Black Ideas Matter Too: Antler
It has been almost five years since my piece Black Ideas Matter went semi-viral and introduced me to the tech world. That piece helped me get featured in Blavity, Epoch Times, Black Enterprise, and many other independent publications. Back then I was much more angry. I think I was depressed but I did not know it at the time. In 2015 founders of color only received about .05% of all startup investments (today that number is 1% lol). And Intel had just started a diversity fund to help minority and women entrepreneurs. I got a meeting with them and they passed on me because they said they only invested in companies that are ready for Series B and I had just launched. My point in writing Black Ideas Matter was to explain to Intel that we will never get to Series B if we can not get investments at the pre/seed level. But I recently spent the last 9 weeks in a business program named Antler where they actually provide you with a very small pre-seed check. And if you thought the Intel story was insightful; just wait until you finish this one.
Disclosure: I reached out to the CEO of Antler before I wrote this. We spoke on the phone this weekend. Magnus is a professional businessman and has shown me nothing but respect. Unfortunately, he and I do not see the world the same.
Antler is a global business program and their business thesis is pretty simple. Get many smart people together and give them $6,000 to start a business in nine weeks. And if you are able to validate your business in those nine weeks, they will invest $100,000 at a $1M valuation. They make money by selling your shares when your company starts to scale. In theory this is a great opportunity for someone like me because Antler says their investment decision is based on primarily the team and then the idea. They just want to see how far you can go to validate your idea. I was excited to be a part of such an innovative program until the first week of the program started.
There were nearly 100 people in my cohort. The demographic breakdown was similar to most tech communities; white-male dominated, a few women, a few first generation Americans, and a couple of inner city African-Americans. During the first week of the program I developed a reputation for being “authentic”. And let me tell you, if you are one of two African-American men in a 100 person cohort, the last thing you want to be known as is authentic. In fact, during the first week we went out for drinks and someone drunkenly admitted that the reason people in the cohort did not like me was because I was always right. But I was never trying to be “right” I was simply speaking my truth whenever I spoke. Here is an example. On the first full day of the program I participated in a group project with a cohort member who had told everyone he sold two billion dollar companies. Let’s call him Gunman. Everyone was excited to have Gunman in the cohort so they started asking me questions about him. Instead of giving a safe answer like “He’s cool” . . . I decided to be truthful. For some reason Gunman scared me. He reminded me of the main character in the movie, American Psycho. During the first group project I got into a verbal dispute with Gunman and I peacefully asked him if he could not speak to me for the rest of the program. When I said this to him he looked at me with the scariest set of eyes that I have ever seen. So on week one I was known to most people as the authentic African-American man who had issues with the “most qualified member of the cohort” . . . Gunman.
I sent an email to the Antler staff telling them about my experiences during the first week. I felt like Kanye West after he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech when no one liked him. The staff and so many other members of the cohort started to shun me. I did not care but I was confused. No one liked me because I was truthful about my experience with Gunman, the superstar of the program. It felt really weird. I had a meeting with the program director about the email I had sent and before I shared any details, I asked him what he thought of Gunman. He replied “Gunman is amazing. He is the most qualified person we have in this cohort.” To which I decided never to mention Gunman again to anyone else in the program.
During the next week rumors began to spread that there was a member of our cohort who was a “White Supremacist”. Let’s call him Madman. I’m not sure if Madman identified himself as a White Supremacist but that’s how many people at Antler described him. To me, Madman was just an isolated dude that did not like being around people. I did not have any problems with him because I am also someone who loves to be alone, so I thought I understood him. But apparently Madman had been sharing many non-conventional ideas in the program’s Slack channel. So if dealing with Gunman was not enough, I also had to deal with the “White Supremacist”, Madman. I had never been in the presence of an open “White Supremacist” so I decided to do what any African-American in my situation would do, I tried to befriend him. People made jokes about him shooting up the program and I thought if he and I were friends then he would not want to kill me. But if you thought people hated me because of my opinion of Gunman; they hated me even more for trying to befriend Madman. But I stopped speaking to Madman after he had been going around debating that white people were genetically smarter than black people.
