me?’ Well, we’re going to have a whole panel of local founders that are people of color.”
One of the conference’s speakers is Fabian Elliott, CEO of Black Tech Mecca, a Chicago-based nonprofit think tank that uses data to “identify challenges impacting how black tech practitioners engage with their local tech ecosystems, crafting solutions to fill its gaps and spearhead change.” Elliott is also a technology consultant for Google and one of Black Enterprise magazine’s “100 Men of Distinction.”
Black Tech Mecca has created a framework to assess individual cities and black tech ecosystems via 13 indicators, including density of black-owned companies; strong connections between black technologists, their projects, and resources; a collaborative, risk-taking culture with plenty of networking opportunities; variety and availability of black mentors; amount of money being invested in black entrepreneurs and their companies; “race-neutral” policies and procedures, and evidence that black entrepreneurs are equally benefitting from them; and evidence of black technologists moving up the career ladder.
In February, the organization released its inaugural research report detailing the 13-point index and other findings. In September, Elliott will release a second report that applies that framework to measure the health of Chicago’s black tech ecosystem. His plan is to do a series of similar reports for other U.S. cities; Indianapolis, he says, is high on his list of places to study next.
“In our research, we didn’t find any a-ha or gotcha moments,” Elliott says. “Most of it comes down to underrepresentation or misrepresentation. If we apply the framework, it helps to better prioritize what will make the greatest impact. The real magic isn’t necessarily in the raw data, but how to make it actionable within the framework.”
Black Tech Mecca’s overarching goal, according to its website, is to create places where people of color are “empowered to leverage technology, to shape their future with their own hands and contribute unique value to the technological revolution taking place. These places are rich with access, connections, collaboration, and value our contribution as consumers and producers.”
That’s what really sticks in Elliott’s craw: why, when black people are so influential in pop culture and such enthusiastic consumers of technology—one could argue that few people knew what the point of microblogging was until so-called Black Twitter turned it into a comedic art form—are they consistently shut out of the opportunity to create and grow tech startups? It’s definitely not for lack of ideas, he adds.
“No one is taking a deep look at cultivating a whole city or ecosystem,” he says. “That’s what I’ll be talking about at Disrupt Indy—how to grow the black tech ecosystem from a quantitative and programmatic perspective.”
The inspiration for Black Tech Mecca came out of Elliott’s experiences working at Google. (Google is one of the organization’s research sponsors.) It was there that Elliott was able to use data to improve the lives of black workers, he says.
“It made we wonder how a similar data-driven approach could be applied to cities,” Elliott says. “With all diversity-in-tech initiatives, data was being underutilized, and nobody was keeping score. That sprung us into action to create a framework for measurement.”
Elliott says he hasn’t yet had a chance to formally present Black Tech Mecca’s research findings to Google. “I think that will be an interesting conversation,” he says.
Felecia Hatcher, founder and CEO of Code Fever Miami and Black Tech Week, knows firsthand the challenge of building a thriving, diverse tech ecosystem. She’ll be on hand at Disrupt Indy to discuss her work, which began four years ago when she opened a coding school for Miami’s black and Caribbean community. “Miami is a very interesting example because people think of it as a diverse city,” she explains. “But it’s diverse in its people, not its institutions. There were no co-working spaces in these neighborhoods where you could see startup founders collaborating, and it’s really easy to be dismissive of something if you can’t see it.”
Storytelling, she says, is just as important to creating an inclusive ecosystem as funding and mentorship. “You need media and platforms to tell your stories over and over—what you’re doing and how you’re contributing. It helps raise the profile.”
In Miami, Hatcher created a venture capitalist-in-residence program to contend with the “huge problem” of a lack of startup funding for minority entrepreneurs, she says. “There was no fund dedicated to entrepreneurs of color, so we brought in leading Silicon Valley investors for one month, and that was a gamechanger,” she adds. With a dash of FOMO and a hint of shame, local investors were inspired to start supporting homegrown early-stage companies after they saw their Bay Area peers put some skin in the game.
“The VC-in-residence program helps two-fold: It has an impact on startup founders, and
