Kapor Center

One day in 2013, AJ Vandermeyden drove to Tesla’s corporate headquarters, in Palo Alto, California, sat down on a bench outside the main entrance, and waited, in the hope of spotting someone who looked like a company employee. Vandermeyden, who was thirty years old, had been working as a pharmaceutical sales representative since shortly after college, but she wanted a …

We need to talk about the tsunami of questionable money crashing into the tech industry. We should talk about it because that money is suddenly in the news, inconveniently out in the open in an industry that has preferred to keep its connection to petromonarchs and other strongmen on the down low.

This series profiles the most prominent and influential venture capitalists in the country. They talk about how they broke into the industry, what drives them, and what they have their eyes on, among other topics. In this episode, I sit down with Mitch Kapor of Kapor Capital.

Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor have built a legacy around their organizations working to make the tech sector more diverse and inclusive. Now, they’re ready to take a step back and let those groups be run by the teams they’ve assembled across the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Capital and Level Playing Field Institute. (Note: Subscribers login needed to access this article.)

In a time of disappearing government data and a rapidly changing workplace, journalists and academics are finding new ways to collaborate and leverage the power of their original research and their reach.

Venture investing is supposed to be a meritocracy, where the best ideas will win funding and support from powerful venture capital firms. But the reality for women-founded companies is often disturbingly different.

When the popular messaging platform Slack won a fastest-rising startup award last year, the company sent four black female engineers to accept it. Onstage at the TechCrunch awards show, one of the women praised Slack’s diversity, citing a statistic from the company’s 2016 diversity report: 9 percent of Slack’s engineering team were black, Latina or Native American women. “THIS Is What Diversity In …

The tech and startup world is filled with innovators who want to solve really tough problems. Investors are pouring billions of dollars into fintech, health tech, education tech, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and many other verticals to realize these entrepreneurs’ dreams. Yet, we can’t seem to make a dent in addressing the lack of diversity in tech companies and startups. Worse, the …

Each year, the Black Enterprise TechConneXt Summit brings together tech leaders, executives, innovators, renowned speakers, and entrepreneurs with the goal of empowering people of color in the tech industry. The two-day conference is packed with insightful talks, interactive workshops, and one-on-one chats with some of the brightest minds in tech. In the lead up to the conference, TechConneXt also provides HBCU students with an …

The first day of the TechConneXt Summit was awe-inspiring and illuminating. President and CEO of Black Enterprise Earl Graves Jr. put it best in his opening remarks, “We continue to raise the bar since our inaugural event three years ago.”

Every week, it seems, brings new ethical questions about Silicon Valley. A seemingly endless rash of sexual scandals in the venture community. Twitter supposedly used by anonymous Russian trolls to rig the American election. A straight-faced Mark Zuckerberg denying Facebook has a problem with fake news. Uber banned in London and vilified everywhere else. Google guilty of anti-trust violations. Apple and Amazon fined billions of dollars for not paying their taxes.

There are a few numbers that seem to drive Blokable, the local startup company with deep-pocketed investors. One is that global construction spending is a $10 trillion endeavor. Much in the same way HP Inc. is drafting ways to upend manufacturing with 3-D printers, Blokable has set its sights on disrupting housing construction as we know it. Another number is …