Lab to Market - Supporting Entrepreneurship at HBCUs and MSIs

All right, Good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for being with us today and welcome to today's panel discussion, Lab to Market supporting entrepreneurship at HBCUs and MSIs. My name is Kiana Stewart and I am the CEO and Principal Consultant of Global Forest Tech Consulting, a tech consulting and software development company. I am also working on my PhD in higher education, Leadership and Policy Studies at Howard University and my research centers, Black Women, Academic Entrepreneurs and Tech Transfer and commercialization at HBCUs. I am thrilled to be asked back by the SBA team to lead another panel discussion on topics I deeply care about. During discussion, we will hear from two professionals actively engaged in bolstering the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to support technology transfer at HBCUs and other MSIs. A few housekeeping items before we begin. Please feel free to use the chat to connect with the other participants, share resources and of course, ask questions. We will leave a few minutes at the end for you to engage with our esteemed panelists. Without further ado, I would like to welcome and introduce Erin Horn McKinney and Donna Harris and I'll take a couple of minutes to just give you a little bit of insights on their background. Erin Horn McKinney is passionate about financial inclusion, social impact, inclusion and innovation and equitable entrepreneurship. She serves as the inaugural National Executive Director of the Howard University and PNC national center for Entrepreneurship where the vision for the center is to create a nationally recognized center for entrepreneurship, education, research, resources and advocacy for Black business owners across the country. Erin is a seasoned executive, investor, womanist, Afro futurist, activist and advocate with more than two decades of entrepreneurship and tech policy, venture capital, economic business development and marketing communications experience. She is the proud mom of two and a double alumna of Howard University located in Washington, D.C. for those of you that may not be familiar, great to have you with us, Erin.

Thank you for having me.

Our next panelist is Donna Harris. Donna is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and angel investor focused on helping to find, incubate and grow ideas for solving our greatest challenges. As the founder and CEO of Builders and Backers, Donna is working in communities across the country to restore personal agency, increase capacity for entrepreneurial thinking, identifying promising solutions, and ultimately scale and fund the ones that work. Donna is also a co founder of 1776, general partner in the 1776 ventures, venture partner at Praxis, and an active angel investor. She is also on the board of the Global Entrepreneurship Network and Policy Council of Economic Innovation Group. Welcome Donna, and thank you both for being with us today for this discussion. All right, so let's dive in. I attended a session yesterday where the panel panelists were discussing challenges they face when engaging with entrepreneurs applying for small business innovation research grants. Sbirs. And the conversation was particularly around those of color.

Both.

Both of you are entrepreneurs of color. Both of you have extensive backgrounds in building entrepreneurship ecosystems as entrepreneurs. Can you each tell us what unique challenges you're facing in your work and what solutions you're engaging in to address those challenges? And we'll start with you, Erin.

Sorry, I was coughing, so I didn't hear the last part of the question. Oh, no worries.

No worries.

You said the unique challenges. Yeah.

So any challenges that you think of as you're continuing to do the work to build the center and engaging with entrepreneurs, black entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color across the country, the specific challenges that you're facing and what are some of the solutions that you're also deploying or seeking from the network at large?

