How do we ensure Black people don’t miss out on yet another industrial revolution? In this episode of From Chains to Links, technologist and startup advisor Tyrome ‘Ty’ Smith drops invaluable insights on what startup founders need to understand today for success tomorrow. He breaks down the biggest mistakes founders often make and highlights the urgent needs and pressing opportunities for Black entrepreneurs and technologists. Tune in for an episode packed with practical advice and forward-thinking strategies to help Black innovators thrive.
Welcome back to the show. I am here with the amazing Ifeoma Ike. How are you?
I’m good.
In this episode, we are going to go deep around deep tech and emerging technology. We are here with Tyrome Smith. Welcome.
How are you all?
How are you?
We’re great. How are you?
I’m good. I’m ready to talk.
This is a brother that I met a couple of months ago. We locked down the hallway for about an hour to the point where they were like, “You need to get out now.” We were like, “Yeah,” but we were still talking. This gives us an opportunity to continue the conversation. Ty, introduce yourself to the good people.
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you are in the world. I am an executive coach for startups. I work with people who are doing innovation from systematic innovation as large as working historically with one of the federal agencies all the way down to people who are trying to build products. I am especially interested in this topic because of the historically Black college community. I am a graduate of and on a Master’s degree from Howard University. I have one who’s A&T. We’re trying to make sure that that community comes along in this emerging tech space.
Emerging Technology
Often, it’s really hard for us to even keep pace with emerging technology because there’s so much coming online all of the time. What are you especially excited about?
It’s going to sound cliche at this point, but Artificial Intelligence. It’s not just Artificial Intelligence because AI is a tool. I’m 57 years old. My dad, many years ago, tried to teach me how to use a sly rule. I still don’t know how to use it. I was a chemistry major in undergrad. I didn’t get a chemistry degree but I had this computer that I would be able to do some crazy notation and I couldn’t figure it out.
Computers came along. I had an Apple II. My parents bought me an Apple II when I was in high school. Then, the internet. We have the World Wide Web, Web2, Web3, and AI. It is a tool. The problem is that we overthink the tool and underthink the value. The emerging technology around something called Generative AI, which is the smarter one, is the one that we need to be excited about. We need to understand what underlies in terms of innovation and value. I’m excited about that.
At Black Innovation Alliance, we are committed to being an AI-powered organization. We are leaning into the power of AI, especially when it comes to productivity. A lot of the conversation when it comes to AI in our community is around bias, which doesn’t give us the spaciousness. There’s not an equal part conversation about how Black folks can onboard onto these AI tools in order to obtain a competitive advantage. Can you talk a little bit about that? Where’s the opportunity? You talked about not leaning into the value.
I sit on a national board with a guy from one of the leading cybersecurity companies in the world. He wrote an article and says there are four things that are part of AI, which are data, energy, algorithms, and thinking or problem curation. What we end up with is if we could think less about all the models but think about how we engage with them in terms of the thinking that goes into them, the AI is fine because it’s dumb. It’s flashy lights, silicon chips, and electrons that go back and forth.
If we are able to think and involve Black folk in that space where we say, “What kind of problems are we really trying to solve?” and task the AI to engage where we are, that’s where the ball is. You talk about bias. Everything I can find out and learn on the reason why it is as biased as it is is because it doesn’t have the training data. It doesn’t have the data to go on to say, “As you examine this thing, please consider this set of information.” If we don’t get Black folk involved in setting the conditions to engage the data and the algorithms, don’t fuss when you can’t show up. It’s like the old-school EPMD song, “It’s like lotto. You got to be in it to win it.” If you’re not in it, you can’t win it. You can’t be a part of that.
I’m feeling a little bit guilty because with ChatGPT, there’s a setting where you can turn it off and it says, “Do you want it to learn from your responses?” I’m like, “No.”
Why?
With us oftentimes, there’s this privacy thing. It’s like, “I don’t want AI up in my business because then they are going to use it in order to extract from me.” This is something that is mainstreamed within the Black community. It’s both-and. How do we wrestle with that?
It’s historic. You have to understand. It’s like the Sankofa bird. You have to understand from what you came. If you look at things like Tuskegee and you look at other things like post-reconstruction environments where Black folks took control of their lives, the systems at large decapitated them. They literally, physically, and emotionally decapitated them. If I put myself out there, am I going to get run over by the things that I’m contributing? It is a both-and condition. It is not an either-or. How do we set the conditions by owning the story to say, “I’m going to learn, but I’m going to own what comes out of this. I got to own it differently.”
One of the things that I like about AI and the possibilities for engaging the community economically is that they don’t need infrastructure to do AI. The infrastructure is already there. You need people who can think. You need people who can engage with the technology. You talk about what’s the next emergent. That’s one of the reasons. I don’t need to build a building to do Artificial Intelligence. What I need to understand is who is building the building and how I can engage with them.
