THE PIPELINE FOR BLACK COMPUTER SCIENTISTS

You were, you know, on time. You know, you communicated, like, just be a good whatever you want to be in the world, Like, just be good at that. I'm Will Lucas and this is Black Tech, Green Money. I'm gonna answer this 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 secution your back,

this podcast is for you. Jeron Petty is founder and CEO at color Stack, the nonprofit police organization that helps black and last the next computer science through this good degreed and hired. When he was at Cornell, he worked as an Internet Google and later turned them down for a full time gig to start his own entrepreneurial journey. We've asked so many conversations NY said White about the pipeline for black talent in tech. I wanted to get an idea of its current state. Torn who works on

this issue every day provides enough day. When you look at the data, it is about thirty percent um. You know, Black and Latin X computer science students or people make up percent of the population of c S grads and

about ten percent of the industry. So there's drop offs at each level where you can say not enough students are graduating with CS degrees to begin with, but also from the ones that are, they're not getting jobs in software right then maybe going into it or becoming a teacher or doing something that they weren't intending to do. So we're trying to solve this like multilated problem of like access to jobs, placement, retention, and then even attraction

to to bring that to right. And at the onset, do you see enough black students interested in computer science? So I studied CS myself, right, so I would c S grad um And so when I was on campus, the whole reason I started doing this work was because I did see that, I did see the interest. But what you would find is that even in that intro course at a lot of these universities, the intro courses.

In the intro course, you know, they kind of gotten so used to these people that come in and have been learning how to study, how to code and program

from when they were in middle school. So the professors I think have adapted for the wrong reasons and have now expected so much prior knowledge, where black students, Brown students are going into these intro courses and they feel behind, and once they get a backgrade on that on that first test or project, they're dropping the class, They're dropping the nature. Yes, I was reading something a different eneview.

You were doing it. You were talking about your personal mission that you found many of your peers you're in their parts in these classes, weren't doing well in these classes UM. And you talked about this as pervasive and why is that pervasive? White many would say we just aren't as talented or you know, we don't have the proclivity from map and science. Well, in your research and in your work, what have you found to be the reasons why we're not UM ready for these classes? And

so many respects. Yeah, I think the first thing is definitely you know what I just mentioned about prior knowledge, like if you didn't go to a if you didn't go to that private school, right that had cus one on one as a freshman, Right. I think public education is just catching up to see US education UM and

baking that into the curriculum for high schools. But if you either didn't if you either didn't go to a school UM that had the coursework or you had a family friend that just was able to expose you to that at a young age, you are coming in at a college level feelings so behind. So there's that there's that mental kind of barrier where you just are not as comp it when you're going into your first intro course and everybody else seems to know everything that's already

like from day one, you already discouraged, right. And then I think some other areas within on the campus where students are kind of sawing themselves short is, for example, office hours. I was at t A for a lot of the common CS courses at Cornell, and for whatever reason, you know, a lot of students would wouldn't go to

office hours, right. Maybe it's because of the same issue they're facing in classes where they feel like if they go to office hours they're just gonna be you know, reinformed that they're like behind or feel like they're dumb for asking questions. Um, but it's a lot of those small things where privileged kind of in network students already know that like office hours, office hours are there, I can go talk to the professor, I can use these resources.

But when you feel so behind and when you're not kind of in these environments already, you just don't feel like you can participate in the same way. With that response, then, is waiting until we get to college too late to make sure that we're ready for you know, actually getting internships to be able to get jobs. I don't believe so. I mean, I think, you know, shout out to all the Organs, COD Nation, UM America on Tech that are doing that are doing work at the high school level,

Black Girls Code. I think it does. It is helpful to start earlier and kind of get that exposure. But I don't think it's too late. I think within when you're on a campus that is already about discovery of oneself and realigious learning and expanding your horizons. I do think there is hope where there are students who are still primed for pushing their their limits and kind of

expanding their horizons and trying something new. But it does take intentional effort at the earliest stage, that first fresh that freshman year, because once you the way the curriculum and the major system is set up at a lot of these schools is you know, if you try to change your major once you're a sophomore junior, near impossible, right, And so you really have to target and support those

students at the freshman level. And I'll even tell you this from when I was at Cornell and we were doing a lot of work um with underclassmen, we actually started doing events that basically made other people who weren't C. S Field jealous, right, like, oh, this is so cool, Like you know, all my friends are doing this thing and they know how to they know how Siri works, and they know how the algorithms of YouTube and all

these different social media work. And they were like, Okay, I'll do a CS minor, right, And that's happening at the college. All these the students that were premed, right, but now they're adding a mind a CS minor. So I don't think it's too late at all. So as an entrepreneur, when you're going through your you know, ideating process of the company you're going to start, the organization

you're gonna start. What was the decision making process like for you when you said, you know, I'm going to target those college students instead of building an organization like a Black Girl's Code that actually gets them younger, earlier in the process, so that they by the time it gets to college, they're more prepared. That's a good question.