Absolutely. If I may, I'm just going to take a step back and explain a little bit about the center for context. So the center was formed out of a historic grant that was provided by PNC Banks foundation to Howard University in 2021 of $16.8 million over five years. The vision for this center is to create a innovative national entrepreneurial network across all historically black colleges in order to inform black entrepreneurship broadly. So the concept of that is a hub and spoke model where the national center is based at Howard University and then there are four regional centers, one at Howard, one, one at Morgan State in Baltimore, one at Clark Atlanta, and then one at Texas Southern in Houston, Texas. Each of those centers has a four to six state footprint where they build out the ecosystem working with each of those HBCUs. And really the thought behind this is not that this is for HBCU students, faculty and staff and alumni, but but really more about using the trust and the thought leadership of HBCUs to support and create best practices for black entrepreneurs in those communities surrounding those HBCUs and around the country broadly. So the challenges that we see and the whole reason that the center exists is first and foremost is in the past there has been very much a scarcity mindset around resources, right? So either resources go to one HBCU to solve for everybody and then that, that, that pits those organizations, institutions against one another, or to be quite frank, especially when it comes to black entrepreneurs, that there are white led organizations or institutions that are giving that funding to inform black entrepreneurship broadly. And there's a lack of cultural competency to those programs and a Lack of trust as well. And then, you know, you know, I think the third thing I would say is one of the biggest challenges is at the end of the day, you know, this community continues to be under resourced and under supported, but specifically around access to capital, there continues to be a number of efforts around technical assistance and people can only be, you know, a community can only be resourced. But so much when it comes to assistance and advice and mentorship, at the end of the day, the, the money has to be there, right? To scale. And the fact that as we've seen a number of reports through the years that have shown, when it comes to access to capital, black entrepreneurs specific to venture capital receive less than 1% of venture capital. And specifically black female entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs specifically leave that receive less than 2%. And we saw, you know, post the George Floyd tragedy, right. We saw a quick spike for just a moment in those investments and then it continues to, you know, then it would drop back down. But it's unfortunate that it took the death of someone in order to there even be an awareness and that a lot of the commitments made to black entrepreneurship have not been realized. Right. A lot of performative commitments were made by corporations and foundations and others, many of which that those funds have never been dispersed or have really just been a drop in the bucket. But it does say that the fact that there, that that could happen in a moment's notice, what could actually be done with intention and that. And also venture capital is not, you know, is not the only capital. And all money isn't good money. Right. And so I kind of use that as a segue. Right. To Donna, who I know is all about everything, you know, just let's not just talk only about venture capital. So those are the barriers that, you know, top three barriers I would speak to.

Sure. Thank you for sharing that insight, Donna. I welcome you to also share some of the challenges that you're facing in your work and solutions as well.

Yeah, thank you. I mean, I can't imagine a better tee up based on what Erin just said, right. I mean the point about under capitalized and over supported, right. I mean, at some point you have to show me the money. And we can only give so much mentoring and so many technical support programs when you actually cannot build a business without some level of capital. And even to just create a minimum viable product, if you're trying to build a tech company Requires on average $40,000. Who has $40,000 laying around in a bank account and friends and family that are willing to or able to provide that level of capital. So the challenge is that in many cases we have people who have excellent ideas and they can't get out of the starting gate because money is a very, very real obstacle, and it's a real obstacle at the earliest, earliest stage. So let me back up a little bit with a little bit of context. So our work at Builders and Backers came out of about two years of research that followed a lifelong career in entrepreneurship and venture capital investing that I found myself deploying capital all over the world. I'm hopefully older than I look, and I've been at this for multiple decades. And about 12 years, 13 years ago, I was at Startup America as managing director and I loved the Kaufman Report about startups create jobs. And we all piled into the ecosystem building bandwagon and started in communities, really grabbed a hold of this idea and started funneling billions of dollars into ecosystem development. The problem is, here we are 13 years later and the start rates not change, the failure rates not changed. Capital is more concentrated than it was the day I joined Startup America. And we have not chipped away one iota at the diversity numbers. That is a significant problem. And when you look at the volatility of the venture capital world in general, we're hanging our nation's economic future on a venture capital asset class that should be funding a minority of the ventures that are getting created. We're missing an entire layer of capital in our entrepreneurial stack. So we sort of started with that as the foundational problem. When you really start unpacking that and looking at the numbers and looking at the data around, who has ideas, the hypothesis that there are ideas everywhere. And as an entrepreneur, I want to look for the lever, right? There's lots of things we could be doing to change this dynamic. Lots of great programs and ideas that are out there chipping away at the problem. What I want to know is what's the biggest thing? What is the big rock that if we grab a hold of it and we push it, it's not just going to chip away at these numbers, it's going to completely shatter the dynamic and be the thing that is the jump shift change in this dynamic. And all roads for us keep coming back to HBCUs. Because when we think about the numbers, certainly the George Floyd moment and the jumping on and the performative funding, a lot of that was driven based around outrage and the desire for equity. But if we look at this purely through an economic lens, right, we would have an estimated 4% increase in our gross Domestic product. If we actually tackle the issue of equalizing the numbers of black entrepreneurs as compared to the population metrics. Right. That's, that is an enormous number. And by the way, that's prosperity for everyone. So this is, this is a very big opportunity. And so I look at that and say, well, what's the big rock? The big rock is you've got hundreds of thousands of students at HBCUs. The data shows that about 60% of people, Americans have an idea for a startup. That's about 187,000 students with ideas in the United States. It's not even looking at the alumni, that's just the students. 92% of the average Americans will not take action on those ideas. That's 150,000 companies that we could be launching if we just looked within the HBCU lens and said, let's go find the students with ideas. Let's not just set a buffet of educational programs and workshops, let's actually fund them. Let's hand them dollars and say, great, let's go test that idea. Here's a team to help you. Let's actually go make that happen. But the challenge is that we have a lot of performative dollars that have been allocated. That money has been, you know, the press releases were issued but the money didn't actually flow. So the schools that could be doing really incredible work are not getting access to that funding. And that needs to be resolved. But we also have to look at it not just through a VC lens but from a full stack funding lens because this is not just about high tech companies. It's about small businesses and medium sized companies and government suppliers and TikTok influencer companies and everything in between. All of that can create economic thriving and it can, can level the economic playing field. I mean we've got 80% of black businesses fail within the first 18 months and lack of access to capital is the number one reason. So HBCUs and actually putting money where our mouth is are in our, in our world, the two things that are the big levers that we could be pulling here.