We know that this administration, the Biden administration, signed the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and all of those things. There’s $53 billion in the CHIPS and Science Act. The board that I sit on helps to do the strategy around that. $40 billion of it is already taken care of. $13 billion of that is set aside for NSF or National Science Foundation, DOE or Department of Energy, and other places. We need to be in the game. We need to be having those conversations with those agencies and saying, “You will not forget. You don’t have a choice to engage us because you need to be in it.”
If we are focused on, “How do I take this training data? Do I turn it off?” you can maybe create your own. I know of two people who are creating AI businesses. There’s Latimer AI by John Pasmore. There’s a young woman. I talked to her not long ago. Her name is Anastasia Jackson. She’s doing something with AI to help students over at Howard University. These are amazing technologies. They own the tech. They are not engaging the tech as an outsider. Don’t do that.
At The Front End Of Digital Entrepreneurship
At Black Innovation Alliance, we have launched two iterations of the BLADE Report. BLADE stands for Black Liberation And the Digital Economy. As far as we know, it’s the very first study on digital entrepreneurship. We mapped digital entrepreneurship, which is all the ways that folks are making money online. We talked about your son before we started. There are many young people who are active gamers.
We wanted to look at things like gaming, eSports, and eCommerce. There were so many powerful insights that came out of that study, one being that these businesses tend to be more sustainable and more likely to be profitable compared to more traditional businesses. We see digital entrepreneurship as a way for Black folks to get in on the front end. How can we start talking about things before the market has taken off?
I like that. I’m an entrepreneur-in-residence and adjunct faculty member at Bowie State University. I love my students. They are brilliant kids. If I see another haircare or skincare, it drives me nuts because the margins on that stuff are so skinny. They’re so thin. What can you do in a digital environment? Build once multiple uses. It’s not infinitely scalable, but if you’re smart about it, the scalability or the X on it is 10, 15, 20, or 25X on 1 engagement versus, “I build the next hard product consumer good. I have to figure it out and I’m competing against everybody else.”
Unpack that a little bit as if I’m ten years old. How do I make money online exponentially?
Let’s go with gaming because that’s the 1 my 21-year-old is out there trying to crush. We didn’t know this. He started streaming at eleven. I’m like, “You didn’t tell us you were streaming.” He’s like, “I can’t tell you everything.” He’s 21, so he has been in this game for ten years. If you are ten, you can go and create content. Content creation is infinitely scalable. You can continue to scale your content because it’s built once and used many times.
There is an organization out there that’s helping convert consumers to producers, particularly around gaming. They convert them so they understand how to create the game. The National Science Foundation put out an RFP to teach underrepresented communities about science, technology, engineering, and math, otherwise known as STEM, utilizing gaming. K-12, not 16 plus, is where they’re starting. They have these tools that they can do. If you can take that, learn the tech but also learn the business. Black Innovation Alliance would be like, “Let’s take that. What does that mean for value creation? How do you create value out of your things or your production?”
My grandparents were from Seneca, South Carolina. They came north in 1940-something. My grandfather had a 3rd-grade education and my grandmother had a 6th-grade education. They were the smartest people that you could find. They knew how to build things. My grandfather did not have a formal education past third grade but he could build stuff. They knew how to take raw material and make it real or make it something that was tangible.
The digital economy is the same. Some kids have to worry, depending on the communities, about the basic Maslow hierarchy needs. Most of those kids that have access to computers or smartphones, they could teach them how to convert that thing into something tangible that has reverberations. The National Science Foundation, the HBCU communities that we’re involved with, and some of the other organizations are out there teaching them how to take this seemingly dumb tool and convert it into products and services.
My kid wants to do something pretty imaginative. This is design thinking because you have to ask what-if questions. It’s like, “What if we did something different with this? What if I could create a system, I could play all day long, or I could convert my time to cash so that I could then go and do something out there?” Elon does it. The Google guys did it, one of which went to high school not far from where we’re taping this. How did we convert that? We can get those kids to really start to rethink the world in which they’re engaging and create value. You can start as young as 8 or 7 years old. Some folks do it.
Can I build on top of that?
Please do.
A lot of us exist in multi-generational homes. By multi-generation, that also means different experiences and exposure to this whole thing around the digital economy. We still have these traditional, “You’ve got to be a doctor or a lawyer,” or certain professions that still lead in how we not only get exposed to these tools but also get exposed to them beyond helping to fulfill a book report.
To build on the rift that you raised, we need to have a dual education outreach with the adults who are connected to these young people. It’s interesting. My dad was an engineer, so I went through the 11011 design thinking very early. Even though I didn’t come out as an engineer the way I think is still very much connected to that. The concept of gaming was seen as a waste of time or a hobby.
