Kimberly Bryant Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015

Good afternoon everyone. Good afternoon everyone! I'm going to need a little bit of audience participation, especially in a room full of female founders, so I'm thanking you for that in advance. It's definitely a pleasure to be here with you all this afternoon. I actually just ran over from Mozilla Headquarters because we're doing our very first leadership team summit. We have folks here from as far away as New York City to Memphis to the Bay Area, and so it's been a pretty hectic week. But this was really a highlight for me, to have an opportunity to speak to an audience such as this, which are other female founders that I feel a really strong connection to in our shared past.

So, thank you for allowing me to chat with you a little bit about our story. Black Girls Code was founded right here in the Bay Area, and this picture shows what we like to call our tech divas. We think that we are really here put on this planet to design the future of technology for women and girls of color. We started in April 2011, and we really focus our work around creating opportunities for these girls ages 7 to 17 to come in and learn about technology in a very culturally sensitive and welcoming atmosphere, which pairs them with mentors that look a little bit like them.

Our mission is to empower these young women to go beyond just being consumers of technology and become the creators of it. Our vision is to train 1 million girls of color to code by the year 2040 and to become the de facto Girl Scouts of Technology. I don't know what the Girl Scouts think about that, but we like it!

When we started in 2011, it was just about the beginning of the whole learn-to-code movement. It was even the beginning of the learn-to-code movement for adults. Only a few organizations were really focused on teaching youth about coding and technology. Since that time, I think it’s no surprise to all of us in this room that the field has really exploded. We have organizations like Code.org, Girls Who Code, and Code Academy, all focusing on teaching young women and young men how to code and how to really break into the technology space.

But despite this exponential growth we've seen in the area, Black Girls Code remains the only organization that has a singular focus on reaching girls from underrepresented communities. Thank you for that! Since we started, we've really seen our growth explode, not just here in the Bay Area but across the U.S. and abroad. We currently have seven chapters in the U.S., as well as a chapter in Johannesburg, South Africa, and we've reached about 3,000 girls to date. We continue to grow.

So, when I tell you those little pieces of snippets of my founder story, it seems like we have it all under control and we know exactly what we are doing, but that is not true. When I was getting ready to give this presentation, I was asked what exactly they wanted me to talk about. The folks at YC said, "Just tell me your founder's story." These are other women, and they would love to hear that. And that really made me a little bit nervous because I fundamentally believe that any person that's a startup founder—excuse my French—I don't know if we know what the hell we're doing. We're just trying to figure this out and see what works, and that's exactly what’s been our past.

So, as I thought about what I would talk to you about, I really didn’t want to just talk at you. I just want to have a conversation, woman to woman. I don't know if there are any men here, or girlfriend to girlfriend, and tell you a little bit about the lessons I’ve learned along the way, and some of them I would say are the hard-knock lessons.

I'm going to tell you a couple of things. Some of them are pulled from this great resource that I would recommend called Good to Great by Jim Collins, and I think it has a lot of tidbits that will help any entrepreneur that's starting on this path or in the midst of it. But I also thought, yeah, it’s been a long month, and I need more help than that. Good to Great is great, but that's not going to cut it.

I was like, I need to call on the ancestors above to help me figure out something to say to these women that will give them a little bit of inspiration on their way. For me and our program with Black Girls Code, one of the things that is so very important to us is mentors—really having those mentors and role models that give you the tips to help you get across your heels. For me, growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I had this one mentor that I know many of you probably know and love. I really felt that throughout my life, she always had the answer.

So today, I'm going to tell you a few tips from Good to Great, but I’m also going to pull from the book Mother Oprah. So, Mother Oprah has an answer for anything you want to figure out in your life, and she has been with me all along this path. I'm going to start this journey with these tips, using a little from this and a little from that.

The very first thing that I think was one of the lessons I've learned is to do what matters most. In his book, Jim Collins calls this defining your core values. But what does Mother Oprah say? Mother Oprah says, "Always take a stand for yourself, your values, because you’re defined by what you stand for." For Black Girls Code, it was pretty obvious what we stood for from the beginning. We were looking at this space in 2011 and saw that it wasn’t very diverse. The issue of diversity inclusion was something that not a lot of people were talking about, but we knew fundamentally one thing that we hold true even today: if technology is designed mostly by males, who make up only half of the population, we're missing out on the innovation, the solutions, and the creativity that a broader pool of talent can bring to the table.

