Building Profitable Business Models w/ Sherrell Dorsey

But I saw specifically in the in the hair extension world, and which came to me via family member who is a hair stylist, asked me if I could get her some hair extensions from China, and I did. Um, And next thing, you know, just because I wanted to make some money, I'm selling hair out the trunk of the car to all these hair salons. Um. And what struck me was that we're buying like nine billion dollars of hair products, um, but we don't sell any of it

right literally. Uh. The customers that go across the street to the Korean in beauty supply store by the products and then come across the street bring it to the salon. So you have all this throughput of all of this you know, uh. Um, this commerce going through these salons but not capturing any of that revenue UM. And that is fundamentally what I wanted to change. I didn't know anything about hair extensions before I got into this business. To me, it was about the distribution of these products

and who is getting what proportion of the margin. And let's talk about that a little bit, because because part of your business model wasn't just about you making money, you one had a value proposition for hairstyle is and two had a model for creating wealth not just for you, but for a nation of people who were being left out of the equation. Why was that important for you?

And then what was the process of ensuring that? Not on the business model was tight, but you literally were ensuring a shift in wealth creation for people who performed had no access. I mean fundamentally, what I saw and what I see in hair stylus and I see in hair salons UM is power and influence. I see power and influence in hair stylus. They are UM. They're influencing on a daily basis billions of dollars of purchasing decisions for what people are gonna buy UM and and their

entrepreneurial I'm an entrepreneur um. I always want to support that, and so you know, when I saw that I could both create a business that both empowered other entrepreneurs in my community and be a big gas business, that's what drew me into it. I'm with Lucas Mrs Black Tech, Green Money. I'm gonna introduce you to some of the biggest names, some of the brightest minds and brilliant ideas. If you're black, in building or simply using tech to

secure your back, this podcast is for you. Charelle Dorsey is the founder and CEO of The Plug and subscription based digital news and insights platform covering the black innovation economy. Prior to launching The Plug, she was a marketing manager for companies like Uber and Google Fiber. I should read about how to monetize content and starting your entrepreneurial journey

with a bit of tinkering and experimentation. A lot of times we all have this really great idea for what we know is going to be like a million to billion dollar business, and I think as well, culture really pushes you to say, go out in the world and create something significant, raise a ton of money to do it, and like that kind of seems you know, it's it's

a very romantic ideal. Um for me, I wanted to be solid in what it was that I was creating first and kind of working through you kind of mature your idea as well as you as a as a leader and as a practitioner. You're maturing as well and kind of responding to the initial hypotheses that you have

about is are are people interested in this? And so by kind of creating the plug under the guys of Hey, you know, I've already kind of been freelancing and writing and sharing about what's taking shape them what we call

the black tech ecosystem. Do people even want like a daily edition of my findings and learnings and folks that I'm speaking to as well as um sort of a one stop shop for their day of figuring out among all the other things that they're reading that are gonna center white guys and hoodies, do they actually want to see black and brown faces and voices as part of

this entire narrative? And it turned out that yeah, a lot of people were really interested, and so so that kind of like as you we talk a lot about aislestones, particularly in tech or particularly in the space of building a company. UM. But that kind of initial testing, you know, phase is really what you're kind of prototyping. And Eric Reece says this a lot around the kind of lean

startup methodology, like you're you're prototyping, you're testing. I think also it's a psychological trick, so that if you fail at it, you don't feel so correcting after her right now, I was just playing anyway, you know, And so it kind of it kind of deescalates some of the stress of feeling like you have to succeed versus this is an experiment. If it works, great, If it doesn't, all

pivot and try something else. And so there's definitely been several different pivots around the way that we've delivered content, the way in which we've made assumptions about our audiences. And so for the most part, you know, going from the daily newsletter from for my part, it was just how do we stay consistent? Is there enough news and conversation happening to even do something Monday through Friday? Um?

And that was kind of the first question, And the second question was are people ready for rigorous, data driven sort of journalism and news? Um? And I'll be honest, it's it's one of those spaces where you can kind of have kind of more of just a very information purposes sort of environment, which I think is very significant to the ecosystem. I think that, um, a lot of folks do that well. Afrotech does that well. UM. And and then like, how do we differentiate ourselves as a

media publication? And so for me, it was really leaning into the analytics of some of the reporting um, and then also wanting to tell a story that really responds to a question or a series of questions about what folks are building from a context of how does this, how does this fit in scope not just this one entrepreneur or this one opportunity to raise capital, but how does this fit into the larger picture about what's going on in the country, in the world in this particular frame.