What you’re proposing is as a people, something separate from the tool but something about how the evolution of where we’re at is not only economically smart but also culturally. You are not unintelligent by connecting with these tools in this way. I wanted to add to that. I also want to say that in many ways, a lot of the money and the efforts get poured into these spaces that are still both connected socially but also traditional in their thinking around this. What do we need to do to also evolve from an organizing standpoint in the spaces that have the most resources within our community?
How Much Gaming Is Worth
I love this. You went there. I’m going to add to what it looks like to be educated, to be brilliant, and to make a digital economy worth it, which is what I’m doing. Alpha Phi Alpha says, “Go to high school. Go to college,” but not every kid has to go to college nor need to. Any parents who are reading this, take a look at the job requirements that are going on in the digital economy. Not a whole lot of them say, “You have to have a college degree.” You need to have lots of training and lots of smarts. They’re hiring people who can think.
Our kids can think, bar none. They’re creative. My wife teaches eighth-grade Math. You have parents that say, “What does my kid need to get an A?” My wife is like, “Can your kid think? I’m teaching kids how to think. I’m not teaching kids how to pass a test.” To unpack that for the high school versus career, the high school that my kids went to is one of the best high schools in the DMV district, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. We started putting those kids towards, “Maybe you need to be career-ready.” What does that look like? In terms of gaming, do you know how much gaming is worth a year?
It’s wild.
It’s a crazy number. It is worth more than television and movies combined per year. It’s a tens of billions of dollar industry. When our kids started gaming, we were like, “Why are you in the basement?” He is in 3 business accelerators at the same time, 1 of which is Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition. That’s 1 of the 3 that he’s in. They’re recognizing, “In this space, how do we develop a business model?”
With the Black Innovation Alliance, start talking about business models, not business plans. Who would’ve thought that COVID would’ve come around? What was the business plan for COVID? You can take a business model and iterate around, “We didn’t expect that, but this now opens an opportunity.” We need to take those innovative energies that our kids have that we teach out of them and reintroduce them.
Advice For Entrepreneurs
You work with a lot of startups. Much of being an entrepreneur is not knowing what you don’t know. If there’s one piece of advice that you have on loop because it’s such a common theme with your entrepreneurs, what would it be?
I have a podcast. I’m not going to pitch it.
Go for it.
It’s called What PAYS. You can find it on YouTube. The reason is if you can figure out what problem you are solving, you can figure out what pays. With every startup, I’m like, “What problem are you solving?” They’d answer and I’m like, “That’s not a problem. That’s a symptom.” Understand the core problem. The Deming model is five whys. I want you to do 12 or 15 because the thing that you think is a problem isn’t a problem. You got to unpack it.
Go deeper.
I’ve developed a curriculum around this innovation called Lean Startup. One of the things you should try to unpack is what problem you come in that you think you’re solving on behalf of somebody in the community or some potential customer. Engineers got one. You grew up with one. It’s like, “I got a solution but what’s the problem? Don’t worry about it.”
God bless and rest in peace, James Earl Jones. The field of dreams doesn’t work in the startup world. He said, “If I build it, they will come.” They won’t. Nobody wants that crap. That’s what you thought was cool, but that doesn’t mean your customers are going to do it. With startups, what problem are you solving? If you can figure out what problem you’re solving, you can figure out how to get paid.
That’s #Facts. It’s so important, especially for us because we don’t have the time and we don’t get to fail forward, right?
Yes. There was a workshop that I was at. I heard somebody say, “Black folks know how to do more with less.” I’m like, “Stop that. We need to know how to do more with more. We need to demand more.” You give them that opportunity. In terms of startups and getting investments, why is it that the White guys can have half an idea on a piece of paper and get $250,000 in seed capital? It makes no sense.
I did some training through the BLCK VC in BVI. What we’re trying to do is create a cadre of folks who can ask a different set of questions. I sat in on a couple of investor meetings and heard Black investors, and I’m talking about the startup community, say all the right things for all the wrong reasons. It was like, “Have you done your customer discovery?” They never looked at the investors. The question that I heard was not like, “Why are you still around? I invest in you. You’ll invest in somebody that’s outside of the community that went to Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, or whatever.” That’s cool, but what about the person who has an idea?
I met an investor out of Baltimore, McKeever. His story was, “I’m an investor now because I met a sister who had a great idea. The only way that she could make sure that that business stood was to give blood.” It was not blood, sweat, and tears metaphorically that most people say, but to sit down and get a needle in her arm to give blood so she can maintain her business. That’s wrong. From the standpoint of making sure that those kids who are out there and who have this idea, we need to be able to invest in their brilliance and their imagination.
You were talking about how we don’t have time to fail forward. One of the problems is that we don’t have the audacity of imagination. My grandparents were born in 1923. My grandmother told a story about her grandmother combing her long hair being the child of the master down wherever they were in Oconee County, South Carolina. By the time in 1970, I was two and a half generations out of slavery.
