Kapor Center

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 …

Tiffany Smith couldn’t stop fidgeting. The 27-year-old had flown halfway across the country from Chicago to pitch a room full of venture capitalists in Oakland, California, about her startup: a website connecting ex-inmates to construction and other blue-collar jobs. Smith’s examiners included Freada Kapor Klein, 64, and her husband, Mitch Kapor (pronounced KAY-Por), 66, longtime advocates for social change in …

This has been a difficult week for the technology industry, particularly for those who care deeply about diversity and inclusion. By now, many of us have read the viral memo penned by a former Google employee, James Damore, who questioned the efficacy of Google’s internal bias training and diversity initiatives. In doing so, Damore also suggested certain biological reasons may …

When Susan Fowler alleged in February that sexism and sexual harassment was rampant at Uber, it wasn’t just the charges that were shocking. It was her willingness to speak out against a powerful former employer.

Oakland can be a role model for tech done right when it comes to diversity, says the Kapor Center’s chief technology community officer.

The stories are vile. Women entrepreneurs face sexual advances by the VCs they rely on to get their companies off the ground. They are bribed to keep quiet. They are threatened to shut up. Their supporters are labeled “whiners” and worse.

Camila Minor considered enrolling in college after immigrating to San Francisco from Brazil, but instead opted for Hackbright Academy, an all-female computer coding course. Inside the Hackbright classroom, 22 women were learning the computer language Python. The walls were covered in cheerful Post-it notes with handwritten notes that say things like, “You’re amazing.” Some of women were even high-fiving each …