Even when we got into the paid membership component again, another opportunity to test for those who've been rocking with us for two three years, are they willing now to make an investment in having access to premium content? And and kind of so listening those folks early on so that when we were ready to launch, and even when I say ready, ready, wasn't complete tied up with the bow. It was like, you know, day one out the gate,

people's accounts like weren't registering. You know, you're kind of just like all right, you know, but because they've been following the work for so long, it was like a quick nice email, hey chrel like something when all my password you know, like you know, get to what you

can understand. There's a ton of grace there. And so I think through that entire process, will I also try to bring people along for the journey and the ride and trying to describe and demonstrate like here's what I'm doing, here's what's working, here's what's not really working, um, and just try to give myself grace in the process because it's just a process at the end of the day. Um. And and so yeah, that's that's kind of how I've

thought about this the whole time. And that does not remove any stress, because you still want to have this tendency to want to deliver well and as best as possible. And they're just some things that are gonna be out of your control. There's some things you're just not going

to know. And when you're first building your business sometimes it's just you and your WiFi, so you don't have a team to help create additional checks and balances or that you can lean on to do the work until you start to build up you know, those particular you know capacity opportunities. So you know, it's it's a journey.

It's a journey. One of the things we talk about often is, and we mean black people, it's like we don't pigeon ourselves into like the diversity conversation of the minority types of conversations, and for instance, like at the conference, you won't see like panels on diversity per se, but there is a meaningful activity from black people in business at large and from startup creation, venture funding, innovation and

more so we're out here. Talk to me about your take on the need for a broader narrative other than just you know, here's the diversity metrics, etcetera. You know, I think it's I think it's great and very commendable that that's not the focus, because I think everyone could has to be exhausted with the diversity conversation. And that's not to negate the work and the practitioners that are

in the space. It's very much needed. But I think in terms of when we're getting together and we're talking about next generation technology, next generation leadership, and we're talking about the kinds of challenges that we have to solve, particularly for our communities. We can't stay stuck on the

trauma because it is traumatic. It's hard to keep telling people I'm human and I exist, and I'm smart and I have I come from a family that that has love in it, or I come from you know, a community that you know has invested everything they couldn't into getting me to this point, Like it's it's it's frustrating to write, like it's really frustrating to continue to have to define your humanity for people who clearly if you don't get it by now in it's kind of like

you're not that interested. And we shouldn't have to continue

to do that emotional labor, especially not with each other. Right, I think that there are definitely some critical conversations that we need to have and not just like the value of diversity, but how from a tactical perspective we can do better, Like, Hey, black men, if you see that everyone on this tech panel is just black men, and you haven't invited any women, or you haven't invited any trans women into the conversation like, that's kind of a

check and balance you should probably think about. And I think we don't need to have a whole host of conversations about it. I think we need to be able to say it, iterate and move on um and some people need to process, and I think they're gonna be spaces for that. But any time that we get together, I feel like we should be thinking progressively. So alongside these personality driven store retelling thing that obviously has its place.

Traditionally people will go to like the Census Bureau or Nielsen defined data on like black consumer habits or population makeups. What is the unique value that information coming from us, that that information comes from a source that is a member of these communities. That is the deepest question. Will um one that one that I'm sure has just a ton of different kind of responses. I think Number one,

it speaks to the history of funding discrimination. Right. You can't go to any institution and not find a black PhD that has not tried to make the research and discovery of what's happening in terms of black innovation a core part of their research and their work. But they did not get access to the funding that they needed because you have to prove to too many people that it matters, and a lot of people are like, oh, no, you can get it, you know in the aggregate. You

don't need it on a granular level. And so there are so many folks that I've had the privilege of talking to who were all centered around this idea of better and stronger data collection. And when it does come from your community, it makes a core difference in the way that you look at it, because numbers can just look like numbers to anyone, right, we we quote numbers all the time. We don't really know how the methodology was was extracted, you know. I think it's it's the

