“Historically, California and New York have a lot of startup programs—meet-ups, accelerators—not only for Latinx founders, but all founders,” she points out.
Toro says one reason digitalundivided is pursuing ProjectDiane research is to connect underrepresented entrepreneurs to more support, wherever they are. “As a Latina founder, I’m so excited and happy that digitalundivided has done this work. It’s an opportunity for us to have conversations [about inclusion], but baseline data was needed to have them. It’s the first time they’re gathering this kind of data, so there may be more that haven’t been captured.” (She urged startups that haven’t been counted to submit their companies via the digitalundivided website.)
We talked to a number of entrepreneurs and service providers in Detroit’s startup ecosystem to find out more about their experiences and strategies for increasing inclusion. Jereshia Hawk, a native of West Bloomfield, MI, left a career working as an engineer for a utility company to open her own consulting firm in Detroit, where she helps entrepreneurs get online businesses off the ground.
“They come to me because there’s a lack of capital,” she explains. “I teach them to create businesses without loans. If they’re not getting opportunities at the corporations they work for, I help them develop service-based businesses online.” Most of her clients are women of color, she says.
“There’s no way I’d move to Detroit if it wasn’t being revitalized,” she adds. But she’s also heard “horrendous stories” from local entrepreneurs. (She hasn’t personally experienced them, she says, but suspects that’s because she doesn’t depend on traditional business services.)
One barrier to success she sees for entrepreneurial people of color, women, and members of the LGTBQ community is being able to identify avenues for success. It starts, she believes, with representation. When she was in the corporate world, overseeing large-scale civil engineering projects, she was frustrated by the lack of people who looked like her at the executive level.
“The issue in the corporate world is that people are making decisions about communities with no representation from those communities,” she says. “You have to have representation in leadership or you’ll continue to miss the mark.”
Venture Catalysts’ Wheat echoes Hawk’s sentiments on representation, but says in some respects, Detroit already has a head start. “We have a strong, supportive startup community” with a willingness to collaborate, something she says is often missing in bigger tech hubs.. “They’re trying to add diversity to their community, but we’ve had that from the beginning. Detroit founders have grit and hustle in massive amounts and we’re longtime leaders in innovation, but because we’re a redeveloping ecosystem, people don’t automatically think of us as a place to scale tech startups.”
Lack of representation is exactly why Chacho Valadez, a venture investor with Backstage Capital, chose to get involved in Detroit’s tech community. A few years ago,
