John Ketchum

This article was originally published on 07/25/2019 2018 was a record year for the amount of venture capital pumped into startups. Over $130 billion went to several lucky founders — the highest since the dot com era — setting them and their companies on a potential pathway to success. For many people, this number sparks a lot of optimism. More VC dollars means more companies are funded, which means more people have a shot at launching their idea. For Black and brown founders, seeing this large, obnoxious amount of VC funding can be a stark reminder of how much of it they’re not getting. According to a recent study, over the past 5 years, 77 percent of founders backed by VCs have been white and the teams receiving that money have been made up of mostly white men. Black founders made up just one percent of the companies receiving cash from VCs and for Black women, the picture is even bleaker. According to data from ProjectDiane, Black women founders have only received .0006 percent of...

Every year, thousands of people try their hand at learning how to code, and for good reason. Being efficient in a programming language (or several) is a pathway to economic empowerment for a lot of people. In 2017, the average computer programmer made around $82,000 a year, with the top coders salaried at $100,000. The financial benefits, while important, only speak to a fraction of what it means when a person learns to harness the technology that people use every day. Learning to code can open up a world of possibilities for the kinds of things people can create and the problems they can solve. However, the journey to gaining the skills to be able to do all these things can be long and arduous. We know that and are here to help. Today, we’re announcing a new partnership with CodeNewbie, one of the largest online communities for people learning how to code. CodeNewbie staffers will be offering advice to people at every level in their coding journey. Whether you’re just starting out,...

Twitter has a lot of problems, from white supremacy running rampant on its platform to the company not doing enough to protect its most vulnerable communities. One of Twitter’s biggest issues, though, is communication. Among the platform’s critics, a common theme is that Twitter has people in high-level positions who fundamentally misunderstand the platform and how to talk to its users to address their needs. This week, Twitter opened a job that may help address some of those issues and make communication between the company and its users a bit more seamless. The tech giant is hiring a “Tweeter in Chief” to run its main account and lead its editorial direction. According to the job description on Twitter’s careers site , this person would be responsible for being the company’s representative on the platform: Tweet Tweet. You’ll be @Twitter on Twitter. Our Tweeter in Chief. You’ll set the tone of who we are and how we act, and talk to people on Twitter. No big deal. While this is...

On Sunday at Morehouse’s commencement ceremony, hundreds of future alumni got life changing news: Their student debt would be paid off, in full. Robert Smith — the world’s richest African American and one of the country’s wealthiest billionaires — made the announcement to a crowd of joyous, twenty something Black men. Now their futures will be lived out without the mountain of student debt that most graduates leave school with. “On behalf of the eight generations of my family who have been in this country, we’re going to put a little fuel in your bus,” Smith said before he announced his gift. It’s unclear exactly how much the the donation will end up being, but the estimated total could be around $40 million, a ccording to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Smith is a mainstay in the tech industry. His firm Vista Equity Partners is one of the world’s leading suppliers of enterprise software and manages about $46 billion in private equity. Smith himself has amassed a fortune of over...

This article was originally published on 05/17/2019 For his entire career, Stanley Nelson has told some of the Black community’s most important stories. From chronicling the murder of Emmett Till to outlining the history of HBCU’s, Nelson has given the world a window into some of America’s most iconic moments, giving voice and historical context to African Americans’ role in them. Now, Nelson is giving us a look at another aspect of Black life, one that has shaped the African American experience in a way few really understand. In his new documentary, Boss: The Black Experience in Business, Nelson chronicles the contributions, successes, and inequalities that have followed African Americans as we’ve tried to pave our own way to success in an economy that wasn’t built for us to succeed. Through rarely seen photos and video, Nelson takes audiences through a journey of the first black entrepreneurs and how they bravely staked their claim in American life — and how that success and...