challenge with the p p P program too. I'm sure that on the onset it looked like, oh, we're gonna save small businesses, but we didn't dive into well, which zip codes are we serving, you know, which particular communities are in a rule, who actually listen those communities? And so then you see that what ent of most p p P lending went to majority white businesses or something like that, right, and a lot of those being affluent

businesses that were not small businesses. So when it comes from us, UM, ideally right for for folks who who have some kind of understanding of doing UM sociology rooted work around black communities. When it comes from us, we're leading with that in mind, even in the way in which we interview people, even in the way in which

we build relationships with communities. UM. And so I I think, of course that again that the response really warnants a look at we traditionally haven't had the resources to do our own research, and we traditionally haven't had the backing of institutions that trust us to do our own research in our own work. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's a challenge, UM, when you are deep into the

numbers on a lot of these things. And I remember UM hearing an interview I don't remember who gave the interview, but they asked a black woman who raised over a million dollars, you know, you're one of the you know, less than ten black women who have raised over my knowledge, and she was like, no, there's dozens of black women who have raised over a million hours. But one of the issues with that is we don't always get that

kind of data in mainstream news. So talk to me about what are like the trends that you see regards to black people in their ability to be successful in technology. Yeah, I think, Um, I think at the end of the day, like there's a lot of quiet work. And I can understand because to really be great at what you do and to really be invested in what you do, you aren't necessarily I mean, like all of the incredible technologies

that I know that are building really dope ship. Um. I mean, they they don't have social media profiles, you know, like they're not trying to get famous. They're too busy being nerds, you know what I'm saying. Like they're like building three D models on the weekends and like teaching themselves machine learning and creating deep fakes just for fun. Um and and you you'll see that lot with a lot of computer scientists. Like they just don't have those profiles.

I mean, they may have what they need for work purposes, but there's not a ton of investment in these things because they're invested in the actual learning of the technology. And even though we see less representation in comparison to white populations, at the end of the day, like there are people there that exist in these spaces that are doing well, of course there has to be some infrastructure

changes around when do these folks get promoted? Right? You have the CEO of of Zoos who just you know, was kind of the face of this initiative around Amazon purchasing the company for over one billion dollars, And like, my question is, like, when's the next black woman of a tech company who is going to be leading a billion dollar sale? Right? I mean, we know Stacy Brown, Philip hop from task Rabbit has recently stepped down after selling the company to Ikea, And so like, are we

growing in that pipeline the next whomever? Right? Um? And so I think I think when it comes to that data conversation, because we traditionally haven't had the funding to do the extraction of that information, or we haven't even just in the newsroom, have put the resources forward to make that happen, we're gonna get a lot of like misused dirty data, you know, because if only we know of twenty seven black women that raise over a million dollars,

that's all that we could count. But that doesn't that doesn't look historically, you know, beyond you know, beyond even just venture capital. Um, we're gonna get these faulty numbers that we quote and then we turn into like policy. Now, there's some great things that come out of it, right as this rush to urgency of like, oh my gosh, only tend black women have raised X y Z. Well, let's put some more money so that we can get more and like, okay, Like that's probably one of the

positive outcomes. But at the same time, I think the greater question is how do we start to dock You meant, these successes wildly, widely and frequently, how do we make this a part of the work. And I mean that's honestly what we do at the plug is like I'm trying to make this a part of our practice and our work in a substantive way. And this is also it has to be the work in the in the

the mission as well. For all of these think tanks and all of these like Institute for Black Research, what have you, Like you have poverty institutes, which is interesting to me, but like who has like progress? I mean, obviously there's an Institute of Progressive Policy, but but like when it comes to research on black and brown communities,

there aren't as many people represented. Um, I'm not sure if you listen to the NPR episode with economist Lisa D. Cook Like she's one of like I think less than ten black economists pH ds that are at institution. Oh, this has come out a couple of days ago. About the yes, I did see that. It was a couple

of weeks ago. And it's just like, you know, I follow a lot of Lisa's work, and it's like even before she could even complete what she was trying to accomplish, she had to kind of go back and redocument and understand in terms of history why patents fell off and sort of that kind of Jim Crow read all of these kind of narratives and historical domestic people didn't trust

the government to protect them, regardless of why. Absolutely, yeah, and so I think that, like, imagine, imagine if there are fifty times more you know, Lisa D. Cooks working

in institutions and bringing this research forward. And one of the most distinctive parts of that particular episode was Lisa's publishing of this particular research should have been completed within about a year or two, and because of how systemic racism works, literally it took her I think it's said like five, six or seven years because she was dealing with all the bus around, like folks didn't want to

see this stuff come to light. So even just getting basic research with the data, like sometimes the data it doesn't even matter if you've collected it well or not. The reality is like there's still are kind of these roadblocks, especially because and and why it's so significant is because you know, once this stuff is published, it's transformative, right, and like then people have to really like pay attention.

