Last November, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien explored Silicon Valley through the eyes of eight African-American entrepreneurs. All participants of the inaugural NewMe Accelerator class, the Black in America: The New Promised Land — Silicon Valley cast invited viewers into their journey as startup founders competing in an industry comprised of less than 1% of entrepreneurs that look like them. BlackEnterprise.com caught up with the tech innovators to see what they’ve been up to one year later.
Chris Bennett is a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School graduate and serial entrepreneur, with expertise in finance, operations, and team building. But he also specializes in programming languages like Python, HTML, and CSS. How did he get such a curious mix of skills you might ask? Well, while studying economics in college, he and a friend launched LiquidBooks.net, a drop-off service to help fellow students sell their books at a higher value. They were pulling in $100,000 a year but after graduation he let the website lapse and went to work in the real world.
But finance wasn’t the right fit so he eventually made his way to Silicon Valley. Bennett is also one of four friends who launched Black Founders, a Silicon Valley-based organization with the mission to increase the number of successful black entrepreneurs in tech. Black Founders was launched at the same time as the NewMe Accelerator, and since has also hosted education forums for hundreds of tech entrepreneurs in Atlanta and New York City.
While participating in the NewMe Accelerator, Bennett pitched his idea for Soldsie.com (formally Central.ly). It allows retailers to sell their products on Facebook by letting shoppers go into a product’s comment section and write “sold” to buy items. Bennett and his co-founder built an entire back-end system that allows merchants to manage sales and collect payments. Bennett wasn’t one of the main entrepreneurs featured in the documentary, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t walk away with a war chest of resources. Below he talks about the accelerator experience, advisor feedback, and why Silicon Valley is “the place for tech startups.”
I worked in finance because…
I got a solid job offer in private equity after college and I never had any experience with a tech company (besides LiquidBooks) so I didn’t apply to any tech companies in college. Â I was really frustrated working in finance and it took me exploring a couple of industries before I realized I should work in tech. I decided to move to the Valley because one of my best friends from college left Bain Capital to work at a startup. That was the first time I realized the potential of startups and the opportunities they afforded. After two years, I’m still in the Valley.
The way I see it…
If you are going to be a technology entrepreneur then you should be in San Francisco/Silicon Valley. Â It has the best and biggest network of talent, investors, and mentors here. I moved to the Valley before NewMe and had no intention to leave afterwards. We are based in the Mission District in San Francisco.
Following NewMe we raised…
An angel round to keep us going. We are using the investment to hire additional people and invest in marketing to attract new customers and inform the market about selling on Facebook.
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. Â 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. Â 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.