I think this is the lesson that I have from us, that I learned from myself but also trying to share with other entrepreneurs, is that you know, you don't want to think too much about what you're building. I think incremental, like solving the problem in front of you incrementally, you kind of just stumble upon a business. Right. That's what happened for me my freshman year, I was I got an internship at two Sigma, had a really great opportunity there.

My sophomore year, I came back from that internship feeling very discouraged because there weren't other you know, black interns there, or I noticed that my friends on campus didn't get internships that summer, or weren't doing well in their classes. Or were considering dropping. And so I said, okay, how can I just solve that problem? How can I just get my friends to come with me on all these

different opportunities you know that I have. And so that was the problem that I solved, you know, in was I no longer have enough time in the day to mentor all these students. So how can I scale that by creating a community of peer to peer support? Okay, that was my problem I solved in en by building the club. And then from twenty it's like, okay, well how can I provide this value to more students on

other campuses? Right? And so it was just me incrementally solving the problem that was right in front of me. And I think that's how everybody should approach, you know, start you know, starting a company, right. You don't have to build a Google tomorrow. It's just what's the smallest

version of that problem you can solve today? And so to the idea that you know, not everybody specifically, I'm talking about black people and brown people who come into college aren't ready for the math courses and the science courses, but what are some other barriers that keep them from graduating? And then you know, then allowing the opportunity to go get internships and jobs by out of school. Yeah, I think there's there's so many. I mean there's a whole

Pockets episode on those barriers. But I think a couple that I even I know, I knew already as a student myself, but then I learned from building color stack. One it's just financial, right, Like some students just you know, can't well drop you know, drop out of school or or changed from a four year to a two year or just be you know, indefinitely on leave of absence

just because of money. Right. So I think there's there's definitely a conversation around the affordability of school, especially these private institutions versus state schools, where sometimes just money that that prevents someone from continuing um. The second thing I think about a lot is no, no two CS degrees are made equal, right, you know you would think that, yes, from a Cornell or you know, a Kinesaw State or Study of the University, like they all offer a computer science.

So no matter which one I pick, I should be good. The truth of the matter is that academia has not stayed on par with industry, and so a lot of what it takes to become a software engineering industry is taught out side of the classroom. And so there are two kind of sub reasons why you know, students aren't

able to keep up. One is if you don't have the time right outside of a class where you're a commuter student or you're working another job to pay for school, and you think that you know, you can just do your classes and do homework and be done. You know you're gonna be s sol when you find out that in order to really get that job, you actually have to do your homework, get a good grade, but then

also learn how to become a software engineer. And you know, when you're in a privileged position of just being on campus and just focusing on school and all that's taken care of, you have that time, but many of these students don't. And then then on the other hand, you also don't have the curriculum that is tied and kind of pegged two industry standards, where a school like an M I T or Carnegie Mellon they have partnerships with

these companies to build curriculums. That's relevant. But if you're going to a local a local school, smaller CS department,

you just just might be out of date. And so it's interesting you say that because I've had these conversations about you know, industry and university is not being able to stay on part or college is not being able to stay on par with what they're educating, and so often it comes back to hiring the professors who can teach it because they those professors can go to the industry and make more money than they would, you know,

working in the university or a college. And so I wonder what your idea is on how much self directed education we need to do, even if you're in school for your CS degree, how much of this outside of that to your you did you did talk a little bit about this, and you know, you've got a job and you've got other things to pay for to pay for that education. How much of that self directed effort is required in order to get the look from a

big company or a startup that you may be interested in. Yeah, I think I think for the most part, when you look at a big like, the bigger the company, the more resources they have for learning and development. So as long as you can prove that you can code, just generally a lot of the bigger companies with more infrastructure