Yeah, thank you both for sharing those insights. This sort of leads into my next question which gets at the tech transfer process, right. Which we know is, is not a linear process. And so I'd love if you could sort of talk to us about and maybe we'll start with you, Donna, considering your last comments, like how you advise entrepreneurs on the process of taking an innovation, right. That perhaps may be developed at an HBCU or at another minority serving institution. How do they take that idea that maybe was formed in a lab and bring that to market? Like, what are the conversations, what are the resources? Considering we know that funding is one of the huge barriers, but more along the lines of building community with those entrepreneurs. What are some of the conversations or instruction that needs to happen as they are thinking about taking their innovations outside of the university environment or a business environment into a marketplace?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really interesting as we think about, you know, again, where are these big levers that we could be pulling? Every time I open a paper and think about the jobs that we want and we think about unemployment numbers and inflation and whatnot, there are gigantic levers everywhere. And tech transfer is one of those levers.

Right.

There's no shortage of innovation. There are literally millions of entrepreneurial ideas sitting on the shelves in universities across America. But tech transfer is historically not incredibly effective at commercializing. Right. So we've got an enormous sort of challenge in that oftentimes the person who is the innovator isn't commercially commercial mindset oriented. Right. They're intellectually curious about the problem, they're curious about the research, but they're not really focused on what is the endpoint of the research and what are the milestones I need to have accomplished in order for this to become a commercialized product. And the skills that you need to do that are sometimes counter to that.

Right.

Research can be long term thinking, multi year research projects, you know, sort of big Titanic esque work. And actually commercializing something tends to be much more nimble and experimental. And what's my hypothesis and how do I go run really quick, rapid, low fidelity tests to see if this works? And not just tests around the product, but the thing that gets most overlooked is does anybody actually want this? What's the market for it? Who are the customer, who's going to buy it? And that is the area that we focus a lot on in our work is what are your hypotheses around that? And before we start spending lots of money and quitting our jobs and buying our domain name and all of the things that we tend to think about, let's actually pause for a minute and do some validating around those things. And oftentimes it takes a lot less capital than we think it does.

Right.

