The Black Startup Collective has been in the back of Kristina Liburd’s head for at least as long as she’s been in the startup scene. For the CEO and attorney, that’s more than five years; Liburd founded CounselUp Legal, which connects freelance attorneys with startup founders, at the beginning of 2015.
It would take this moment—a unique crossroads of a global pandemic and a fresh realization of racism in the U.S., coupled with a renewed desire for diversity in the startup economy—for Liburd’s dream to be realized.
Liburd launched the Black Startup Collective in earnest just a few weeks ago with the goal of creating a public directory of Black-owned startups for investors and the innovation community as a whole. From humble origins as a Typeform, it exploded overnight.
To date, Liburd has collected more than 300 different Black-owned startups through a combination of Typeform submissions and aggregated data from partners with similar lists. Those now exist in a public-facing Google Sheet, with links to partners, resources and other lists, including a list of venture capital firms that invest in Black-led startups.
“Honestly, I didn’t realize how big it was going to get,” Liburd said. “It really was just something I had been thinking about for a while, because I would like to collaborate with other Black founders in the travel tech space. I was hoping to find those who were like-minded. Now that it’s grown into a much larger issue, which it should be, I’m excited about where this could go.”
On Monday, Liburd announced that the Black Startup Collective had set up a number of scholarships with GSVlabs, a coworking space and startup accelerator that launched in Boston nearly three years ago. Members of the collective will get free annual memberships to GSVlabs’ Passport, a private platform with online tools and resources for startups.
The Black Startup Collective began as a side project. Liburd also works as an attorney at CounselUp Legal, and she’s the founder and CEO of Viageur, an AI-powered travel concierge based in Boston. She also previously ran the Boston chapter of Voyager HQ, a community and events platform for travel startup founders, which closed in April of this year as the coronavirus pandemic effectively shut down the travel industry. Liburd is now working on shifting her Voyager HQ colleagues to the Travel Tech Collective, a Slack community she started that serves a similar purpose.
Which is all to say: Liburd is busy. But her projects, particularly the Black Startup Collective and the Travel Tech Collective, demand her time for a singularly important reason.
“Community is needed,” Liburd said. “We like to pretend that we’re superheroes, that we can do it all. But community and discussion and membership are needed.”
Pariss Chandler, founder of #BlackTechTwitter and Black Tech Pipeline, has found a similar theme in her work.
It was nearly two years ago that Chandler posed a straightforward question on Twitter: “What does Black Twitter in Tech look like?”
The tweet went mildly viral; it garnered more than 4,000 retweets, but more importantly, it received reply after reply from Black software engineers, computer science students, designers and more who posted photos of themselves along with their job descriptions. Tech companies quickly caught on, and a number of them reached out to Chandler to ask her if she would recruit technical talent for them.
“I created my own talent database and started recruiting people out of that,” Chandler said. “Still, we noticed there was a retention problem. A lot of companies focus on the diversity piece and forget about the inclusion piece.”
To help remedy some of that, and to create community from the movement that had started with her tweet, Chandler launched Black Tech Pipeline, which boasts a community on Slack and Discord as well as a newsletter. Chandler is finalizing a more complete platform for Black Tech Pipeline which will include a job board, a resources page and events.
Like Liburd, Chandler works on these projects on the side. Her 9-to-5 job is as a front-end developer. (When I asked how she managed the multiple roles, she joked, “A lot of wine.”) And like Liburd, Chandler has been working on her projects for some time—even if they’re just now getting visibility.
“I was always building the platform,” Chandler said. “I always knew I wanted to build the website, and I did it little by little, finding out what the community needs and wants. Then, the newsletter came, and that was to bring exposure to individuals within the community and what they’re doing. The Slack and Discord communities let people continue collaborating.”
Liburd calls this juxtaposition “a double-edged sword.” Entrepreneurs and tech workers of color have been spending their time on worthy projects—and trying to improve the tech community’s long-standing diversity and inclusion issues while they’re at it—for as long as the tech industry has been around.
So why are leaders only just beginning to take notice?
“It’s progress, but then you wonder, where was that energy before?” Liburd said. “This is a visceral reaction to a very graphic death, which has been seen by so many people, during a pandemic. Why did it have to take this much? But we got here, so let’s make the best of it.”
What ‘making the best of it’ will require
Kurt Edwards can code in about 40 programming languages. He has taken two startups through Y Combinator, most recently Pyxai, a soft skills and culture fit assessment tool designed to help companies recruit, retain and develop talent. But he did not put a photo of himself—a founder and CEO, and also a Black man—on LinkedIn until within the last year.
“We just want to remove race and gender from it and have people value what we’re bringing to the world: a game-changer for the recruitment space,” he said.
A February report from Fit Small Business found that just 1 percent of venture-backed startup founders are Black, even as Black-owned firms grew: by 34 percent from 2007 to 2012, totaling 2.6 million companies. That same report ranked Massachusetts the 29th-best state for Black entrepreneurs based on specific ranking criteria like “Black Business Success” and “Social and Financial Equality.”
Kurt and his wife and co-founder, Pyxai COO Angela Edwards, are acutely aware of the factors at play as they work to build out Pyxai, which was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2019 cohort. After graduating from the renowned accelerator, the pair began raising seed funding for their startup, but turned their attention back to product development when the pandemic put fundraising on hold for most startups.
Besides, perfecting the product would be key in getting Pyxai off the ground.
“We learn to be self-reliant,” Kurt said. “We learn to work three times harder than anyone else to get the same level of success. It’s conditioning, for a lot of us, over time. It’s a mindset adjustment.”
