Black & Brown Founders

Women, especially Black and Brown women, are increasingly the bread winners in single-parent homes, are achieving higher academic levels than in the past.  Most encouraging is the fact that they are the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs in the United States.  However, they still only receive 1-2% of all venture capital that goes to startups.

The first barrier to launching business is not capital - it is product market fit.  Therefore, At BBF, we teach women of color to launch and organically grow tech or tech-enabled businesses with modest means (bootstrapping).  We focus on prototyping and ensure they achieve product-market fit, as evidenced via product/service sales within 6 months.

The second barrier is access to education and resources.  Our community is virtual and our training is completely online.  Unlike competitive accelerators that require relocation for three months, our work is completed without interrupting family responsibilities, which are often a deterrent for women of color.  Our community is a major fountain of encouragement, peer support, group coaching, and inspiration, increasing the chances of resilience through the startup phase.

The third barrier is indeed capital, but not in the way people might think.  Generating revenue and growing organically is the most important predictor of long-term sustainability.  Of all businesses that receive venture capital, only 2% persist beyond five years.  However, bootstrapped businesses have at least a 50% change of surviving beyond the first five.  We have used mini-grants (up to $5,000) to seed the set-up costs or miscellaneous expenses related to prototyping for selected businesses.  Ultimately, it is not until the business generates sales that we know they will have the capital they need to sustain ongoing operations.

Currently, our program is 100% virtual, except for a hybrid pilot we have successfully ran in the city of Philadelphia.  Our retention has dramatically increased, and we have seen a higher program completion level because of it.  For this reason, we want to establish formal hybrid programs in the cities of Philadelphia, PA, San Francisco, CA and Greensboro, NC.

We plan to serve 180 women of color per year in total (3 cohorts of 20 people per site).

Our Bootstrapping Bootcamp was created by and for black and brown women entrepreneurs.  It is composed of the following:

* 10 modules, ranging from personal goal setting to building social capital, designing and building a prototype, to launching marketing campaigns.

* Group coaching once per week during the 10 weeks of the cohort, during the which participants bring forth their questions and challenges related to implementing what they are learning directly in their businesses.  The group coaching component keeps the work very practical, ensuring that theories become actionable on a weekly basis.  This also helps ensure that the participants do not fall behind and are moving along.  

We know not everyone will work at the fast pace of the program.  This is why the community is critical - people have an ever-green access to lessons.  They can come back any time and review concepts and other details.  They also have each other - you can come back at any time and join a discussion board or the coaching session of the active cohort, and get your questions answered.

CHROMA is our annual convening, and this has become a time when people get to meet in person, further strengthening the sense of community they build throughout the year via the online experience.

Black and brown women are culturally expected to be caregivers.  More and more however, they also find themselves becoming bread winners of single-parent homes, or at least hindered in their professional growth due to family responsibilities.  

Black And Brown Founders provides a solution that respects our women's commitment to family while creating space for networking and learning.  

Our program was designed by and for black and brown female entrepreneurs that lead tech or tech enabled businesses.  Although BBF is open to anyone in the black and brown community, we consistently attract more women than men, which is consistent with the fact that this demographic is the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs in the United States.

We described how our solution tackles major barriers earlier in our application.

The Bootstrapping Bootcamp was designed by Aniyia Williams and Francesca Escoto.  Aniyia Williams is a black entrepreneur that comes from an entrepreneurial family.  Her venture, Tinsel, successfully integrated tech into upscale jewelry, competing in the wearable tech space.  She has gone on to found non-profit organizations, such as Black and Brown Founders, and is currently part of Omidyar Network.  Francesca, a Latina immigrant from the Dominican Republic, launched first venture building software to track the performance of aircraft engines.  She has since launched different businesses, from franchises to network marketing to software development.

Aniyia and Francesca are the ideal clients! After our pilot, we gathered feedback to improve the curriculum and the delivery of our program.  Through our events and our extensive social media presence, we constantly scan the environment and intentionally request feedback on what is needed to move the needle for black and brown women in STEM entrepreneurship.

We are serving approximately 150 people per year via our Bootstrapping Bootcamp cohorts.

We have a moral imperative to expand our reach and increase our impact.  As more and more women of color change the face of American entrepreneurship, BBF needs to augment its infrastructure to better support this community.

Yes, we need funding.  However, just like our clients, we also need support, coaching and community to grow.  Our work requires that our social capital increase exponentially, helping us reach our target audience in places that we don't currently have access to.

Finally, we need infrastructure.  This means revising our organizational chart and revamping our job descriptions to ensure we are positioning for the growth we are seeking.

Deldelp Medina is a Latina entrepreneur and futurist, currently the Executive Director of Black and Brown Founders.  She is a resident of San Francisco.  The Black and Brown Founders Chairman of the Board and Founder, Aniyia Williams, is a black entrepreneur with family roots in Philadelphia, where her father and extended family run their enterprises.  Lastly, our Financial Officer resides in Greensboro, NC.  

Aside from geography, our whole team 100% represents the communities we serve, since we are composed of black and brown women who are entrepreneurs, running tech or tech-enabled enterprises.

We are tracking the following:

Growth in Sales 

Jobs Created

Businesses Created

If black and brown women have access to coaching and community, they will be more likely to persist past the initial five years of business launch, and build a more robust business model than those who do not have access to our program.

Persisting comes from increased self-confidence, and increased self-confidence comes from incremental capacity to do hard things.  Doing hard things requires coaching/teaching, practice, and community.

A robust business provides consistent revenue and profits, grows their top line over time, and creates new jobs over time.

Online course management platform (Thinkific), complemented by the professional practice of coaching.  

Full Time Staff - 2

Part Time Staff - 2

Contractors - 2

Black and Brown Founders has been operating for four years.

However, Deldelp, Aniyia and Francesca have a combined 50 years of experience in technical entrepreneurship.

To start, inclusion is intentional with our definition of woman and female being fluid, allowing individuals to self-designate.  

By design, our work is innately addressing diversity, and this voice was instrumental in the creation of the curriculum, the delivery, and the way in which we nurture community.  We intentionally ensure that many voices are heard by including speakers from many groups in society.

Finally, we strive for equity. Within our cohorts, individualized attention helps ensure that the specific needs of every person are met and nobody falls through cracks.

We provide business coaching and prototyping technical assistance for the low cost of $495.  These services are delivered via an online education platform and group coaching is delivered via video conferencing technology.

Our community needs these services because without them, their success rate would be as low as 2%.  With our services, their chance for resilience beyond five years is at least 50%, and up to 85%, comparable to franchises that use a systemic approach to business launching.

We are currently financially sustainable, with a very committed base of individual monthly donors, annual corporate donors, and now an increasing number of grant funders.

Our goal is to create a self-sustaining model for the Bootstrapping Bootcamp specifically, where we have enough paying clients to be able to cover the cost of delivering services, and using the additional funds to regrant as well as provide scholarships.  Our other programs, such as CHROMA, could continue to be subsidized by corporate partnerships and foundations.  Individual donors will continue to be the lifeline of the organization, providing sufficient funding to cover operations, until we grow our infrastructure.

We currently receive approximately $35,000 per month in individual donations, and have raised up to $700,000 in event sponsorships for CHROMA.