This week President Trump announced that he’s adding $1.6 billion to NASA’s budget so that America can “return to space in a big way.” While more investment in science and space exploration is a good thing, the way the administration plans to go about doing it is raising some concern. On Monday, the administration proposed taking $1.9 billion in Pell Grant surplus dollars to fund a number of different budget priorities, one of which was a fresh jolt of cash for NASA so that the US can return humans to the moon by 2024. The original deadline was 2028. NASA’s budget for 2019 was already at $21.5 billion and this proposal would add $1.6 billion to their 2020 budget. Originally, the president wanted to cut spending for NASA by $500 million. The extra money will also go towards building the Orion capsule, and developing the Space Launch System, the rocket being produced by Boeing that would be used in the moon mission, which we learned this week will be called Artemis, named after the...

We’ve all been there. You order a pair of shoes online that you love and wait in anticipation for them to be delivered to your doorstep. The day finally comes when they arrive, you try them on, and they don’t fit. Now, your day party, brunch — or whatever kind of turn up you like to go to — fit is back to square one. Nike wants to make sure this kind of fashion let down doesn’t happen to another poor soul with the use of augmented reality. Today, the shoe giant announced its Nike Fit feature, which uses technology to scan a customer’s foot to help them find the perfect shoe size. Nike claims that 60 percent of people are wearing the wrong shoe size. That seems like a high number of people wearing size 10s when they’re supposed to be wearing 11s, but its not surprising given how e-commerce has impacted the shoe industry. Finding the right shoe size online is hard. Unless you carry a Brannock device — the metal thing you stick your foot in at shoe stores — it can be difficult to know...

A hacker who has stolen several Git repositories from users is threatening to release their code to the public unless they pay a ransom of 0.1 in bitcoin, which is close to $565. In a note, the hackers said that anyone who had their code stolen had 10 days to pay the ransom or it would be leaked. People using Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab were all impacted. Below is a copy of the note, according to The Verge : “To recover your lost code and avoid leaking it: Send us 0.1 Bitcoin (BTC) to our Bitcoin address ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekctxLgc1FV2Ti9DA and contact us by Email at [email protected] with your Git login and a Proof of Payment. If you are unsure if we have your data, contact us and we will send you a proof. Your code is downloaded and backed up on our servers. If we dont receive your payment in the next 10 Days, we will make your code public or use them otherwise.” According to ZDNet , 392 Github repositories have been hit so far, but the bitcoin account where the ransom funds are...

Today, Facebook announced that it has banned several public figures from it’s platform, saying their behavior was “dangerous” and could cause potential harm to others. One of those figures is Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan’s removal from the platform most likely stems from some of his past comments regarding Jewish people. Just last year, Buzzfeed reported that Twitter refused to ban the religious leader after he tweeted a clip of him from a speech where he appeared to compare Jews to insects, saying that he wasn’t “anti-semite, but anti-termite”. Here’s the clip below: https://twitter.com/LouisFarrakhan/status/1052304476923719680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.buzzfeednews.com%2Farticle%2Fjosephbernstein%2Ftwitter-wont-suspend-louis-farrakhan-for-tweet-comparing During a speech last year on Saviour’s Day, Farrakhan incited more controversy , calling Jews his enemies, among other things. The speech has actually been...

This story originally published on April 30, 2019 Everette Taylor became an art buff by accident. In 2017 he stumbled into owning his first piece — The Red Whisperer by Jonathan Henriquez — after winning a raffle at a speaking event in Boston. Since then he’s been hooked on the art world, peppering his LA home with pieces from well known and unknown creators. But with his discovery of his love of art also came a commitment to fixing a lot of the issues he saw in the space. In the midst of his journey as an art collector, Taylor kept running into the same problems: How do you actually find and discover artists? Better yet, how does a person without connections to elite galleries and wealthy people find artists? How do you transform the art industry from being exclusive, to inclusive of minorities and marginalized groups of people? “I walk into art galleries and people don’t even acknowledge my presence” Taylor told Afrotech. Searching for the answers to these questions led Taylor to...