Still, Kurt and Angela are aware of another truth in the startup world: “It’s not necessarily the companies that have the best product in the world that make it, but those who have the support,” Kurt said.
Support is everything within the tech industry. That goes for monetary investment as well as more unseen systems. In her recruiting work, Chandler finds that in addition to vetting candidates for tech companies, she also ends up vetting companies to determine whether they are healthy workplaces for the Black and Brown developers she works with. If a company’s internal culture is too toxic, she doesn’t pair them with job seekers in her network.
Even at relatively inclusive companies, Chandler often hears from candidates that they lack mentorship, or that they don’t know where to safely turn when they experience microaggressions.
To that end, Chandler quietly collects information about incidents of prejudice at specific companies. When she can, she relays feedback to companies without revealing information about a specific employee or job seeker, usually by first collecting more information from other employees via company-wide surveys.
“I think it’s hard, because I feel like companies need the concrete numbers, the concrete facts, the proof that they are harmful,” Chandler said. “They don’t take into account people’s experiences, no matter how minor they are. They say, ‘If it wasn’t blatant enough, then it’s not a problem.’ If you don’t take those little things into consideration, then you’re going to continue to be a harmful workplace.”
It’s not always companies that make things difficult for entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds. Sometimes, it’s the U.S. government. On June 22, President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring many categories of foreign workers from obtaining visas to enter and work in the United States.
The order, which puts a 60-day freeze on green cards until the end of the year and adds new restrictions covering work visas, attracted the ire of tech CEOs as well as Bostonians: One in six Massachusetts residents is an immigrant.
One local organization is working to keep some of this talent secure and in the country. Open Avenues Foundation helps foreign nationals and their U.S. employers obtain cap-exempt H-1B visas. The group’s Massachusetts Global Entrepreneur in Residence Program helps foreign nationals get a secure visa status with one of several universities in Massachusetts, permitting venture-backed startups to then file their own visa petitions.
Another one of its programs—the Social Innovation Incubator Program, which is still being iterated on—helps foreign professionals set up their own social ventures. The program partners with community colleges in the state and requires the social entrepreneurs-in-residence to either teach students or run an apprenticeship at partner schools.
As the program’s first social entrepreneur-in-residence, Jasmine Qin, put it, the set-up is a “win-win situation.”
“In today's climate, getting a cap-exempt H-1B visa for people like me, [who are] working here or want to go into research or higher education, is hard,” Qin said. “As it gets harder and harder, this is a unique opportunity for those who want to stay in the country.”
And if diverse entrepreneurs are able to stay local, they will likely be a crucial component of improving issues of diversity and inclusion in Boston’s startup ecosystem. Liburd, Chandler and scores of others are already doing the work. Chandler herself entered the tech industry via Resilient Coders, a bootcamp for coders of color in Boston.
But it remains to be seen whether Boston, specifically, will listen to their concerns. The median net worth of Black Bostonians is $8—yes, a single digit—and Boston has long been held up as an example of the myth of the benevolent North, a “liberal” city that is deeply segregated, where racism is embedded such that it can remain unseen to those not aware of it.
“Boston is the kind of racism that will act racist but call it a different name,” Liburd said. “It’s also the kind of racism that is just so deep-seeded that even people who would call themselves liberals don’t see the biases they act out. Which is why I think it’s definitely been an issue in the startup community here in Boston.”
Strategizing for the future
This summer, as venture capital firms look to begin finding new investors again, Liburd and the Edwards duo are both looking to finish out their startups’ seed rounds.
Liburd will be fundraising for her travel startup, Viageur. The company’s flagship product is an AI-powered platform that creates a personalized itinerary for the user based on interests, dislikes, destinations, budget and travel dates. It then connects the user with experienced vendors and can update the itinerary in real time if there are any changes.
Liburd is optimistic—“we’re going to knock it out of the park,” she told me—but she is also mentally preparing herself for an additional level of scrutiny that her White, male counterparts don’t have to go through.
“I know this is the plight of being a Black, female founder,” Liburd said. “There’s a difference in terms of the hoops I have to jump through to get a ‘maybe,’ whereas a male founder would have sticks and stones cobbled together and get a ‘yes.’”
Kurt and Angela Edwards acknowledge this reality in the very hierarchy of their startup, Pyxai. Kurt’s title is CEO and Angela’s is COO because, they said, he is more likely as a man to be well-received by investors. ProjectDiane2018, which analyzes data on diversity in venture capital, notes that in 2014, there were 6,791 funded startups led by at least one woman founder, and of those, less than 4 percent were led by Black women.
Kurt and Angela both pointed out that the issue is perpetuated because investors are so concerned with “pattern-matching;” that is, they look to successful tech companies like Dropbox and Google for examples of a good potential return on investment. The trouble is, most tech giants are run by White men.
“There’s a hesitance, from an investor’s perspective, to invest in minorities, because they don’t have that pattern-matching where they say, ‘The next unicorn’s going to be a Black founder or a Hispanic founder or a female founder,’” Kurt said.
Maybe—ideally—that will change.
Venture capital firms are taking stock of their own investments and in some cases creating new funds altogether to address disparities in funding. SoftBank this month launched a $100 million Opportunity Fund for minority-owned businesses. Andreessen Horowitz launched a $2.2 million donor-advised fund with a focus on early-stage entrepreneurs "who did not have access to the fast track in life but who have great potential."
“Change comes with awareness,” Kurt said. “There are unfortunate circumstances right now—people killed, the violence we’ve seen—but if one good thing comes out of it, it’s awareness. A lot of this has been happening behind closed doors for a long, long time.”
BostInno editor Srividya Kalyanaraman contributed to this article.