for learning and development. Like, if you do well in your classes and you can demonstrate your basic knowledge of coding, you'll be able to kind of secure at least beyond their radar and be competitive for roles at bigger companies. If you're talking about mid sized company and especially for a startup, they're going to expect you to come and hit the ground running. So it's gonna require you to, you know, subscribe to certain newsletters so you know what

the newest tech tech is. Like JavaScript has a new framework like every year, you need to know what those are. Right, Um, you're going to have to know how to build an iOS app if you want to work on a team that their only product is a mobile app. Right, That's that. And that's a perfect example of something that, like across

the board, is rarely taught in institutions. Right, Like you might how to code and Python, you might learn about databases, you might learn about machine learning, but even something like iOS development isn't a thing that's typically taught in schools because, like professors do research, and there was a much much

research done on like mobile app development. It's usually like database efficiency or machine learning or like programming languages compilers, so things like iOS development, which is ubiquitous in terms of its impact. Everybody uses their phone and has apps. You're actually not even learning that on average if you get as from any school in the country. So you have to go out and take a you to me

course or go on YouTube or get a book. You just have to know that, and so some other things that we talked about, you know, with that are prohibitive for students to get the degree and actually actually graduating. What are some of those things that actually keep you from getting a job. So let's say you've graduated, You've you went to a mid level university, midlevel college, you didn't go to Cornell. There not everybody as smart as you.

But let's say you know, I went to a mid level school, I got my degree, and I still can't get a job at the company that I'm interested in. What are some of those reasons why, other than racism? Other than that, Yeah, let's start like that's already that's

the pre requisite, that's always there. Um, yeah, I think I think, you know, there's there's some there's some challenges definitely when it comes to like exposure to companies, So for example, you know at certain schools, like at the top level school, you're gonna have companies flying out to be at that career. Fair right, every company that you know will go out and make sure they're at Cornell, at m I T whatever to get in front of

those students. What I see at the mid level schools is that it's usually like local companies, and if you're at a small school in Michigan, there's no local tech company, right, So your your access and your exposure to employment is usually at best I T. Right, at best, you're learning about some org that has a back office I T team that you might be able to work for, um, you don't even know, you aren't even talking to her.

On the radar of like pure tech pure software companies that are hiring software engineers, which is what you study to be, right, So it's it's not like, let's not confused that you study to be that, but the roles and and and the opportunities that are available to you are more aligned for I T and other things that are not coding. So that's one of the ways that caused that obviously bridges the gap. So no matter what schools are going to, your career for if you're at

a small school in Michigan, Illinois wherever. I mean, we partner with fifty top tech companies today where you can immediately get on the radar. But that's like one of the bigger, bigger reasons. You know, I'm glad you bring up color Stack in the way that you have because I'm interested in you know, colors Stack is a nonprofit number one. UM, A lot of people will ask how

do you make money doing this? You know, because I mean it's is this like purely altruistic or are you attempting to like be like I want build a billion dollarlet organizations? Why what's the motivation behind this? Yeah, for sure, there's a lot to unpack there. So for me, you know me personally, my my passion and who I am at heart is I like to help people. I'm a servant leader, like I just want to help people reach

their full potential. So, you know, the decision to start color Stack was easy for me because I knew I'd be happy every day. Like every time I student gets a job, even if they just get a good, great on their homework assignment, I am just fired up, like let's go. Like I'm so happy for you. UM. And it doesn't matter how big we get, I'll always kind of have that local mindset of like, if we can help one student, we're successful. UM. So that's just me.

That was my motivation personally. UM. Obviously, so I started color Stack, this is beginning kind of peak of the pandemic UM. And so for me, I mean I still knew rationally speaking that like, I had to make this work financially. I had an offer at Google that I had accepted at the time actually so I was heading to Google was to be to be an associate product

manager UM. And basically my my calculation internally was, Hey, I know I'm not going to make the same amount that I would make if I was a product manager in industry, but I want to be paid kind of respect, you know appropriately, um for my time and effort working on clubs back full time. And so I first sought out to raise enough money to do that. So my first goal was raised enough money to do this full

time for at least couple of years. So we got an incubation deal UM or Triple Byte, and that's that was amazing. They were so supportive they got us off the ground and today I mean we have a full time team six two contractors, and we fund that mainly through corporate sponsorships. So similar to you know, even after tech how you know, you guys do an event, you have all these sponsors they come in and kind of

