How This Black Female Founder Is Helping Women and Minorities Get Ahead at Work

When a successful venture capitalist comes to a turning point in her career where she’s not sure what step to take next, what does she do? She co-founds a startup to give other women the professional tools and guidance she wished she’d had. In Episode 5 of the SistersInc. podcast, “Making an Impact,” Lisa Skeete Tatum shares how tech platform Landit is that solution.

“After over a decade as a venture capitalist—the thing that I thought I’d worked for all my life—I realized I didn’t want to do that anymore. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Skeete Tatum says.

“Everyone expected me to know. It felt pretty horrible,” she continues. “We know there’s a social cost to walking around saying, ‘I need a little bit of help,’ or ‘I don’t have it all figured out.’ So we suffer in silence.”

So she started working on a project that would “change the world” by helping diverse talent—women and people of color—unlock their professional potential.

“If I could address that massive problem of wanting to achieve success on your own but not knowing how, then I would have impact,” Skeete Tatum says, “because so many of us are not bringing the full measure of our talent to the workplace.”

Landit, billed as a “one size fits one” approach because it can offer a personalized career playbook, can be used both by individual professionals and by companies looking to develop and retain their diverse talent.

Last year, it raised $13 million in series A funding, putting Skeete Tatum in rarefied air as a black woman founder. To hear how she did it, check out Episode 5 of the SistersInc. podcast.

SistersInc. is Black Enterprise’s podcast for and about women business owners, hosted by Executive Managing Editor Alisa Gumbs. Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in America and on every episode, we’ll sit down with one successful CEO to share how she slays the challenges of being a black woman in business.