How how do we get almost anything done in the last five years, particularly it pertains to black tech ecosystem is because of having to publish research to prove to the powers that be that we have been disenfranchised, we have been underfunded, we've been discriminated against. We constantly have to prove our our humanity try but you know, but

like but like that's the name of the game. And it goes back to to Tony Morrison's whole thing on like the very nature of racism is distraction, Like it's if it takes you seven years to get this work done to start changing patent policies for the us UM House of Business and Business and their last their last hearing on why we need to collect data and provide

more resources to black owned businesses seven years. Imagine if two, if if five years ago that was done, we could have been had this conversation, you know what I'm saying. So so I think about UM. Last year at the conference, I talked to Charles Hudson, who was a venture capitalist. I think you said, uh, precursors, And I asked Morgan the same question you know about. It was about when

you're at the only one in the room. So when you go through a conference that's not like afro tech, but when you are a VC like in Charles's position, and you go to any other conference and you're like the only black VC in the room, anybody who's black that's there wants to come see you because you're the only one, and they like they're gonna get their plight right.

And so I wonder, what did you see that's encouraging about the numbers of black venture capitalists who have more ability who are number one getting the jobs, but number two have more ability to fund companies from communities that look like ours. So what's encouraging about our trajectory? If there's anything encouraging about it to you? Honestly, that's what attracts me. To this space because it gives me hope.

You know, it's like an amid all the tragedy, and you alluded to this earlier to Will, just like there's so much happening, there's so much friction intention there's so much tragedy and death, and you know, it's like you grow up with the stories of my grandfather's from Birmingham, Alabama. He left when he was thirteen. He didn't go back to visit until maybe his eighties, and that was at the behest of like my dying um great aunt. And

he doesn't talk about it. He doesn't talk about what it was like to grow up in an environment that was violent and that you know, bombed a church be

four little black girls. You know what I'm saying, Like, like when you grow up with that kind of tragedy and those kind of stories and in the struggle and the books and the Baldwins and the Angelus, you know on your bookshelf, you you know what kind of a resilient space and and um foundation you have, but you're always hyper aware that struggle is imminent right especially in

this country. And so for me, I mean, like I learned coding and things like that in high school in Seattle from black women engineers and my cousins who went to more House and and Clark and Spellman and you know, will come home and you know, they bought their first properties at nineteen and we're talking about wealth building and and they were black as hell, you know, and they were fly and you know. And I'd go to Microsoft during the summers and work in high school as an intern.

And it was just like I wanted to be in those environments, but I also wanted to fully be myself like I saw my cousins being. And so when I when I see the progression of even if you're the only person in the room like that, visibility matters, and you still have to keep opening more doors and training up folks as well to exist in those rooms. So it gives me a sense of hope, honestly, Um, every little inch that we move forward and gives me a

greater sense of hope. And I'll tell you what matters more to me, Will, is that we are starting our own things and that we are not necessarily asking for permission in the ways that we used to. Um. I know, there's a lot of fodder around Black Wall Street and all these kinds of things, and I think it's great. I think that the vast majority of us will have to work for some of these companies that traditionally have

not been kind to to group underrepresented group. That's just the reality that everyone's gonna be a full time entrepreneur building a multimillion dollar company. But if we can also build strong CEOs and practitioners that can build multimillion dollar companies, then I don't have to tell my little cousin to go once he finishes his education, that you have to go to one of these tech companies, and here's all

the ways you can finesse getting a job there. I can say, you know what, there's this venture firm that was started by a black or brown person, you know, Or here was this company that was started by a black or brown person, and you can go work for them and you don't have to go through all the hoops in order to get that dollar. Right Like, at the end of the day, I'm not asking for y'all to save me, right like I'm gonna save myself. Your