try to attract talent. We're doing the same thing kind of all year round through events and engagement with our students and companies a budget for it. Like we're becoming a line item in university recruiting budgets where they're like, hey, all right, we're doing a new strategy. Fore we gotta hit Apporte, we've gotta hit Grace Hopper, and we've got

a partner with color Stack. I love that. But when you go to a company and you say, look, I'm gonna help you with your black talent, there's people who came before you who said I can do that in a hundred and nine coming after you who said I can do that. Like what is what is it that got them to believe that? You know Geran and what he's doing with colors Stack, these are who you need

to be working with. Yeah, for sure. I mean I think the first of a couple of early things that I did strategically or I understanding do them intentionally, but they happened that they were strategic. Um. The first thing

was be being a cs UH student myself. The transition from this recruiter was trying to recruit me to for their company, to hey, I'm not running a nonprofit that you can benefit like that was such a transition because you know, these these recruiters were like trying to literally trying to hire me for the new new graph programs, and you know, unfortunately said notes allow them to have

to pick one. But it was so easy to like reach out to them because they're already excited about me as a candidate, to be like, hey, well I'm doing this other thing that's going to help you in ideally find hundreds of more means out there in the world. And they were like immediately on board because I had built that trust and they already respected me for you know,

a different reason but related. So I had tons of relationships like dual Lingo is a good example, Squarespace, some of our silver partners, like those recruiters, I was in their pipeline. They were trying to hire me, right, so it's easy to kind of leverage those relationships and then the second thing I connected with UM he's on my board now wahab will Hobba Lobby. He's the founder of a community called u r X, which is a community of university recruiters and so we connected, we hit it off.

I asked him to join from my board and like the brand, equity and trust just built from that as well, all the intros from that as well, Like that just

all helped out. Where a lot of the early sales I didn't have much, but they just because of my background, because of the people I have associated with, we're able to give me a chance and you know, they're rewarded and longan you know, from from your perspective, UM, when when a company doesn't have black talent at the levels it should, UM, what are they What are they missing out on? Because we often talk about this from a justice perspective like equality and you know, having diversity, But

what are they actually missing out on? UM? And I'm talking about even from financially. Are they missing out on the revenue opportunity for having black candidates, black talent on their teams? Yeah? For sure. I mean I think I think you can you can be specific about black talent, but This applies to all kind of intersectional identities out there.

I think the more homogeneous right a team is, the more blind side you have, blind spots you have where you know you're thinking the same way, right, you have very similar experiences. You just view you view the world in a certain way, and you're not able to really bring in new insight and get truly creative on new product innovation or even just how your team should operate,

or even just lessons learned. I mean there's a lot of you know, not every you know, black student is necessarily low income, but there are lessons learned from being, you know, in certain situations and growing up in certain circumstances that could help when when companies have to cut budget and figure out, you know, innovative ways to get

the profitability. But I'm sure if you're if you're a bunch of people who never had to deal with never to think about money, you probably don't know what you're doing right now. You probably you probably are trying to

figure that out. And that's just an example, right, But I think you know that I've even learned within um the space of building a team that's primarily black, Like, there's a lot of the sectional value from the intersectionality where people are bringing different to the table that I just would never have thought of, and that leads to better outcomes, better products, better solutions, and better returns. At

the end of the day. You know, we've had um these stats that come out that talk about you know, ten percent of Google's national workforce is black or Latin X and or you know, talk about Apple, you know where I think it's like nearly half of their global team is all white people, right, And you know, I have the perspective that you know, I'm not interested in asking for us he did the table. That's just me.

I'm interested in building my own tables. And so I wonder what your take is on these not necessarily competing approaches, But what is your take on You're like, look, we're going to continue to beat down the door of Google, say you need to be hiring us versus we're gonna go build the next Google. Yeah. No, for sure, I'm so happy you wrote this up because that might have the same thesis, Like we partner a companys and you know, we were happy to to to help these students get jobs.