So I mentioned $40,000 to create a minimum viable product. No code tools, low code tools, generative AI. There's all kinds of incredible tools out there that we rarely meet. An idea that can't be tested through a series of low fidelity experiments for under $5,000. I mean, we, there's a lot more that can be done than we think of. And I don't know that we're broadly teaching some of those modern approaches that meld the best of what humans bring to the table and what the machine is capable of doing today. I mean, landing pages can be built without any experience. You can build an app without knowing how to code. Like, there's a. There's a whole layer of education in the entrepreneurial realm that needs to be updated with, to reflect that, you know, AI is reality and it is your friend in many ways when it comes to commercializing your ideas.

Yeah. Erin, I'd love to get you in on this discussion, considering the center is at an academic institution. Right. At Howard University. If you could talk to us about some of the conversations that you're having with entrepreneurs on campus or across the HBCU network.

Absolutely. So I think, you know, I echo a lot of the same sentiments that Donna has shared already, but I'll add a few other things. So some. One part of the conversations we're having is just breaking silos across campuses as it stands. So one of the innovative ways that we're doing that and we're creating a blueprint for it, it seems very simple, but you'd be surprised how much it doesn't happen, whether it's at HBCUs or higher education institutions all over. But it is. So we created something called the Howard University Entrepreneurial Task Force. And that task force, it was in its infrastructure, started by a call from an associate provost who is one of our PIs, and also the dean of the business school, to other deans of the colleges and universities across campus, as well as some of the staff entities as well, and said, hey, if you have any entrepreneurial programs, courses, what have you, please send a representative to this, this monthly meeting. So we started that last November. So just exactly a year ago, from that very first meeting, we had an amazing amount of attendance from across the campus and uncovered, quite frankly, a lot of things we had no idea existed. Everything from, you know, from our law school to our College of Pharmacy, that there were actually entrepreneurial in fine arts. We have the Chadwick Boseman School of Fine Arts, the College of Fine Arts, rather, that we found out that there were entrepreneurial business classes being taught there and no one was connected. So in that very first meeting a year ago, we created a Entrepreneurship Week. And then that Entrepreneurship Week included things around tech transfer and other things to introduce the conversation. Because what is so interesting to me is how much people think entrepreneurship should only be within a school of business or is only within, you know, certain areas of research. Right. Very intensive research. And how there are a number of opportunities that wouldn't traditionally fit in, but people in, quite frankly, people just aren't even aware of it. Right. So there's still a lot of education that needs to happen. So that's a conversation that we're having. And even when we have. So we had a very successful entrepreneurship week when we launched the center. We actually used that entrepreneurship week in the spring of earlier this year as a lead up to our launch event in April. And part of that included a conversation around research, tech transfer and SBIR and other resources. Right. Because that's just not something that people are familiar with, a resource that, that folks are familiar with. But additionally, I think what's interesting to me is that even if you. There's still so many HBCUs that don't even have an office of tech transfer. We do, but then even if they do, there's still not the infrastructure in place at many universities to handle that process. Right. So Howard is one that. That is a priority. And there's been a number of things been put into place to continue to build on that and obtain additional resources. But one of the things that we're doing as a part of our national network that were created across all HBCUs is to help with that infrastructure thinking about not just best practices, but how can other institutions support that those efforts if there's something from a back office standpoint or what have you that your institution doesn't have, it seems very simple, but it is actually very. The implementation of certain things are just extremely complicated when you're still having antiquated systems. And again, not just at HBCUs, this is just across the board, but it is a conversation that is a high priority because it really changes the game, especially when you're shifting the thinking. And it's not really an innovative resource. But for communities that haven't really thought of it or haven't activated in the way that it could be activated, it is a new conversation. And so there's a lot of education that has to happen there.

