TechTank: How Black Tech Founders Are Advancing Innovation

Black inventors, scientists, founders, and other tech innovators have made tremendous advancements to the broad ecosystem of technological innovation. To name a few, Shirley Ann Jackson is a renowned physicist who was the first Black woman to earn her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jackson contributed to early telecommunications advancements like caller ID and call waiting. Mark Dean, an African American engineer and computer scientist, has been recognized as the expert who contributed to the development of the modern-day computer, as well as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus, which allowed various devices, such as printers and modems, to connect to personal computers. These and other Black tech innovators have been tremendous drivers of the contemporary and future tech ecosystem.

Despite their progress, access to capital still wanes when compared to white inventors. McKinsey and Company found that investments in Black founders would contribute more than $290 billion to the general economy. However, Black founders face many obstacles in closing deals with venture capitalists. Black founders continue to receive less than 1% of all funding of startup capital, which makes it more difficult for them to breakthrough.

In this episode of the TechTank Podcast, co-host Nicol Turner Lee speaks with serial entrepreneurs, Erin Horne McKinney, the founder of the HBCU National Innovation Consortium for Entrepreneurship, and John Pasmore, the founder and CEO of Latimer, a more inclusive Large Language Model.