But my ultimate mission and our ultimate mission at color Stag is to to to give these students agency. I had a really close friend, a mentee that became a close friend of mine, and she a black woman from from New York. And she um had a terrible experience, uh, interning at at Google with me, right, we wait to take walks like almost every day kind of she was

crying like there's a really bad experience. Right, And you know I could have went to you know, the manager or talk to someone in the team be like, hey, you guy should do this differently, or here's the impact of this, and blah blah blah. But I focused more on just investing in her. The next summer, she worked at a company, a startup that was building a woman coaching an empowerment platform, and obviously the team was all women,

and she had the best time of her life. And now she's over there working at Figma, having a great career, you know, careers, early career experience. And so for me, it's all about agency, Like I just want to help these students, right, want them to become the strongest engineers in the world so that they can chart their own path. Right, Because when you to your point, if we just focused on like trying to make these companies less biased, less racist,

less whatever. That's just gonna be endless. That's that's how we got to the point where we're still talking about this ten, fifteen, twenty years later. I'm not focused on that they can do their thing. I'm trying to help

thesetems just become the best. I love that. And one of the conversations that we were talking about an afro tech was, you know, we often talk about getting black people into tech, but it's another thing to keep us in tech because we don't necessarily have ecosystem everywhere, which is why colors tech is important, which is why afro

tech is important. What are some interesting ways you found to help those who might be in the ecosystem but might be disengaged from the ecosystem so we don't lose talent that you know, could have opportunity here but they don't see themselves. Yeah, for sure. I mean there was some study done that said something like one of there's like a predict year of retention that has to do with like comedy friends you make in the workplace, Like if you don't make like two or three, then you're

very likely to leave that company. And I think, you know, that applies here as well, where at the very least you need community, which is a thing that Avrotec does, Like you said, it is a thing that colors Stack does. All these events and all these ways for you to connect with other folks that may not be at your company, because we know what the numbers look like, but at least you notice someone in your same role in the industry, and that leads to further retention because you at least

have that support system. Right. So, like, that's one thing that I think is important, and I think people need to know about that. Even if your company may not be the most ideal situation and you can't build community, at least you can do that across different companies through you know, company agnostic communities. And I think the other thing that is missing a lot is understanding what it

takes to progress. I think what happens a lot of a lot of recent RADS and early CREPT professionals stay in that entry level role, that junior role for too long, and one is the fault of the manager. But like we just talked about, I'm not trying to convince a manager be less biased and whatever. Let's just focus on really educating our June from our community, people who are in that junior level, Like, here's what it really takes to to become that level two, level three, that senior level,

that manager level. Like what what's the next step? Right? I think the breaking into the industry and that content is great, but I really want to see over the next five years more content and support around. Once you get there, how do you grow? How do you continue to progress? Right? Yeah? Yeah, I'm still thinking about how you got these deals versus the people who came before you and the people who were in mine after you.

And so because a lot of it has to come down to you, you know, like what did you learn through your journey, whether it was in school or just upbringing, about how to make yourself valuable while you're still in school, Like what kind of things make you more attractive as a person as a professional, even that aside from turning down a role at Google and as I can go into cornell Um and getting accepting the cornell and getting getting a job offered from Google, Like what aside from

those things, like what would you admonish other students to do to make themselves more not just hirable, um, but attractive as partners to these organizations. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think the first thing is first, you can't you can't get around this. You have to be good at what you do, like if you have to invest in learning what you're really good at and just doing

that to the best of your ability. Like that's the one thing that you know, people are gonna that's the one impression that you're gonna make With most people, they're gonna remember, like, you know, did you say what you're gonna do? You ran that of and it went really well. You were, you know, on time. You know, you communicate, like just be a good whatever you want to be in the world, Like, just be good at that, right.

I think that's where I started. I started Cornell by just trying to be the best CS student I can be. The second level is about kind of networking. I hate to say networking because sometimes it's just like people think it's like super professional and boring and like proper, but it's really just putting yourself out there. Within my sophomore year, I started to like post on, LinkedIn and even little

things like oh I just watched like Panther. I just really, you know, love the representation it was a little article kind of just a couple of words. But I started to build this brand on social media um based on my interests and my accolades that people you know, started to recognize and and and understand about me and build that personal brands that when they think of certain opportunities,

they were able to think of me. Right. And so once you already build that skill set right that nobody can debate, you start putting yourself out there so that people the right person can find you see that and and and promote, you know, refer you to an opportunity or select you for an opportunity. So I think it's like those are the two things that I would say,

for the most part, that you gotta do. And I think the last thing is like once you get the opportunity, it's just like doing what you say you're gonna do, following up and just seeing things through. I think the biggest thing that students aren't doing right now. We deal with this a lot of color stack. It's just they don't close. They will apply to this thing that we have.