Yeah, I love that what you're talking about is collaboration across the network. Right. So you hear quite often or many of us that work at HBCUs will make the statement that we're not a monolith. Right. We're not all the same. Our resources, our infrastructure, academic pursuits are not all the same. And so what I Appreciate about what you're saying about the center and the center. The work of the center is that it's not just happening at one institution, but it's happening across institutions. And how can you all develop a consortia of resources that can be applicable not just to Howard University or Morehouse or Morgan, but to HBCUs that perhaps don't have the same structure but have the same desire to support their students? Right. So thank you for sharing that. I'd like to just kind of go back to what we were talking about before around challenges and solutions. And we know that even within the domain of tech transfer and commercialization, one of the resources that is I, I'd say readily used if it's introduced appropriately, is the Small Business Innovation Research Grant. Right. The sbir. There's a question in the chat about to a comment that you made earlier, Donna, about how can government through the SBIR STTR help in the capital pursuit. Right. So we're, we're thinking about resources. We need funding opportunities. You know, you mentioned that they don't have to all have to come from venture capital. They can come from other areas, the sbir. So would you say, and this is the question is for both of you, would you say that these grants aid in helping to develop entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs innovations as a part of follow on funding? Right. In many cases it's used to help develop the commercialization path. But as additional resources, would you say that those are ones that you either recommend or what are some others if not?

Yeah, I mean, I'll jump in and I'd love to hear what, what Erin says. I mean, my answer is yes, but so the SBA has and all government agencies, not just through the sba, but if you look at the different government agencies, there's an enormous number of grant programs that are offered for innovators. The challenge is you don't know what you don't know. And if you're a rookie entrepreneur, it's pretty easy to go poke around, get very frustrated very quickly and give up. Right. And this is true of a lot of things in entrepreneurship. We always say entrepreneurship is best learned by doing. The problem is, is that to do it, you're actually in the thick of it. And they're high stakes decisions that you're making while you're doing it. Right. So it's not like learning basketball or you know, learning a new hobby, like you've quit your job and you're betting your family's savings and in cases you don't have a safety net to be supporting you. So learning by doing is maybe not our best approach to our number one most important economic activity. So there are incredible grant programs out there. They're hard to figure out how to navigate. They're hard to know which one you're a fit for. If you make the decision to apply, it's very hard to figure out how to put in a good application. And in many cases, the solution to that is to hire and pay for somebody to help you do that. Which again, who has the money to do that if you're starting from an under resourced perspective. So in I my research found, and we continue to believe this, that our national approach to entrepreneurship, while extraordinarily well intended, is an if we build it, they'll come approach. We've set a gigantic buffet of amazing stuff. But rookie entrepreneurs are standing in front of the buffet going, I don't know where to start. I don't know what to consume. And they're wasting cycles and time consuming the wrong things. And we're not getting the benefit of those ideas becoming fully commercialized because of that. So we have to shift from this sort of passive approach to an active approach. Which is why I love what Erin is doing with the center and the resources. Do we really want every entrepreneur to have to figure this out for themselves? Like, that's an enormous learning curve that every single person is going to have to go through. And we hear at the same time from government agencies that they have funding available that people aren't applying for. So, you know, that gap should tell us that our approach isn't working. And I'd love Erin's perspective on this.

Well, so thank you. And you know, it's not working. And I think there's some simple reasons why they aren't. And here are a couple. One, there are a lot of resources that, while well intended even to protect particular communities of entrepreneurs, never get there. Right. And there are a lot of barriers to sometimes how people get resources or even information. But before I'll even get to that and more specific around it, I want to talk about language. Donna and I have talked about this before and we've all talked about this in some of the other conversations, which is, you know, studies show that women and minority entrepreneurs don't identify themselves as entrepreneurs in the first place. Right. And so there's different languages that is used to even describe what they're doing. So to Donna's point about, you don't know what you don't know. If you're trying to Google for something and you're not using the right language around, you know, how to find a resource, you will never find it. Right. And so there's an issue around that. So this kind of is the point of that, the reason our center, even it was created and because some could say, well, there's other centers that have been created before, yes, but not with the intentionality, right. Of bringing together researchers with practitioners specifically. So some of the work that our center is funding, as a matter of fact, is one giving funding to faculty fellows at HBCUs to research black entrepreneurship specifically. Different barriers, different lenses around this work. And so we give out, we had our inaugural cohort for this academic year, and we actually just opened our.