So, our whole work, everything that we do, is really grounded in that belief, that vow, and that focus: that this work about technology is more than just teaching kids to code. It really is an issue of social equity. It really is about equalizing and leveling the playing field for everyone, especially women and girls of color. This is a little bit more like what we think the industry should look like. Look at those faces, and look at that fashion! Do you see that? This is what we feel the new leaders in technology should really look like. Our goal is to keep that value and focus in everything that we do.

Another key point that Jim Collins brings out in his book is really owning your purpose. Purpose is so important to the work that you're going to do once you identify what your core values are. What does Mother Oprah say a little bit differently? She says, "The work of your life is to discover your purpose and then get on with the business of living it out."

Now, this is one that’s very interesting for me personally because I always say that I consider myself an accidental social entrepreneur. By that, I mean that when I started this path in 2011, trust me when I tell you, I had no idea I would be running a nonprofit four years later. I really was just a mother of a very interesting, really different kid—a daughter who was interested in gaming and computer science. I was looking for something to get her to be a little bit more productive than spending every weekend at GameStop buying the new games. I didn’t know this is the path that it would lead me down.

But when I really looked at the industry, some things were really shocking to me at that time in 2011. I wasn’t really aware how underrepresented women and girls were in the technology industry. When I received my degree in computer science right at the end of the 80s—look at this chart—that is the peak. So, right about 1989, I was able to receive my degree in electrical engineering and computer science at a peak moment for women. Women at that time received about 36 or 35 percent of degrees in computer science. Since that time, the numbers plummeted, and it’s now only about 12 or 14 percent for women. But for women of color, that number falls off a cliff even further than what you see on the chart. African American women receive only 3 percent of the degrees in computer science, and for Latinas and Native Americans, it's less than 1 percent.

So, these numbers were really a wake-up call for me, and I knew at that moment in time I would have to divert my path, which was originally to start a for-profit startup company, to really doing something to change those numbers—to change the reality for my daughter and to create a more ideal future for her and girls that look like her—and that's the work of Black Girls Code. Thank you! We are really, really focused and see our purpose as changing the face of technology. We say that a lot, but we truly mean it because we really feel that the more diversity of thought will also be both a business imperative and a social justice imperative for the industry itself and for our nation as a whole.

That’s embedded in the purpose of our work. The next thing that Jim Collins mentions that I think is important is the BHAG—the big hairy audacious goal. Finding that big audacious goal and setting a stake in the ground for what you're going to do. One of the things he says a lot is that if that goal is not big enough to make you a little bit scared, it’s probably not big enough. For Black Girls Code, our goal is really focused on the work that we’re doing.

So now, it should really find a good quote from Oprah, Mother Oprah, for this, but I did find a great picture. But, as we all know, there’s nothing that Oprah does that’s not big. Everything that she does is big. For Black Girls Code, our big audacious goal is to train 1 million girls of color to code by the year 2040. We picked the year 2040 intentionally because that's the year when the demographics in the U.S. will shift, so that those folks that we consider minorities now will become the majority. Our focus is really to prepare this generation of young people to move into positions of leadership, as well as to have the skills to be competitive in a changing landscape.

That was just a picture of many of the places that we've been to and many of the girls. We haven't quite reached a million yet, but that’s the focus. Secondly, I really love this one! I love it a lot! Have a reckless disregard for the impossible. This one is very near and dear to my heart, simply because it certainly took 25 years to recognize that I really wasn’t that great of a corporate employee—it just wasn’t my thing—because I’m really one of those who likes to kind of break the rules. So if you tell me I can’t do something, that’s pretty much a good indicator for me to try to prove you wrong.

That is exactly what you need if you're going to be a startup founder. One of the examples that I would use in this case would be a use case for Black Girls Code would be our Summer of Code that we started in 2012. Now, in 2012, an interesting thing about Black Girls Code is that we were still really new. In 2011, we had one pilot with about 15 students, and that was how we ended 2011. So as we moved into 2012 and started to have more workshops and more girls coming into our classes, we began to move into a period of growth—a really fast growth.

But we didn’t really think we were having the impact that we wanted, and we were only here in the Bay Area. So we were sitting around one day and had a bright idea: why don’t we take this thing on the road? We’re going to take Black Girls Code on the road, and we’re going to go to six cities. Oh, by the way, we’re going to do this only in like one and a half or two months during the summer and we’re going to reach 200 girls.

Now, that might not sound like a big goal when I told you we’ve reached 3,000 students, but at that time, the largest class we had ever reached was about 30. So we were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna reach 200 girls by the end of summer.” Again, big audacious goal! But also, it was something that we didn’t really think was necessarily going to be possible, but we didn’t care, because at that time, it was only myself and one employee and we thought if we did not get this work done, no one was going to do it.

