About 500 tech founders, investors and workers converged on The Gathering Spot last week for the 2024 State of the Atlanta Black Tech Ecosystem Summit, which organizer Joey Womack described as a kind of “board meeting for the community.”
As Atlanta’s Black founders and tech workers were squeezed by tech layoffs, increased inflation, housing prices and the rise of artificial intelligence last year, Womack wanted the community to discuss the strengths and threats to the ecosystem, and how to move forward.
“Like any board would not let the CEO … get away with not having a plan, this is our presentation of our plan to our community,” said Womack, founder and CEO of Goodie Nation, a nonprofit aimed at supporting diverse entrepreneurs and investors.
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Womack and other local Black tech leaders discussed the lack of representation in computer science classrooms, the difficulties of being a product manager and the existential threats Black venture capitalists are facing.
The discussions were split across three panels — the first on the state of the city’s Black K-12 and college computer science and gaming community, the second on the state of Black tech workers and the last on the state of startup founders, investors and entrepreneur support organizations.
Leaders from the different areas discussed the strengths they saw in the city’s tech ecosystem.
“Our strength is the richness of our diversity,” said Erica Stanley, a director of engineering at Google and founder of the Atlanta chapter of Women Who Code.
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Anastasia Simon, investment principal at the startup accelerator Techstars, said, “There is a certain level of tenacity and grit and just hustle that you see from the founders in Atlanta.”
But they also discussed the threats that they were seeing.
“What I’m seeing right now, particularly for Black founders who raised [money] during the time where it was easier to raise, the goalposts have moved,” said Jaisa Gooden, the Atlanta-based vice president of startup banking at Silicon Valley Bank. Money has to stretch further because it is harder to raise now than four years ago, she said.
And Grant Warner, executive director of the Center for Black Entrepreneurship housed at Spelman College noted the increasing challenges to diversity programs is affecting the money flowing to Black founders.
“The environment for investment is getting worse, not only because of the economy and the risk, but because of the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] attacks,” Warner said.
In the classrooms, Bryan Cox, a research associate at Georgia Tech, noted that while there is increased access to computer science and tech education, the students still don’t reflect the diversity of the city.
“We’re doing a really, really good job with access,” Cox said. “Participation, we’re not doing a great job.”
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
This year’s summit was a resumption of an event that had previously happened in 2017-2019 but was derailed by the pandemic.
Those earlier iterations were “electric,” Womack said.
“No one had ever really brought together all the parts of the community before,” he said. “You could see the formations and the frustrations that people faced in various panels, and people took action from it.”
Womack is hoping people use the insights from this year’s summit to act. He is using them to inform his nonprofit’s work. At the end of the year, he’ll ask other leaders if their organizations lived up to their goals.
“For next year, 2025, we want to be able to say ‘This is what we said last year, this is what actually happened and here’s our plan for 2025,’” he said.
For Aaron Butler, founder of the cybersecurity startup Blackhack Society, this year’s summit was his first introduction to the Atlanta Black tech ecosystem:
“This is the room I’ve always aspired to be in.”
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