Our.

New round of funding for faculty fellows, which are $10,000 grants to research the problem. And so that's one piece of it, right? Because I think there's still a question around information that is made available, is it culturally competent? Right. And then, and let's be honest, especially in government, whether that's on the federal side or local side and others, a lot of times these programs are created and they're sometimes super amazing, sometimes not so much because let's be honest, sometimes they're not created by people who are entrepreneurs themselves, are really are thoughtful around that. Even if they ask questions. It just sometimes the, you know, the intent is there, the positive intent is there, but there are barriers that are put in that make that prevent people from participating. Like, for example, for SBIR and some others, certain things you have to have a, you know, a researcher who's tied to your work. But if that's not common in your community or common to your work, I mean, it's just things like that, that it's like, where's somebody going to find that from or find that if that's just not in their network. The other thing is, and then we saw this with ppp, we saw this with other things where certain communities, these programs were built off of assumptions around relationships with banks, assumptions around information and education and other things. Right. And it just, you know, one of the things that our center is advocating for and it's really is following the heels of some other organizations who are doing similar work in this space is there are small business development centers and small business resource centers based on like women's business centers, minority, so forth, veterans, everything. But there's not any specific for black communities. Right. And so what happens sometimes is that I talk to entrepreneurs all the time. They have no idea the resources that are around them because they're not connected, they're not in those networks and they're not, they're not invited in. And even if they come in, there's not a welcoming space. You have CDFIs and others who receive, you know, federal funding. And quite frankly, a lot of the organizations that distribute that funding, when you look at their investment committees, they lack diversity. I mean, there's a lot of barriers just even to get these resources out. And so, you know, one of the things that we're pushing for are to create black business development centers. And we'll be piloting the first one at Howard University, which is really around connecting resources and organizations that are specifically supporting black entrepreneurs and to roll that out across the, the country because only just recently, the US Black Chamber created in the last, you know, less than two years the certification as a black owned business. Before you couldn't even, you couldn't even have that. Right. And so I don't, you know, for some reason, up until, you know, George Floyd's murder, you couldn't even as an organization or as an entrepreneur, identify yourself as focused on black entrepreneurs or as a black entrepreneur. And now what the US Black Chamber is doing by creating that certification and what we're doing by the work that we're creating, supporting and lifting up and giving a platform to, is saying that policy has to follow this even on a federal level where we start to have to have resources that are very specific to the black community. It can no longer be so broad that it doesn't. It never gets to black communities and to black entrepreneurs.

Yeah, you're getting lots of support in the chat, both of you, for your comments. And I think what you all are highlighting is that the challenges that you've mentioned and the ones that many of us are aware are, are far greater than any one person can tackle. Right. It really does require a community approach. It requires all of us with our unique gifts and talents, really pouring our resources together and pulling our resources together to tackle this unique problem and specific for HBCUs and other minority serving institutions. And so I'm really excited to hear about the work that each of you is doing individually, but collectively as a part of this larger network and community. And so to that, to highlighting that, I would love to just, just shift for a second to how do entrepreneurs, to your point, Erin, like, how do they, what do they need to do, if anything, for them to access these resources? Right. So we're talking about at HBCUs and other MSIs, so the assumption is that they have to be students, registered students on those campuses, and maybe not in Your case, Donna, but I'd love for you to chime in as well. But what are the inroads? Like how do they build community? Right. With the, the resources that you mentioned, how do they build connections with other entrepreneurs that might be on campuses? I think about to your point, Erin, about research teams, right? Like when you apply for an sbir, how do they build relationships? How do they get connected? And how do they utilize and benefit from the resources that are currently available when they don't know that they exist? And either one of you can take that question.

