Month: August 2013

Discrimination in startups and entrepreneurship

I came across an old CNN video, featuring a famous tech blogger Michael Arrington saying ‘I don’t know a single black entrepreneur’,

a study published on CNN pointed out that the vast majority of top executives at the leading Silicon Valley tech firms are white men.

Women and Asians are less frequent but they have an ok presence, but African-American and Latino tech leaders remain a rarity.

And only 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black.

This made me reflect on the status of financing when it comes to minorities, I have read an analysis that points out that some weak projects by white & Asian entrepreneurs get financed while much stronger projects with black founders are shunned.

I personally believe that “capital” is not racist, on the contrary, capitalists want to make more money and they won’t care even if you came from outer-space ….. but on the other hand stats don’t lie.

So why Black entrepreneurs and start-ups are shunned when it comes to funding!!

possible answers:

1- Connections : often the right connection is the #1 reason for funding, maybe black entrepreneurs are less connected to investors or share less connections with investors than other minorities /communities.

2- Stereotypes & Hollywood: maybe Latino & African Americans stereotypes trick the investors into thinking that if he invests in a Blacks / Latinos founded start-up he would have to deal with gangster style employees.

3- Better invest in what we know: another reason is that most investors being White, they may prefer to invest in a founder that they judge had a standard way of thinking, and that the other communities do not think the same way the investor do!

This just confirmed my original idea that Connections are the most important factor in an entrepreneur success, and that’s why i started Startupz a club to create connections between entrepreneurs

Human population growth

Human population is growing with a terrifying speed, and what is more terrifying is that poor and less intelligent populations are expanding fast, while rich and developed populations are not growing!

from 1990 to 2010, the world added 1/3rd of it’s existing population.

The growth is championed by countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan , Nigeria ….

These poor countries are not able to sustain their existing populations, and thus the majority of population is poor and undereducated!

Why there’s no process to limit the population growth worldwide and in poor countries in particular..

if we continue on this route , the movie Idiocracy (2006) will become a reality!

Can’t poor countries understand that population fast growth is bad for their future?

Growth rates of the world’s most populous countries
Rank	Country	Population 2010	Population 1990	Growth (%) 1990–2010
7	Nigeria	158,423,000	97,552,000	62.4%
6	Pakistan	173,593,000	111,845,000	55.3%
8	Bangladesh	148,692,000	105,256,000	41.3%
2	India	1,224,614,000	873,785,000	40.2%
5	Brazil	194,946,000	149,650,000	30.3%
4	Indonesia	239,871,000	184,346,000	30.1%
	World	6,895,889,000	5,306,425,000	30.0%
3	United States	310,384,000	253,339,000	22.5%
1	China	1,341,335,000	1,145,195,000	17.1%
10	Japan	128,057,000	122,251,000	4.7%
9	Russia	142,958,000	148,244,000	-3.6%