‘Black in America’: Chris Bennett, One Year Later

‘Black in America’: Chris Bennett, One Year Later


Because of feedback from investors and advisors we…

Pivoted the company in November of 2011 to facilitate sales through Facebook. We received feedback from investors that the market wasn’t big enough and we weren’t solving a problem just building a product.  After thinking about it and talking to many customers, we realized there were big problems with selling on Facebook and there was a lot of demand to sell on Facebook.

We received a ton of…

Advice. The best though was to figure out how things would work in the future and build that. With Central.ly we were trying to improve upon a technology that existed already. With Soldsie, we are creating something new that will be the way people shop on social networks in the future.

The environment for blacks in Silicon Valley is…

Way better. It’s not surprising to hear a black entrepreneur has raised $500,000 in a seed round. That wasn’t the case when I first arrived here two years ago.

The solution for increasing the number of blacks in Silicon Valley is…

Working to get more black tech students visiting the Valley to see how awesome it is here.

Silicon Valley needs more blacks with…

Technical skills.  It’s clear there is a lack of engineers in the Valley and they are the most coveted human capital resource here so it makes more sense to develop technical skills to succeed out here.

The Black in America documentary…

Provided a lot of eyeballs on what is going on in Silicon Valley. It was definitely successful at shedding a light on the lack of diversity here. NewMe took our company to the next level. Somewhere we couldn’t have gone without the support of Wayne, Angela, and the number of advisors involved in the program.


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