This is my life lesson on how to manifest your destiny by relying on your true self.  

Is it possible for people to rehabilitate preconceived notions and love one another based on the context of their character? If adrenaline were addictive could the pursuit of the satisfying feeling of privilege be an addiction?  After watching my 5th YouTube video of white men and women unnecessarily attacking unsuspecting individuals, I was inspired to put pen to paper, and write the hypothesis: the biased thoughts and habits of privilege are an addiction.   A bias is a preconceived notion, But how could we prove biases behind privilege (the thoughts and actions) are not addictive?  It’s time for a scientific-based psychological approach to change the root cause (the origin) of the behavior (effect).  

In classic founder fashion, I said to myself, there has to be a better way.  There has to be a better way to help people revere Black people instead of fear them and so we set out to prove this hypothesis false. And that’s how the Bias Rehab Center was born. It is not a registered center of therapeutic treatment, instead, Bias Rehab Center contracts licensed clinicians and inclusion professionals to enterprise customers seeking help, while teaching people how to transform to an inclusive lifestyle. Outside our trademarked movie-themed program, The 11 Step Program, Bias Rehab Center employs a number of digital tools to push messages of inclusion in ways that mentally, emotionally, and psychologically reach audiences. 

The center’s mission is to promote the adoption of an inclusive lifestyle.  We teach people how to adopt an inclusive lens on each aspect of their life.  Both personally and professionally. And the bias rehab center is already making a name for itself! 

I decided to write the Top 25 VCs based on the data found in The Black Founders List.  Venture capital firms on the list had written the least amount of checks to Black founders around the world.  Therefore I decided those are the investors that are least worthy of time from Black and other founders of color and I was not the only one who thought so. The Top 25 VCs Least Likely to Invest in Founders of Color was one way of pushing our agenda forward and challenging the status quo with data. 

According to a recent Crunchbase story, investments in founders of color have gone down since this summer’s reemergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.  The common-sense expectation of Black office hours, Black Pitch Competitions would be that funding to people of color would have gone up after watching the horrific murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Aubrary on television.  But that was not the case. What actually happened was even less funding went to founders of color than before the murders. 

If even fewer checks were written to founders of color than before the murders then that means founders of color wasted even more of their valuable time meeting with investors who had no intention of writing a check.  Present company included. 

Rather than go into 2021 with a 2020 frame of mind, I made an executive decision.  I decided that it was time for founders of color to take command of the state and control of their destiny.

The article got a lot of attention!  I expected it would.  But what surprised me was the type of attention it got and thus the reason for writing this follow-up article. I was expecting to get angry emails from people defending the list of investments they made into founders of color, but my first two responses were from MassChallenge and Tech Coast Angels!  

The exact words they used were “appreciate you shining a light on the venture ecosystem's lack of diversity” and “not disputing the data or importance of the article”.  

Amongst those in the culture, the article was a huge success!  Printed in Startup Pill and CultureBanx, when the article was printed in Afro Tech it caught the eye of Investor and celebrity Baron David who retweeted it with words of support!  Baron agrees with the idea behind the article and to stop wasting time with piranha venture capitalists pretending to be interested in making a dream a reality.  Overall, at the end of the day, the lesson I learned from this experience was that I could manifest greatness if I was my true self.  In short, do you boo-boo.  Do you!