The notion that Black people in America need to work twice as hard as others to succeed may be a depressing sentiment, but it has been deeply ingrained into the psyches of many African-Americans.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, several Black founders spoke about some of the burdens that come along with being a Black person in tech. Many of us are familiar with imposter syndrome, where one feels like they’re a fraud and fear being “found out.” But another idea that came up was representation syndrome.
Representation syndrome centers around this idea that because there are so few Black people in tech, being one of the only ones comes with this added pressure to be successful. Otherwise, one may feel that if they fail as one of the only Black people in tech, they will inadvertently make it harder for other Black people to be embraced by this homogeneous industry. That’s a heavy load to carry.
As Jessica Matthews, founder and CEO at Uncharted Power said:
When we raised our Series A, the immediate thing I thought was, ‘Oh, man. I can not lose these people’s money.’ This is huge and if we don’t work, it’s not even about us, it’s about every other person who looks like me.
Matthews said she hopes for a world where her daughter “can be mediocre as hell and still raise funding.” In 2016, she launched the Harlem Tech Fund, a nonprofit organization focused on STEM.
“You know, we would tell people we’re going to be the first billion-dollar tech company in Harlem, but we do not want to be the last,” she said.
PromisePay founder Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins said she felt a conscious desire to avoid letting people down to ensure that more people like her, a Black woman, would have an opportunity to succeed.
“What I think a lot about is, how do I make sure our company wins in such a way that I am the least successful story and how do I win in such a way that it raises the bar?” she said. “I’m more worried about the people that I want to create opportunity for because it feels like tech has failed so significantly in investing in people they don’t know and missed out in growing companies because of that. So I think our obligation is to help make sure that we are not the only ones.”
It’s hard to say exactly how many Black work in tech, whether that’s among the founder community, venture capital or rank-and-file workers at tech companies. But what is clear is that Black people are underrepresented at major tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. It’s also known that Black women have received just .06% of all venture funding since 2009, and that Latinx women make up less than 2% of women-led startups, according to Digital Undivided.
“So clearly there’s a gap there,” Squire co-founder Songe LaRon said at Disrupt. “The question is why and I personally believe part of the explanation is because there are biases that a lot of investors typically have. Those biases may be unconscious or not. Just in terms of our experience, we have really kind of experienced the whole spectrum of fundraising from it being really, really hard to get anybody to even take meetings with us early on. You know, we applied to I think every accelerator out there and got rejected by all of them, including YC. And then you know, we applied two more times to YC before we got in.”
There’s also sometimes an assumption, LaRon said, that if you’re a Black founder, what your building is for the Black community. Many investors had that misconception about Squire — that it was only serving Black barbers.
“So we learned pretty early on that we had to be really proactive about presenting Squire as a general product that could be for everyone,” he said. “And we kind of like preempt their assumptions by making sure that we have like, white barbers in our deck, just because we knew somewhere in their mind, there was that assumption. So those kind of things, I think, just tactically you have to think about, like, what are going to be the presumptions and wonder what are the things that investors may think about you because of how you look, and then kind of get in front of it. You know, it’s unfortunate that that’s the case, but it is the case and if you want to succeed, you know, you have to find ways to get around those things.”