Madame Noire | Black Women's Lifestyle Guide | Black Hair | Black Love

LDC:  How can we encourage more Black women to create, rather than just consume content?

MW:  Black women are some of the most active voices on social networks and we over-index for the use of mobile technology, but we are rarely creators of businesses around those technologies. Encouraging black women to create rather than just consume really starts with the education of black girls.

The way that you develop the next generation of female tech entrepreneurs is by encouraging girls to do well in math and sciences and pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers. I took my first programming class when I was about 8 and begged until I got my first computer very soon after that and I’ve been hooked on technology ever since. So it’s important to encourage any affinity to technology. That encouragement usually comes from the parents, but there are also organizations like Black Girls Code who are doing a lot to introduce girls of color to programming.

LDC:  What’s your greatest hope for the future/future of the industry?

From a Black Founders perspective, I hope that we’ve nourished a community of minority entrepreneurs and that we see several home run companies come out of that.The tech industry moves quickly and I don’t think it’s unfeasible to say that we’re going to see an extremely visible black tech entrepreneur leading a company on a national scale in the next 5-10 years.

If there’s a discussion around ‘pattern matching’ and that leads to an investor thinking ‘hey, maybe I have used that shortcut and how can I use less lazy decision-making techniques in evaluating entrepreneurs in the future’, then the dialogue has been beneficial. I’m not interested in discussions around race that are nothing more than venting sessions, but if a discussion creates potential solutions or helps someone change the way they see black entrepreneurs, then that discussion has value for me.