Go ahead, Donna. I'll jump in.

Sure. Well, I mean I can't, I can't say from a university perspective, but I can say from our perspective, you know, our programs were created through this lens of we know what the pro, we've studied the problems. Now let's take out a blank sheet of paper and reimagine this. If we aren't constrained by how it works today, what would we do differently? And there's a handful of things that are really core to that. So first is the point of, I think Erin, you mentioned this. If you're an entrepreneur or you're someone with an idea, you are not usually going to call yourself an entrepreneur. We found hands down across the board when we use the E word in our research, people would say, oh, I have an idea, here's an idea, I have an idea. And as soon as we would say the entrepreneur world word, they would say, oh, I'm not an entrepreneur. And I found myself saying if only there was a different word for what I'm talking about. Because what I'm talking about isn't just go create a venture capital backed tech company. I'm talking about being a social innovator, being an intrapreneur in your company, having an entrepreneurial mindset, being an entrepreneur, creating a social venture, a non profit in your community, the whole range of it. And so this is why we actually change the language. So we use the word builder instead of entrepreneur. We use the word buildership rather than entrepreneurship to change the mentality and the thinking about this, that we can apply these same skills to build new things. And those things can be a whole array of colorful, amazing things. The second thing is that this, if you build it, they will come has to stop. So if we take, you know, a city with the population of a million people in it, I challenge you to ask, how many unique visits do you have to your incubator, accelerator, coworking spaces in your city? It is a minuscule fraction of the Population of any city, right? So for context, the US funded 7,000 new VC backed companies last year in the US. 7,000. That's it. In a nation of hundreds of millions of people. So there's an order of magnitude more people out there with ideas. The problem is that they're not going to come to us. We have to go to them. So when you are recruiting for programs and offering opportunities and funding, our instinct is go promote that through the accelerator, go promote that through the VC funds, go promote that through the incubators and the coworking spaces. And certainly we should do that, but we should also go to the church community, the nonprofit community, the education community. We should look at the community as a network of networks and go, how do we make sure every network in this community is being touched by this opportunity, right? And that the stories we're telling in the language we're using, if I'm anyone in any one of those networks, I can look at it and go, I see myself there, right? That's not just like visually the pictures you show, it's the stories of the businesses you highlight, the kinds of companies you talk about, how you define sex, success, but it's also the words you use. Like we use the word scale. Scale implies unicorn, big, huge exit level growth. But what happens if we start using the word full potential now? Every venture matters because every venture can hit its full potential, right? So we've changed a lot of the language and the approach. And then the other key thing that we do is we, we believe that rookie entrepreneurs shouldn't have to struggle in silence and they shouldn't have to struggle alone, right? This whole learning curve concept is bullshit and we've got to do away with it. So we assign every builder in our program a venture studio team and that team is there to bridge the gap between what you know and what you can know. Just because you don't know it now doesn't mean you can't be good at it, right? And that, and we mistake those two things in our culture a lot. So when you are told to do something and you don't do it well, we tell you you're not good at it well. No, you just don't know how to do it yet. And it turns out pitching, pitch decks, raising capital, all of those things, those are learned skills and they should not be the on ramp to entrepreneurship because if you don't do them well, you lose precious few opportunity, right? To get capital, to get access to these top tier programs. So we have to look at all these obstacles and say let's not just chip away at them, let's blow them up because they're, they're self created obstacles based on how we have decided as a society to build ecosystems. And a lot of what we've decided while well intentioned is not working. And we're all about just starting over. So that's how we approach it. And I know it's not obviously the only way to approach it, but it's working extremely well in terms of, you know, attracting a diverse array of people and businesses and ideas and ventures. And it's beautiful to see what happens when you get people from all walks of life coming together and building together because it turns out we actually can build together. And it, it's probably one of the only few things we can do as a society well together today.

