When Eddison Razon came to Boston from the Dominican Republic four and a half years ago, he spoke no English, so he worked a dishwashing job and taught himself the language in his spare time until he could enroll at Bunker Hill Community College.
"I didn't know anyone, everything was new for me," he said.
Fast forward to now, and Razon is finishing his final semester of college. But that's not the only thing he has going for him: He also has an IT support internship set up this summer at Carbonite, the Boston-based data backup company. Even better, the internship will turn into a full-time permanent position when it's over, giving Razon a solid start to his career.
Razon is among the 18 students in the inaugural class of Hack.Diversity, a collaborative effort between Boston tech companies, venture capitalists and others to help black and Latino students find careers in the innovation economy. From January to March, the program helped students from colleges and coding bootcamps with career and interview coaching, ultimately leading up to them interviewing for internships at participating companies.
Razon shared his story at a Wednesday night event celebrating Hack.Diversity's inaugural class, where dozens of tech leaders, venture capitalists and other business officials congregated.
Because of Hack.Diversity, all 18 of the students have found internships at the five local companies participating in the program — Carbonite, DataXu, HubSpot, Wayfair and Vertex — and those internships will convert into full-time jobs, which Executive Director Jody Rose said is a requirement for participating companies.
"We're setting these students up for long-term success," she told me.
Hack.Diversity was founded last year by Rose, who's also executive director of the New England Venture Capital Association; Melissa James, a former Google recruiter who founded The Tech Connection, a firm that helps companies with diversity hiring; and Jeff Bussgang, a partner at Boston VC firm Flybridge Capital Partners.
The graduation of Hack.Diversity's class comes as tech companies struggle to attract and retain minority workers. This week, Uber released a diversity report showing that its workforce is 50 percent white and 31 percent Asian while only 15 percent of its employees are black or Hispanic — mostly falling in line with other large tech companies.
"There is an impending economic disaster here, and no one's paying attention."
Outside of the companies participating with Hack.Diversity, some of them, like HubSpot, are developing their own internal diversity programs.
Rose said Hack.Diversity's goal is to reach 100 job placements by the end of 2018 and 500 by the end of 2019. That means the program needs to partner with more "host companies" offering internships that will convert into full-time roles and more colleges that will help it find the right talent. As a nonprofit, the program is also looking for more financial support, with a goal to raise $1 million by the end of this year.
To Carbonite CEO Mohamad Ali, boosting black and Latino talent is a "financial and economic imperative" because it will help tech companies address gaps in the workforce. In making his point, he cited a statistic from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education that the state's economic growth rate will drop to 1.5 percent by 2018 "precisely because the state will not produce enough college-educated workers."
"There is an impending economic disaster here, and no one's paying attention," he said.
Razon said he knows companies could just as easily have looked for new talent at MIT and Harvard, which is why he's thankful Hack.Diversity gave him a chance to showcase his abilities.
"It would be easy for a lot of the companies to not give someone like me one second of the day ... they could just take my resume and just say, 'oh he's from Bunker Hill, just throw it,'" he said. "But the fact that you decided to take this moment ... decided to give me the opportunity to prove myself and to do my job, it's something that I really appreciate."