Most successful entrepreneurs have an element that drives them beyond fame or money. Something that speaks to the very core of who they are. For Zume Pizza co-founder Julia Collins, that driving force is food. As a child growing up in San Francisco, Collins spent a lot of time around her grandparents, who came to the Bay Area from South Carolina during the Great Migration and opened up their own dental practice. Collins says her grandparents were well-known in her community, not just for their success professionally (Collins’ grandfather was one of the first Black dentists in the Bay Area) but for the way they used food to bring the people in their community together. “At my grandparents’ house there was never any notion of setting four places and sitting down at the table at six o’clock. It was much more ‘come one, come all, there’s always something on the stove, everyone’s invited,’” Collins told Afrotech. As a child, Collins’ understanding of what it meant to feel safe, happy,...

Last week, Sony announced it would be rolling out a new feature that allows users to change their PSN name — the ID that follows you throughout the Playstation gaming world — freely and openly. It’s a big step for Sony, since Microsoft allowed XBOX users to do it for years. While gamers are very excited about the change (not being bogged down to one name while you’re owning people in Overwatch is very exciting), there’s one issue. T he new feature has the potential to stir up one of the gaming world’s oldest problems: hate speech and offensive language. Sony recognizes the problems that allowing people to change their PSN names more frequently could bring, and the company is trying to get ahead of it. A company blog post last week outlined that any PSN names using racial slurs, profanity, or any other offensive language that breaks Sony’s terms of service would be automatically changed to “TempXXX.” This punishment is actually light, considering that Playstation used to ban people...

Rapper Nipsey Hussle died Sunday after being shot outside of his clothing store in Los Angeles, but his life and legacy go far beyond the words he put on wax. Born Ermias Asghedom, the 33-year-old was at the highest point of his music career. His 2018 debut studio LP, Victory Lap, received a Grammy nomination for Rap Album of the Year. For many, the Grammy nod was just a confirmation of what a lot of folks already knew. Hussle — who started making music in 2005 — made a name for himself releasing mixtape after mixtape, gaining notoriety both nationally and in his hometown of Los Angeles. A lot can be said about Hussle’s rap career and how he was on his way to greater heights musically. But outside of the recording booth, he was committed to fighting inequality and solving age-old problems that held back the people in his community. Hussle was a staunch advocate for diversity in technology. Before Victory Lap dropped, he opened the doors to Vector 90, a co-working space and STEM...

Update: Hamilton has announced that she will be stepping down as CEO of Backstage Studio. Backstage General Partner Christie Pitts will step into the role. Hamilton will remain as Managing Partner for Backstage capital and will focus on fundraising. Last May, Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton announced that her firm  would be launching a $36 million fund geared toward supporting black women founders. A perfect way to fight back against the white, male dominated tech space. The fund however, hasn’t closed, according to Axios. Axios reports that two key investors for the fund have fallen through, and that the company also lost a $5 million operations deal with the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance two weeks before it’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, was arrested. Hamilton confirmed to Axios that some layoffs have occurred at Backstage Capital as well. Moving forward, Backstage will focus on its accelerator, which has expanded to 4 cities since the firm was founded in 2015. Hamilton told...

Twitter released it’s most recent diversity report today and announced a major hire that the company hopes will help it accomplish it’s broader D&I efforts. The new data shows that while Twitter’s diversity numbers are still low, the company is headed in the right direction. In 2017, Twitter’s workforce was 3.4 percent black. In 2018, that number bumped up to 4.5 percent. The company’s goal for this year is to have Black workers make up 5 percent of it’s workforce. For it’s Latinx workforce, the company saw smaller gains but has the same goal of 5 percent for 2019. Diversity in leadership at the company also saw an increase. Black employees currently make up 4.7 percent of leadership positions, an increase from 3.5 percent in 2017. The makeup of leadership positions held by Latinx employees only saw an increase of .1 percent. Source: Twitter In 2018, women made up just over 45 percent of new hires at the company. A little over 7 percent of new Twitter employees were black, and just...