored by the CCAACC at its Small Business Awards Gala this year. “Natalie has brought together companies that may have heard of one another but didn’t have a legitimate connection,†says Mykel Mitchell, president of Heatwave, which released the popular iSamJackson app. Cofield has made it possible for Mitchell to negotiate future deals with Dell and be 100s advertising agency SandersWingo.
“She definitely gets Web 2.0. She’s exactly what the chamber needed,†says Donell Creech, founder of SoulCiti, Austin’s portal to black events and businesses, who has curated Blacks in Tech events for SXSW for the last three years.
Cofield, acknowledges that the black population in Austin is decreasing. But that shouldn’t discourage black entrepreneurs with web-based ventures who want to take advantage of Austin’s tech resources. She says: “I feel like Austin is reflective of the changing dynamic of the U.S.â€
The Bankers
After meeting as interns at J.P. Morgan, co-founders Charlie Tribbett and Larry Baker, both 28, saw a way to help entrepreneurs engage local investors without breaching SEC laws. They launched Chicago-based Bolstr, a community funding marketplace that makes sure small businesses remain in compliance and lowers the legal costs businesses incur. Among Bolstr’s investors are John Rogers of Ariel Investments L.L.C. (No. 7 on the BE Asset Managers list with $4.4 billion in assets under management).
The Jet-Setters
Founded by Andrea Adams and Teri Johnson, TravelGirls Unlimited L.L.C. is a boutique production company and award-winning travel and lifestyle brand specializing in global travel content. The 30-something jet-setters provide useful travel tips in their original Web series on Travelista TV and other sites such as AOL Huffington Post and BET.com. Their HD video content has garnered more than 9 million views, and their social footprint boasts close to 3,000 Facebook likes and more than 3,000 Twitter followers. This year Travelista TV will unveil an e-commerce component and perfect its mobile presence.
–Janel Martinez
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The Gamer
Since 2007, Atlanta-based Konsole Kingz has been one of the few minority-owned companies that have a contract to create and sell virtual goods on the Xbox platform. Partners C.J. Peters (pictured) and Marcus Matthews have sold more than 1.3 million unique gamer pics, themes, and avatar accessories. The two partners recently worked with Kandi Burruss of Real Housewives to produce her mobile app, Kandi-Koated Spades.
The V.C.
Model turned serial entrepreneur turned early stage venture capitalist and angel investor Lauren Maillian Bias, 28, is a co-founder of Gen Y Capital Partners in New York City. After successfully exiting SugarLeaf Vineyards in Charlottesville, Virginia, she founded Luxury Market Branding, a strategic brand building consultancy firm for high-end consumer products. Her advice to aspiring tech investors:
Invest in the team. “I look for people who are able to evolve and adapt. Companies pivot all the time. You have to feel like you’re investing in a team that moves as fast as the market.â€
Don’t lead, follow. “Make a small investment in the early stages and follow up selectively in companies that show significant traction and are breaking away.”
The Data Hound
In a world where big data technologies are becoming part of our everyday lives, Jon Gosier, along with business partner Matthew Griffiths, co-founded metaLayer in 2011 to help non-technical users perform data-driven research such as trend spotting in big data sets, predictive analytics, and visualization, using drag-and-drop data science technology. “One of the biggest pitfalls of other companies in this space is they are all targeting super-sophisticated
individuals who are highly educated and highly trained, but that doesn’t help smaller companies that have non-technical staff. So we decided to build metaLayer in a way that helps people who don’t know anything about big data but who know how to drag and drop things on a screen.†The Philadelphia-based data analysis startup, which Gosier, 31, says is totally bootstrapped, aims its services at government, media, and nonprofit organizations and has grossed annual revenues of $500,000.–LaToya M. Smith
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The Instructors
After a year of trying unsuccessfully to teach themselves how to code using online tutorials and e-books, Neal Sales-Griffin, 25, and Michael McGee, 24, founded the Starter League (formerly Code Academy) in 2011. The 12-week program teaches aspiring programmers and Web designers how to turn their ideas into working Web applications and interactive prototypes. More than 500 students from 25 states and 15 countries have graduated from the program. This summer, Starter League will participate in an innovative teach-the-teacher partnership with the city of Chicago. It will teach Web development classes to teachers from select Chicago public schools.
–LaToya M. Smith
The Entertainer
Don’t call it a comeback, call it a startup. Boomdizzle Networks, co-founded by Grammy Award-winning entertainer LL Cool J, is a virtual recording studio that allows two musicians in different locations to collaborate in real time without experiencing latency issues. Sony found the software to be so cutting-edge that the company partnered with Boomdizzle to include the software in Sony VAIO E 14P series laptops. In 2012, the Sony/Boomdizzle Future Sounds bundle sold for $900 in 30 Sony Direct stores as well as Walmart.com, Fry’s, and a number of additional retail outlets. “Boomdizzle makes it easy for the next generation of great artists to come together, regardless of geography, and create the next big project,†says LL Cool J. He used the software to create a few tracks on his newest album, Authentic, which will be released this spring.
The History Maker
Serial entrepreneur Clarence Wooten is founder and CEO of Arrived Inc., a consumer mobile startup. He has launched and operated five tech startups since founding his first, an architectural rendering and animation service company, Envision Designs, while in college. He also co-founded ImageCafé in 1998 (acquired for $23 million by Network Solutions/VeriSign). Wooten founded Groupsite (formerly CollectiveX) in 2006 and will launch his newest venture, Progress.ly, this spring. Groupsite will be introducing a companion product this spring as well, called Roundtable.
–LaToya M. Smith
The e-Boutique
Making life easier for women on the go, Tracey Solomon and co-founder Katrina Carroll-Foster created Hoseanna, a site where busy women can sign up for monthly or quarterly deliveries of must-have pantyhose, trouser socks, leggings, and shape wear. Delivering brands such as Berkshire, Hue, and Hanes to your doorstep, the nearly 2-year-old company has more than 1,000 customers.
“We recognize that pantyhose can be a nuisance for women to buy, so we’ve brought together top-selling brands under one house to make it easy for women to get the hosiery they need,†says New York City-based Solomon.
–Janel Martinez