brother's proof. You don't have to wait till you get a million daily page views, have a hundred thousand, nine g followers or celebrity endorsement before you can start charging for the value you provide. The plug is premium content behind the paywall, data insights and studies on the black innovation economy that you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere else. A lot of companies you might admire make no real money. It doesn't have to be this way. Real Doors speaks

on it. Number one, I think folks are on information overload. Um I felt like we even went from daily to weekly, you know, and just doing a deeper dive on a Monday, Like, here's how you can be smart for the week about what's going on. But I don't want to keep flooding your inbox and you're paying attention to the metrics to you're looking at your open open rates decline, You're looking at like, okay, every single day, do I want to

read this? Like maybe I have acts, I can have access maybe through social media, to see what's taking place. But you know, going deeper and less frequent allows you to build somewhat of an intimate relate relationship with your audience. At least that's the way that I I kind of think about that. I think about what slow journalism looks like I look about I look at what does long form journalism, you know, and sort of what I subscribe to.

I definitely have my dailies and just my quick rundown because you know, when you're when you're looking at it, you're just looking at the headlines, right, But if you're trying to have an intimate relationship, and why these newsletters are kicking off on things like sub stack, you're getting to know the person behind it, You're getting to know the work, You get to be deeply invested in the topic. You get to slow your brain down a bit and contemplate.

You see these folks who are building communities off of like big ideas and tactical advice around like how do you essentially develop yourself better be it like better productivity tools, to how to run a team, to you know, how to manage your money better admit a pandemic um. And so when I kind of I started to see that, and then secondarily I wanted to put the value add back into what it means to be a journalist, particularly

a black journalist trying to cover black community. And for me, while I believe that journalism in and of itself is a public service. I'm not here to entertain people. I'm here to educate. I'm here to inform. I'm also here to uplift. I'm also here to be critical of some of the work because just because it's black and it happened,

it doesn't mean that it's great. And we have to have these nuanced conversations and so you know, being part of that philosophy also of watching the venture capital industry not necessarily fund media companies, watching a lot of the

way traditional business model for journalism has taken place. It also seems like, hey, like there has to be a new method because advertising is all being eaten up by Facebook and Google and you know, all of all of all of the folks who are getting all the ad dollars.

So I can't come out of the gate trying to compete with those mofos with just lilo me right, So I'm gonna have to figure out a way to immediately ask people to make the investment, you know, And it's like the plug is a hundred dollars a year or you know, thirty dollars a quarter. Of course, I still have advertising and sponsorships, you know, of course, like we leverage grants where it makes most sense, um, But it really is about playing a different kind of game because

obviously the nature of the business has changed drastically. And you know, of course not everybody is gonna say like I can't either afford it or I actually wanted, But you quickly start to find your tribe, and you quickly start to find what people value. Um. And at the end of the day, if you're producing a great and a formidable product, people want to be a part of that. Yeah,

let's talk about that. Because what is sales like in this sense, because it's one thing to have a product, and it's another to communicate the value of that product to a potential customer, right and or or do you think of it more as you're not trying to convince a new subscribe, but perhaps you're looking for the people who are already convinced but may not know that, they may not be aware of your offering. So what does

sales look like in the respect of what you're doing? Absolutely, I think, um, you know, in the beginning, and going back to that kind of experimental phase, of course, you think everyone are subscriber list is like, yeah, of course they read my stuff already. Again, you know, you start to segment out, you know, who's who finds the information you know valuable to their work UM, And so you start to kind of see, okay, well, these are the

kind of folks who are starting to subscribe. UM, these are the kind of folks who are using and leveraging these tools within their their company or within their business.

And so I find that just more business people that are making investment decisions, that are making policy decisions, that are even making reporting decisions, they're the ones who are like, I don't have to convince them to subscribe as soon as they learn about us, especially over the last couple of weeks, where I'm sure like we've all seen an uptick in traffic as soon as they learn about us, Like they're clicking that button, they're putting their credit card

in and they're like, yep, you know. And I think too, you know, in terms of UM, in terms of that sales process, I think I've had to get as clear as possible on the value, right I've I've had too. Again, that's also talking about the work. It's demonstrating the work. It's this kind of idea or philosophy around doing your

work in public. And so you know, demonstrating like, hey, like my team and I are researching X, Y and Z, or hey like we're you know, we're looking to do an interview series on X, Y and Z, you know, and and not being afraid of like, look, if there are folks that want to try to replicate what we've done, like by all means, go with God, Like, I know who I am, I know what my background is, I

