Juneteenth, BLM, Startups & Equality ✊🏾
👋🏽 Welcome to Doing Well by Doing Good: The New Startup Model, a newsletter highlighting the startups that are profitable with a purpose.
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Global challenges are ever present: poverty, hunger, climate change, and so many others. But one problem that spans all of these worldwide is inequality and unequal access.
In the US today, Juneteenth, commemorates the celebration of June 19, 1865 — the day all slaves were finally freed within the US. But it’s also a day to reflect on the remaining inequalities we still have here in the US and around the world.
In recent weeks the BLM protests sparked by the murder of yet another innocent Black person, George Floyd, have called attention to the ongoing inequality in the treatment of the Black community.
This movement, sparked by the police brutality and the broken criminal justice system in the US, is only one of the many systemic inequalities experienced daily by the Black community around the world.
In the fight for Equality, individuals and companies both have their role to play
Individuals play a key role in changing governmental systems which perpetuate these inequities and we can all do our part to chip in. Here are a few links I found helpful:
Great blog post on how to be an ally is a great starting point
The Black Lives Matter website has the latest info which you can subscribe to for continual updates on ways to help
Companies play a key role through their actions and words. Global companies from Google to Johnson & Johnson and everyone in between are taking a stand and doing their part to support the movement through words, money, and action.
In this post I wanted to highlight a few growing for-profit startups who are fighting for a more level playing field every day and are taking a stand to create a more equitable world directly through the products and services they provide.
For each company, I’ll keep it simple by focusing on just 4 things: mission, product / service, doing well (how they make money), and doing good (how they contribute to equalizing the playing field).
Andela
Andela is well-funded VC-backed startup focused on building a better remote engineering team experience. They train world class engineering talent from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt, and Ghana and provide them opportunities to contribute to remote engineering teams all over the world.
Mission: Solving the global tech talent shortage through training and job opportunities for engineers from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt and Ghana.
Product / Service: End-to-end remote engineering management and training process to help development teams within companies deliver great products.
Doing Well: Andela makes money by charging between $50,000 to $120,000 per developer, passing on about a third of that to the developer and utilizing the rest to support company operations. Each developer hired and new project delivered means more access for the developers.
Doing Good: Andela provides training and development services to aspiring developers in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt, and Ghana. This levels the playing field and barrier to entry for African engineers into the global technology ecosystem.
tEQuitable
tEQuitable is a seed stage startup founded in 2017 and backed by Y Combinator focused on building an equitable workplace through their platform. As mentioned on their website, they are a tech-enabled Ombuds practice focused on arbitrating issues of bias, discrimination, or harassment in the workplace.
Mission: Help companies be more inclusive and create a work culture that works for everyone
Product / Service: Platform to create a more equitable workplace by addressing issues of bias, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace
Doing Well: Employers’ HR departments purchase a subscription to the platform. As more and larger companies adopt the platform their revenue grows along with their ability to affect more and more individuals.
Doing Good: Bias, discrimination and harassment disproportionately affect minority populations within the workforce. By contributing to alleviating these challenges, tEQuitable creates a more welcoming and inclusive workplace.
Valence
Valence Community is a seed stage global social network for Black professionals founded in 2019 and growing rapidly. They are creating a global network of professionals with many of the same advantages of LinkedIn and GirlBoss, but with an additional key focus on highlighting the successful Black business executives and professionals to inspire the next generation.
Mission: Unlock the global combined power of Black professionals to create massive economic and social progress
Product / Service: Professional social network for the Black professionals to connect, network, find mentors, and jobs.
Doing Well: This community has multiple ways to make money as the network grows through paid ads, job posting, and value added subscriptions. While that may not be the main focus currently, it’s clear that as the network grows, monetization grows commensurate with the ability to do good.
Doing Good: This network provides access to a traditionally underrepresented minority in professional circles to mentorship, jobs, and networking opportunities, helping to bridge the gap in representation. In fact, their website even mentions their key value to “close the racial wealth gap”.
Equality cannot be solved in an instant, but startups are constantly finding new ways to solve tough global challenges like this and for-profit DWDG startups are one of the most scalable ways to do it. While I can’t highlight all of these startup in this email, I look forward to finding more along the way and sharing them with you.
Thanks for reading!
Happy Juneteenth,
Anand