So I love your no nonsense approach to solving problems. Excuse me. So we have about five minutes left. I've been taking some of the questions from the chat, but I have one final question and maybe Erin will. Excuse me. Close us out. What do you want people to know, participants to know about the innovations that come out of institutions like Howard University and other HBCUs and MSIs. What's important for us to know?

So I want to jump back to the other question for just two seconds to say that how people find out about things is very critical. Right. And I think that we need to be really thoughtful around creating information and welcoming spaces, using language. We kind of talked about that already. But it's also just to put a shout out to what we're building at our center because again, we're brand spanking new. We just, even though the funding came in 2021, I was just hired last year and we just launched this spring. But one of the things that we are creating is a national online resour center that's by the end of the grant is the, you know, using all this research and data to create so a very customized effort. Because how do you, you know, scale technical assistance is. So we want to get to the point that entrepreneurs can go online and say based on where I live, the industry that I'm in, the gender, whatever the qualifications are for funding and that what's available to me, what are the resources around me. And it's customized. Right. And there have been a number of efforts around that, but a lot of them have not included gender and race in it. And they also don't scale necessarily internationally because sometimes the resources are not actually near you and you have to be open minded to what that might look like or reapply in an innovative way. Resources that don't clearly identify you as a candidate. Right. Source. But to, to answer your question around what innovations are coming out of HBCUs and the things that we're doing and really what how I'd like to close it out and say what really my ask is also of those listening in is a few different things. One is that innovation can come from anywhere. And I think that too often people think it's in the school of business or it's in, you know, in health innovations or whatever. Right. Like it's amazing that somebody might have a personal situation in their life that all sudden of a sudden that makes them a subject matter expert on something to solve a very real problem. So we need to make things accessible. We need to change our perspective around who qualifies to be an innovator and an entrepreneur. Because there's so much data that shows that, as Donna pointed out, visualization is important. Even the images that we put on our websites and how we communicate and welcome people into spaces virtually and in person and the language we use all makes a difference. There is so much, there's so many innovations that are sitting on the shelf at HBCUs because they have been under resourced and have not had the infrastructure and support to get them out the door, which would solve like many things. If you can solve for the most under resourced and under supported communities, you really do solve for all right. So thus there are so many opportunities at these institutions to solve major problems and even it just, you know, if you want to be, you know, capitalist about it, right. That at the end of the day that actually make a lot of money because they're there. I think sometimes there is an assumption that the products and innovations at HBCUs are niche market products and services and not mainstream market and don't have huge market opportunity. And that's just simply not true. And so my ask here is one that related to our center. I don't want people to assume that we're a fully funded center. We were given some seed capital to start, some general operating funds to hire staff. But so much of what we do still needs to be funded and supported. Our entrepreneurs still need to be funded and supported. So please be an ambassador for our work wherever you are and get in touch with us. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find our center on Howard's website, and also our regional centers. But it really does take all of us to get involved. As we shared earlier about collaboration and community and Community doesn't mean just, you know, the black community supporting black entrepreneurs. We all have a hand in this, in supporting not just black entrepreneurs, but also minority entrepreneurs in general and women entrepreneurs, who continue to still not get a fair share of the marketplace when it comes to funding, support, and resources.

Thank you for that, Donna. Any closing thoughts before we conclude our session for today?

No, I'm just going to echo what Erin said, and I'm super excited at how Erin and Howard are approaching this in terms of the network approach. Right. I mean, we can actually do a lot more if we all figure out how to work together, because this benefits. Entrepreneurship is the number one most important thing we as a country can be doing, not just from an economic standpoint, but also a social standpoint. Imagine the problems that we could be solving. But by the way, the process of learning how to be an entrepreneur and doing it in community is also, I think, how we're going to tackle our democracy problems at all. So I plus one, everything that Erin said, and I'm grateful to be part of the conversation. Awesome.

Well, thank you both again. Thank you to the SBA for hosting this summit. Thank you to our participants, and enjoy the rest of the summit and your day.

Thank you for having us.

Yes. Thank you.

Bye.