I remember laying on my grandparents’ floor watching the Apollo moon shots. The audacity to go from the Wright brothers and shoot a rocket to the moon. The audacity of Black folks to go in and say, “We don’t have anything,” and to establish something like Tulsa, Oklahoma. The audacity of imagination. The gift that we could give back in terms of community is to create a space for the audacity of imagination. If you can do that, then you have the space to fail but to learn even faster.
I love that. We live in a society where 96% of the risk capital goes to White men. Women get 2%, Black folks get less than 1%, and other people of color get 1%. That sounds good, but when it comes to the capital that is necessary to enable those dreams to take flight, we have none. It doubles back to the piece around how we have to do less with more. It would be nice to not have to do less with more but we are getting none.
I understand. To your point, the guy who blew up WeWork went back and got another $325 million to buy some property. The one in Nashville is about to go belly up. What does it mean? What you’re speaking to has nothing to do with money because it is anti-capital. You would invest in people that you have data on that says when you invest in them, you get a big return. That has nothing to do with capitalism. That has everything to do with culture and the risk of what it means to be Black and Brown in America, and have people invest in you.
It’s high risk.
Cultural Innovation
Even Black folks invest in each other. What does that say about our cultural space? Innovation, for me, is not just about the next best thing for customers. Innovation, for me, is a cultural innovation.
Who do we need to organize the quickest and in mass? I appreciate a lot of what you were saying about this. Much of what has come up for me as you were talking was that you embody an ownership of innovation. We are moving in this space of owning our birthright to innovate. When you hear the term right to innovate, what comes up for you? What comes to your mind? You’ve already mentioned a lot of gems. If you think about the right to innovate to be real, X, Y, and Z need to exist. What comes to your mind? Also, the evidence of that, what would it look like for it to be real and to exist?
My grandmother told me, “Do you ever see those columns and the steelwork in the plantations? Those people didn’t have an education. They were built by enslaved people. They can steal everything else, but what’s in your head, they can’t steal.” I said, “I got that one. The right to innovate post the enslavement period all the way up through 1921 and a little beyond, we need to go back to that. We know how to do this. We know how to build systems of support and systems of benefit all the way back to 1789. I went and traced it a little bit. Richard Allen in Free African Society. We knew how to do this. We know how to support one another.
A colleague of mine said that we own three things in Black communities. Those are funeral parlors, churches, and our academic institutions and universities. I’m not going to put it on the other first two. With our academic institutions, we behave in ways in which we’re like, “I have to look out for myself.” Yet, we have all these brilliant Black babies that are out there doing their thing. What would it look like to have a coalition where we could find space for investment, for advancing our ideas, and for those students to be that brilliant?
It’s happening. Clark Atlanta University had 42,000 applications. They had more applications than the University of Georgia for 1,400 spots. Their GPA was 3.71. How do we support that not just for Clark Atlanta but for the AUC or the southern part of the United States where HBCUs are? That’s where it’s going to happen.
With the decisions that came out from the Supreme Court, kids are going, “It’s cool.” MIT saw a 15% drop in their diverse applications because they were like, “What?” What I’m trying to do is help build systems where kids go, “I didn’t get into A&T. I have to go to Stanford.” Can you imagine that and what would that mean in terms of innovation and investment? You get the best and brightest going to schools that they don’t normally get.
Forbes Magazine did an investigation in 2022, around the times when they were calling these bombings. They looked at the underfunding of institutions. They looked at land grants. The top one that got completely underfunded was A&T from 1987 to 2020. It was underfunded by $3.8 billion from 1987 to 2020. Yet, if you looked at the economic impact associated with North Carolina State and them, it was about the same. It had $2.3 billion in economic impact. How do we create spaces so A&T, Winston-Salem Johnson C. Smith, and NCC all come together and create an economic engine? That’s where the Black Innovation Alliance could come in and help support that.
I love it. Thank you, Ty. These are gems on gems.
You’re welcome.
Thanks for all you do to advance this conversation within the spaces that matter. We are really grateful for your service. We appreciate you.
Thank you.
Thanks, everybody, for joining us for another episode of the show where we are taking the time to unpack this conversation on what it means to have the right to innovate. Join us next time. We’re going to continue to go deep. We appreciate you. Take care. Bye.
Important Link
About Tyrome Smith
Tyrome ‘Ty’ Smith, has over 25 years of consulting and leading executives and their teams by helping them understand human and organizational dynamics. As part of his work, He developed an innovative education program for the DoD; including coaching and mentoring product development teams engaged in an internal incubator. In addition, he has provided support to several organizations either as faculty or entrepreneur-in-residence; including Bowie State University, University of Maryland Innovation Extension Program, StreetCode Academy, Digital Undivided, and TechStars
