Charlotte Epée-WillSuN has always seen a racial gap at startup events. A gap in attendance, a gap in speakers.
Every year she’s hoped to see more diversity, “and I kept hoping that that change would come,” she said. It didn’t.
The Nigerian-born entrepreneur — Epée-WillSuN is the founder of video-on-demand streaming platform GrooVVee Media Inc. and BlackBumble, an IT recruiting system — is now launching a startup event of her own. BIPOC Startup Week runs Dec. 7-9 at the Finnovation Lab and Workbox in downtown Minneapolis.
Besides founders and interested entrepreneurs, the event will be attended by community development financial institutions; diversity, equity and inclusion directors; banks and venture capital firms interested in partnering with founders of color.
She said an event like this is especially important for networking and education. She’s known founders of color who have exited their startups while having little knowledge on how valuations work or had limited understanding of some of the venture-capital language. She said with that knowledge, those founders would have had significantly more profitable exits.
Data from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce shows that while people of color make up about 24% of the state's population, they make up less than 14% of all nonemployer business owners and under 7% of employer firm owners.
A McKinsey & Co. report notes that in 2022, Black and Latino founders received only 1% and 1.5%, respectively, of total U.S. venture capital funding. Only 0.1% of VC funds went to Black and Latino women founders.
The event will include a BIPOC Mall on the third day, where consumer-packaged goods founders can sell their products. There will also be retail sessions on e-commerce, scaling to global and AI.
A list of speakers can be found at the BIPOC Startup Week website. Some names include Al Cornish II from gener8tor, Y. Elaine Rasmussen from Social Impact, serial entrepreneur Isaac Kamsin and a host of others.
Epée-WillSuN said representation is huge. She grew up playing with dolls that had blonde hair and blue eyes. She said she grew up with a tainted imagination of who she is.
“I grew up with not accepting my strengths as a Black woman, because I feel I've got to look like this image to be this to be successful, and to achieve these heights,” she said. “Based on that, I want other BIPOC founders to see people like them orchestrating all these types of events.”