So we didn’t care about having a reckless disregard, and we started on our path. As we were going on, doing all this work, we did our first workshop in Atlanta. We walked into the room—wow, there were like 85 students in there! We didn’t know what to do! It looked fantastic; they really liked this thing. We better get it together! I told y’all I’m going to be really honest—that’s true! So we were like, okay, well, let’s go to the next city. We went to ship—went to Chicago, same thing. We went to Detroit, same thing. New York—we ended up, at the end of the summer, not only reaching 200 students, but we reached 1,000! Yes!

That’s when we knew that we really had something—that we could have an even greater impact by migrating our organization from a very hyper-locally focused organization to one with chapters and utilizing the very large pool of volunteers we had to execute this work in each and every city. And if that wasn’t enough, in 2012 when we came into 2013, we were like, we’re going to do it again, but this time we’re going to reach even more girls, going to reach 2,000. And, oh by the way, we’re probably going to want to crowd fund for that, and we’re going to raise a hundred thousand dollars!

Reckless disregard with only two people figuring out—we could do that! But we did! We reached that goal; we raised a hundred thousand dollars! Even when many people thought we wouldn’t do it, we actually raised about $125,000, and most people thought we wouldn’t do it. So that really set our organization up for exponential growth, with all the relationships and all of the goodwill and branding we received from setting these goals and having a reckless disregard for our potential supposed ability to meet it.

One of the things that I think, if I could tell you any one thing that keeps me up at night, is building a great team. One of the things that Oprah says about building a great team is this: surround yourself only with people who are going to take you higher. One of the things that Jim Collins says in Good to Great is that starting a company or running a company is a bit like driving a bus. You need a driver—you are the driver; we are the drivers as the CEO or founders—but it’s our responsibility to find the right people, the key people to put in those seats.

For me, founding a team or really finding the right folks to be on my team has been one of the hardest things I’ve done as a startup founder because everyone wants to ride on the bus, but hardly anyone wants to do all the work that is required to get the job done. But it's key for us as founders to be able to sort through finding the persons that have the same vision, purpose and drive, and are the right fit for the company because it’s a make-or-break situation.

I think another thing that I struggled with as a founder is that generally, we come in with the ideas. We are like the type-A number one person—"Auntie"—but really, to succeed as an organization, you have to hire people that are better than you, smarter than you, more knowledgeable than you, better marketers than you, better salespeople than you—everything across the board. You cannot be the best person on your team if you want your team to grow and succeed.

Today we’re coming too close to getting there in terms of building our team, and this is a team that we just took this picture of yesterday. They came from all over the country—different occupations—to help grow the mission of Black Girls Code.

This one I always really like to bring home in terms of really knowing the end in mind or keeping the end in mind—envisioning the future before you get there. One of the ways that Oprah describes this is to create the highest, grandest vision for your life and then let every single step move you in that direction. Now, while this is a personal goal, I would say this is the same for a company.

When you're building your vision, it's important to understand where you want to see your company at the end of the line, when you've reached the goal, when you've reached your mission. For Black Girls Code, yesterday we did a little exercise and we created a future vision looking out to 2020. This was one of the headlines that we thought we would see in 2020, and it’s just a headline that is one of our aspirational goals. These three students are currently in their 13 and 14-year-old age range in our program, but this is what we think the headline is going to look like underneath their picture in a few years: “High-tech startup company founded by former members of Black Girls Code.”

That's what I’m really looking for, and that's what the future vision is for our organization—to see a room filled with coders like this who are formerly from Black Girls Code based on the work and the impact we’ve been able to do with the organization. So, setting the goal in mind and having that throughout our conversations as a team is what keeps us moving when the times are rough and things are hard.

Last but not least, this one is really one that I think we've all heard before. It could be a big cliché. If you had asked me this four years ago, I would have told you that it is a cliché: “Follow your passion.” Oh my God! Oprah says that all the time, and I love her like no other, but it was getting on my nerves. But then it happened to me! I stumbled, literally, across this work—something that I would do even if I didn’t get paid for it.

The way that Oprah describes this passion and being driven by this passion is: if you don’t know what your passion is, realize that one reason for your sole existence on earth is to find it. I feel very lucky—really lucky—to be placed in this space, in this time, even in this body, to be able to drive for this work. It truly is my life passion, and I have no doubt in my mind that this is what I was put on this earth to do. If I could tell you any one thing, I would tell you to find what your passion is, then put all of your energy—all of your spiritual energy, all your passion energy, your technological energy, your intellectual energy—into focusing on that passion! Then, all the other questions will be answered for you. Thank you!