mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

The former MIT student body government President Danielle Geathers said she wanted to study patent law so as to bridge the racial innovation gap. She was by then a Mechanical engineering major that was fixated on studying patent law so as to make it easy for black innovators to be able to easily patent their ideas. The innovation space is largely a white male scenario and if black founders are supported, they could bridge that divide and build many black owned enterprises. In fact, a commenter on tech news website techcrunch says the next chapter in the civil rights movement is in business capital availing to black founders so they can ably start their own enterprises. This will add about four percentage points to the overall American economy. And given a lot of conservatives are pushing hard against DEI efforts in leading American institutions, would it then be appropriate for black and underrepresented founders to start their own corporations?

There is a need to elevate minority geeks and intellectuals. Unfortunately for blacks, only entertainers and athletes are given the limelight as black nerds are hardly ever known. The eminent black leader Booker T Washington, the first black to visit the White House, said that instead of blacks competing directly with white supremacy, they should instead focus on quality education and entrepreneurship so that they can create a parallel state of upper middle class careers and small business excellence, just like Asian Americans have done. For the most part, Asian Americans don’t depend on the niceties of the state and they aren’t treated as a non profit would treat poor people, that is promise change but don’t deliver as it will jeopardize the business model sustainability. And so for minorities, they would want to make sure that they are able to start flourishing enterprises to uplift the whole community.

It would be important that a venture capital fund for minorities be set up. Unfortunately, the current venture capital market has insinuations on what a typical founder should look like, and that isn’t discrimination, but some sort of confirmation bias. And truly, this is to take nothing away from white male founders, but rather to point out that the venture capital field must be widened. And then reach out to historically black colleges such as Howard and Morehouse so that we set up entrepreneurship centers just as the likes of Harvard, Stanford and MIT, also have VCs going round in the college corridors and throwing money at the students. Really, with pushback against diversity efforts, even some big supporters such as JP Morgan are scaling back on DEI efforts. Diversity efforts have since cooled down after the murder of George Floyd and the black lives matter movement. In deed, this is to take nothing away from white male founders. They have formed incredibly great companies that continue to power America to this day. It’s just that the field of founders needs to be broadened.