They'll show up to the first event, but then three weeks later it's like, oh, hey, like I'm there either ghosting us or like oh hey, I got busy or whatever, and they're not kind of following through like just close

you know. Yeah, It's it's interesting you started that off talking about you know, actually doing what you said you're gonna do and um and being good at what you actually are you know, supposed to be doing, because I have had I had this conversation um with several different people in this podcast about you know, it's sometimes it can be a folk pod to walk into a job too early and talking about diversity and equity and include like you need to hire more of us and you

just got hired last week, bro, Like but we and we hired you to code and now now you've got your black panther shirt on. And I mean, you know, it comes like come on, like, actually be good at the job. And then as you build that credibility, then you can start speaking up on certain things. So I wonder there and it's a balance there and and and I'm sensitive to the balance of like when you see injustice,

obviously you've got to you've gotta address things appropriately. But I'm about to think about the ways that we want to be you know, brother human Johnson. And that's no shade on him so early in the journey of a professional career, when you when you haven't proven yourself to be good at the role that they hired you for,

you speak on that. Yeah, it's tough. Like you said, there's a balance, right, But I think and I want to preface that also by saying purposes also by saying, like, you know, we we know that the current circumstances aren't right. Like we we we can't change today what happened right over the past hundreds of years. We are here today and there are certain circumstances. So these are just ways

that we can kind of get around that. But we know, like I battle, I have these conversations with students all the time where it's like, do you want to be that pioneer. I don't think you have to be, and I don't think you deserve to be, but someone needs to be the first black employee at a certain company if that company is going to increase and kind of

be more diverse over time. And so to your point, I think, you know, being good at what you do the best as best you can kind of just reduces any evidence, right, any unsaid or kind of flaky evidence.

Um for not commoning you, letting you go like all these different things, and that still might happen just because of racism and biased But the best thing that you can do for your own agency in your career is just do the work right, because at the end the day, as much as all this other social stuff is present, companies want to be profitable, do better, do better work for their customers, make great experiences, and reward their investors.

So if you can just take care of that, right, if you can just write that code, push that product, do the things, you have so much more agency to to to add anything on top of that, to start adding new initiatives because of that respect that you have that you have kind of solidified right now. I love that. Um. I was reading the interview another interview you were talking about.

I'm in a paraphrase a statement that you had here, and it says, you know, being a computer science major actually forces you to think about things in the same way an entrepreneur thinks about things. If you remember saying that, can you speak on that and elaborate? Yeah? I think so. When I'll start learning how to how to code, and front of me, who who hasn't learned how to code. It really you're you're trying to held the computer what

to do at the end of the day. Right, You're using this coding language which boils down into language that the machine that you're coding on can understand to perform some level of computation or render website or whatever the case may be. Right, And what I started to learn early on is that, like you have to be so detailed to write, like you have to think about so many different cases, if else, for loops, like all these different things that boiled down to to to solve some

basic problem like adding two numbers. Like if you've ever written code, you know that adding two numbers isn't like some super trivial things like you actually have to think about a lot of like um edge cases and and and and math that you didn't think about before. And so I remember on this part, I think it might have been the same podcast. I would tell them explain to me how you would how you would you know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And

they realized how many ups they take for granted. And I was like, well, as a business leader, right, as a founder, if you want to go and build a nonprofit that supports Black and Latin ext computer science students. And you tell me, and I ask you how you're gonna do that, and you tell me, Oh, we're gonna do events and we're gonna run a slack and we're gonna get sponsors. Well, okay, let's break that down into

how you're gonna do those individual things. You need to break those things down, need to continue to do that. And it just reminded me so much of like what

I learned when I wrote code. So when I come in and think about how to build a company, I'm starting from the basis of like I've already learned and been trained on how to be so detailed in my solutions that I'm applying that here in the same in the same use case of like starting company, where I'm thinking about each step, each edge case, boiling it all down to it's fundamentally uh kind of basic parts of

the solution. Black Tech, Green Money and Production to Blackvity Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast Network and Night Hired Media is produced by Morgan Dubon and me Well Lucas, with additional production support by Sarah Rogan and Rose McLucas. Special thank you to Michael Davis. That's a serrano. Learned more about my guests and other tech the trucks that innovators to afro tech dot com. Join your black tech, green money, shire us with somebody gonna get your money. Peace and love,