Overlooked...

People of Color: An Overlooked, Ignored, and Missed Opportunity in Early Stage Enterprise Software Investing

I owe much of my success, grit, and identity to New Orleans and People of Color. 

Why?  Many incredibly accomplished People of Color, raised in New Orleans’ unique ethos and culture, served as mentors to me (either directly or from afar). For example, these are just a few of the people that I looked up to, learned from, studied & competed with and/or against, growing up in New Orleans: 

So, in 1999, I was both surprised and confused when I started my career in the software industry and saw that it was composed almost exclusively of white males. 

On March 6, 2000, I attended the Boston College Conference on the New Economy which included luminaries at that time including Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve), Bob Davis (CEO of Lycos), Bernard Ebbers (CEO of MCI Worldcom), Lawrence Summers (Secretary of the U.S. Treasury), and many others.  The event took place in the Boston College Conte Forum (i.e., BC’s sports arena) and thousands of people attended.  

C. Tyler Mathisen, a CNBC anchor was the moderator for a panel discussion entitled “Investing in the Internet Revolution” with four prominent technology CEO’s.  Considering the large audience, I was surprised when Mathisen opened this panel up to audience questions.  This was serendipitous for me; I wanted to ask a question and, since it was broadcasting live on CNBC, I figured that it would be a great way to get free publicity for the two companies that I had founded at the time: quixotiCo (an incubator focused on assisting existing, profitable small businesses with their Internet strategies) and Fat Thursday (a face-to-face networking events company for the high-tech industry). 

So, this was the question that I posed to the panel: “If you look behind me at this audience, what you see is a sea of white males.  What are you and your companies doing to ensure that you are recruiting the best and the brightest talent?” 

Note: This image is an approximation of the audience — it is not an actual picture from the event :)

My question produced a noticeable change in the demeanor of all of the panelists except for Geraldine Laybourne (Co-founder of Oxygen Media and Co-creator of Nickelodeon).  Many of the panelists immediately launched into a defense of their companies:  One retorted “we only hire the best” and another proclaimed “we hire based on merit.”  While Geraldine Laybourne agreed with me and stated that the tech industry had a lot of work to do to ensure that hiring was truly merit-based (i.e., not based on race, gender, geography, referrals from an insular network, sexual orientation, graduate of an “elite university,” etc.). 

This was a moment of clarity for me.  I recognized right then and there that this was a market opportunity that was clearly being overlooked, ignored, and missed.  This opportunity still exists today since frankly, on the whole, not much has changed since 2000.