“When we talk about building our “own” let’s not leave out tech startups (Software, Fintech, SaaS, Etc.) In 2019, Apple became the first trillion-dollar company in the world and we only accounted for 6% of its employees.”- Givanne Nelson
Givanne Nelson is a 25-year-old recent college graduate, marketer, and developer based in New York City. His business, “Le Pale Shadow LLC” creates mobile applications that centralize all marketing and sales for small businesses. He recently is embarking on a brand called “Black X Tech” that is encouraging more people of color to join the tech industry.
My journey into programming started out with chatbots. Back in 2017, chatbots started becoming “all the rage” in marketing. Many of Software as a Service (SaaS) based businesses were popping up that allowed marketers to create them for their own businesses and clients. However, as most of these providers of chatbots were relatively new, their platforms were prone to have bugs. I became frustrated with these issues and it forced me to learn Python. Fast forward now to 2020 and my business is building apps and turning larger profit margins.
Recently in an interview with The Breakfast Club, recording artist turned tech entrepreneur Ryan Leslie expressed some important statements: “There is so much wealth that is being created right now in technology” and “in technology, there are only about 3% minorities”. He went on to explain how “programming is the language of the future” and how our community required a visionary similar to Steve Jobs to pioneer it.
Statements like this may seem outrageous but then you look into the actual statistics and it gets a lot worse. Last year a Wired article written by Sara Harrison reported that 8% of Apple’s staff is made up of Latinx employees and 6% is made up of black employees. Other tech companies Like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft actually reported a number less than that. We are not going to talk about gender inequality that also plagues these companies.
In my opinion, it all starts with parents encouraging their kids to learn to code and join programs such as STEM that are propelling kids and young adults into engineering and tech-based jobs. It’s also up to us as minority developers to provide our help in teaching programming which is something that my brand Black X Tech is setting up to do.
Not only do we need to increase these numbers in the tech industry, but we need to have our own tech startups built. Somewhere out there is the next Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. All it takes is for us as a community to push that brilliant brain to where it needs to go.
Let’s also support some of our amazing names in tech like Ryan Leslie’s company Super Phone, Tope Awotona’s Calendly , Dawn Dickson’s PopCom, and more.
Learn more about Givanne Nelson by visiting his website and following him on Instagram and Twitter.
