Moving Beyond Stuck: A Design-Based Approach to Enhancing Minority Tech Startup Launches

Given that all of the US-based business owners ranking in the top 10 of the Forbes billionaires list helped found technology-based companies, tech entrepreneurship presents an almost unmatched potential for social mobility for company founders. Unfortunately, Black entrepreneurs in technology-based businesses receive less than 1% of the venture capital in the US. “Stuck from the start,” is the characterization of the situation that Black entrepreneurs find themselves in while navigating the road to entrepreneurship (Myers and Chan 2017). The challenges faced by Black entrepreneurs stem from institutionalized racism (e.g., discriminatory lending), implicit biases, a lack of mentorship or connection to a larger network of business owners/investors (Fairlee and Robb 2008; Robb et al. 2014), a dearth of culturally-relevant curriculum, a lack of technical support, and other characteristics of the current entrepreneurial ecosystem. For the past three years, the Entrepreneurial Diversity in Information Technology (EDIT) has been iteratively refined to address some of the hurdles faced by Black tech startup founders; technical development, culturally-relevant curriculum, and targeted mentorship. With the ultimate goal of developing a scalable and sustainable model that can bring target communities into the tech-based entrepreneurial ecosystem across Florida, to date, EDIT has supported 43 Black founders in starting their entrepreneurship journey and assisted in the development of 25 technology-based startups. In this paper, we discuss the relevant background, the design-based research methodology utilized to refine the program, and the future directions for the program.