know I know how I've built this. And like the folks that like like, like you can't, you can't do a story like me, You're just not going to because I'm too good at this and I have I have a clear angle in editorial judgment on how on how I do the work. Not everything is going to hit with everyone, but you're gonna walk away with the story under the story, right Like you're gonna we're gonna ask

the questions that no one else has asked. We're gonna do the extra layer because we don't necessarily have to compete for just driving page views and things like that, like that's not our metric. And so once you kind of get clear on that, your sales process looks vastly different. Right,

you have universities that want students to get access. So you know, again like I'm not for everybody, and that's okay, And I think niche is so significant and I'm sure you know, these are the kind of the conversations that you may be having to well around um you know, having these discussions with folks who felt like initially like is black news, black tech news and black businesses is

not actually a business? You know, Like how many times have I you know, been in environments or space is where folks have been like that's great, but like, oh you know that's like not a big thing. And but they said that to us about our hair care. You know, they said that to us about our sunscreen. Now you've

got black Girl sunscreen like killing it right now. Um So again like being underestimated, you know, as Arlen Hamilton says, like it's such a great opportunity to be like, all right, I know my audience, and I know that for every person that's like me that has a very similar life experience or comes from a very similar experience, like I know that they're out there, right, but I also know too that there are crops of individuals who are trying to get it and the way that they speak the

way that they talk, the kind of schools they come from, the kind of communities they come from. There's a certain language in which they identify with UM as they read and digest information, and like, if you can develop your content in a way that is that has journalistic integrity but also meets the needs of today's business mind, You're like, you can't, you can't really lose UM. So you know again, I think at the end of the day, like all of that said, and all the great words said, it's

all an experiment. I mean, you know, we're either between being wildly successful or completely failing. Like, I don't know, I just keep going. But talk to me about the early on. You know, how you build that credibility to monetize early or where people don't question or at least are more receptive to paying for your work. Like, how do you build that credibility? You know, I think there's

a variety of ways. UM. I think number one, UM, and I'll and I don't know if if these are conversations you've had yet with other folks on this podcast, But you know, as a black woman, my credibility has been doubted in every room that I've been in. Oh, yeah, we talked about that, Yes, yeah, until it's not right,

Like I've been talked over. I've had, you know, my can't pains where I have completely won and um still my male counterparts, you know, are either a trying to take crowded or they did something mildly okay and they were praised. And so for me, I didn't go into building this out um with without knowing that it's gonna take me a little while to be recognized because we don't call black women geniuses, not outside of our own communities. We don't. We don't we talk about being the next whatever.

We talk about Mark Zuckerberg, and we talk about Elon Musk, and we talk about Bill Gates. Right, we don't talk about the next Jewel Burks. We don't talk about the next Utra Wilson. Like, don't tell me you know you

want to be the next Zuckerberg? Like why Like there's so many other individuals that like I want my nieces to look up to, right, And so for me knowing that and being hyper aware and hyper clear, um, for me, it was like, I like, you're not going to outwork my work and the quality of my work, because it's always going to get better. And so for me, it was as long as I put the work in, it's

going to come together. Right for me, it wasn't about the hyper visibility or the accolades or the attention even on social media, but it was leveraging the tools and resources that I had access to. Because I didn't have the dollars right, so I couldn't invest in a pr person. I couldn't invest in like crazy ads or what have you.

My work in and of itself had to stand on its own, and then being strategic about my network and sharing and constantly talking about my work and saying like hey, you know, actually you know I run X, Y and Z. This is the work that we're doing making it useful for people UM. And as it kind of crept along,

you know it, it was helpful. I mean, obviously the biggest boon for us was, you know, our text statements database that we put together UM a few days after George Floyd was killed and we started to see all these text ceo s start to speak out about UM racism in police brutality, and and as I started to track and again, like I started this project with with the idea of I want to create a story and craft a story of of of you know, who these

companies are, who these leaders are, and what their actual like racial representation looks like at their companies. Because they're talking a good game, does that actually mean that they're practicing what they preach? And again that whole philosophy, I'm

doing your work in public. Once I got to like companies and I started working with one of our data fellows to like complete some of the the different attributes and tables and columns, it was like, okay, like let's kind of push us out and kind of see if other people have things to add to it. And it went viral, you know, and it's like, this is not the first you know, sheet or database that like we've

we've allowed to kind of go into the wild. It's not the first time we've created an infographic to explain what this actually looks like. It's just the first one to go viral. UM and so that again added another layer, you know. I went to Columbia Journalism School and I did a data concentration. It was very strategic and going to this specific program was the only one that I I applied to. UM. Part of it was definitely for clout because the name Columbia carries weight, especially within media

where majority of folks did go to the j School UM. Secondarily, they were the only ones that had a ten month masters program with the data concentration. And I was like, look, I love being a journalist, I love being a storyteller, but I don't want to spend six figures on just getting a degree to learn how to write. I know how to write. Um, I want to go with this computational side because that's the space that I come from.

You know. I had helped to run marketing for Uber in Charlotte, so it was like analytics was at the top of the chain of everything that we did. And so I was like, how do I create this hybrid opportunity? And then honestly like it was like a follow spells. I got a master degree, you know, a ten month program that almost died died to get and I can

go teach you know in some some regards. So so for me, that layer was yes, now when I walk into the room, I have additional access to networks that can help to elevate my publication and at least make those different UM connection points for me. It's interesting you talked about we don't call enough of us geniuses, right. I had this conversation with Alex Wolfe Um in New York and who I believe is a genius like Alex Um.

She she had this philosophy that in her mind, the women who were on the corners in New York selling fruit, we're more entrepreneurial than a lot of the mainstream CEOs and tech founders that we hail as entrepreneurial. Maven's right, essentially, because those women created real value and it's in just about likes and swipes. Um and I wonder your thoughts on how we as black creatives, technologists, innovators, and founders can better tap into a market opportunity and rethink our

business models. I think it's so important that we read everything, you know. I think that like, there's so much great information out there. I think there's so many great things from business books to UM two blogs to obviously the podcasts, because it helps to enlargen our world in perspective beyond

just what we can see. I'm concerned that we have, like in entrepreneurship, just to being cute online, and like I said before, I think it's a distraction away from some of the very real challenges we're up against as a community. And I think that even as we see kind of celeb and influence, our cultures start to battle it out right now, and in this pandemic, there's such a great opportunity to be real problem solvers, and not everyone is deeply connected to what those problems look like.

That's why I say, like reading is going to be so critical to like the ideation process of what is the value that the world is looking for? And now how do I get in it? I think of the safety uh Fabodes, whose name I'm probably butchering, but over a Aruna Technologies, who's building water sensors for municipalities like our infrastructure. Our water infrastructure in the US is over

half a century old. And so when we look at the flints of the world and what happened there, like he directly is like, I don't want another flint to happen, So how do I create a tool that these water engineers can use to detect early potential contamination of water? That's a billion dollar business right off right after that? And guess what, like I mean, he's raising money, He

and his his partner are raising money. But he's already got government contracts in play, right, so the right the money is for working capital, but you've got you've got contracts with government that last eight years, so your money is good. Um. But you have to like really be in tune and diversify what you're reading and what you're watching so that you can start to get those ideas

perculating around the problems that you can actually solve. Finding ideas and letting an idea mature is part of the game. You try certain things and if it works, it's great. If it doesn't, you've learned something and you find out you do your post mortem and you realize, like, maybe that didn't really work. Um. So anyway, I think, I think, um, I think in terms of adding value, you've got to

know what value looks like. You know, you've got to know what the problems are and the pain points really are. And I you know, I really becove folks to just think about, like what are the deepest challenges based on the data that I'm reading, based on the journals Google scholar like you can look up every you know, every thing. I think all the books that have come out from black and brown folks who have been writing about systemic racism or what have you. Like, that's a great material

to start with. You know about what the actual value add could potentially be, but you have to kind of make sure your content stack is is matching up to help you get those ideas. Fling Black Tech Green Money is a production of Black of the afro Tech was produced by Morgan Davon and me Will Lucas. Additional production support by Love Beach, Stephanie bog Ravener Ball Special thank you to Michael Davis. Some cars of van Yan you know like the wine and yes that's his real name

and Dominique Right. Learn more about Charelle Dorsey and other tech disruptors and innovators at afro Tech. Can't You Get Your Money? Pece of Love