Despite all of this, I still had to build a business. My background is in online communication. I spent the last ten years of my life building new online communication experiences. The most successful product was The Blast App. In 2017 I won a $50,000 grant from the city of Newark NJ to build a safety feature in The Blast App to help protect women and children from street attacks and domestic abuse. So while at Antler I decided to build a new communication experience that we called Orrrg. I had an ambitious goal to replace sms and email. The business model was to build services that community leaders will pay for. But I still needed a cofounder to make this happen and because of obvious reasons, I did not get along or speak with too many people at Antler. And the people I did speak too were already working on projects. So to make me feel comfortable, Antler allowed me to bring a high school friend of mine into the program as my cofounder. My partner Aaron Smith was the third employee at the first ever union for Uber and Lyft drivers where he managed a community of 100,000 drivers. And he also has managed or helped manage over 25 political campaigns nationwide. When Aaron and I met with T, the leader of the Antler NYC program and Antler partner, he told us that Antler will invest $100,000 in our business if we focused on building community management software. In fact, he told us that Antler will be our first client. With the assurance that we will get the investment, we pivoted. We no longer were the ambitious founders who wanted to replace sms and email. We were founders of community management software and our only job at that point was to go out and find community leaders that will validate our business and agree to be a customer once we launch.
We had two more meetings with T before the program ended. The first was when Aaron had decided to open his network and find the people he thought might be able to help us validate the idea. We had meetings with union leaders, high school principals, the Assembly Speaker (third most powerful person in NJ politics), and Mayor Christine Dansereau from Roselle NJ. When met with T again to update him on our validation and progress, he specifically told us to focus only on Roselle, NJ. (Fun fact: Roselle, NJ was the first village in the world lit by Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb.) So Aaron and I spent the next couple of weeks working directly with Roselle to fully understand their problem and to create a business model. And after two weeks we realized the problem that most municipalities face today is fragmented communication. They do not have an effective and efficient way to share information with their residents and constituents. And after speaking with local government leaders we realized that all 566 municipalities in New Jersey have this same issue. And we figured out a business model that will earn us $7.5M a year if all municipalities in New Jersey adopt our software. Our plan was to scale throughout the entire country. We met with T one final time. A meeting that was supposed to last for forty-five minutes only ended up lasting less than five minutes. We gave him an update and asked him for advice on pitching Orrrg. He seemed stressed and he said “say the problem, show an example of the problem, show your solution, explain what the MVP will look like, explain how much money you can make, and then explain how you will use Aaron’s connections to get municipalities to use your software.” The meeting was over in less than five minutes. The other members of the Antler staff and members of the investment crew blew us off pretty often but T was pretty authentic and straight forward with us. Our biggest complaint to T was the conflicting advice that we received from the “mentors” of Antler. He assured us that if we followed his advice, then Antler would invest. He was the head honcho so we made a strategic decision to follow his suggestions.
November 18 6:38 AM (Week 6 of 9)
I woke up to an anonymous email that read;
“I am a resident of ___ and understand Mr. Gunman is working with you now at a company called Antler? Are you aware of his reputation? He grew up rich, entitled, got into a fight with a police officer and paid off the judge to get his violent felony conviction written off before joining your firm. I kindly ask you do not share this private matter as Gunman is known to file many lawsuits.”
Attached to this email were two links with articles to Gunman’s New York arrest and court case. The article read “It is alleged that the defendant possessed two loaded and operable semi-automatic pistols, three large capacity ammunition feeding devices, and various Kung Fu stars and metal knuckles.”
. . . . . . .
I’m too exhausted to finish this but I was right about Gunman all along. I have so much more information but I just decided that I’m over it. But imagine building a business around Gunman and Madman, and then being assured that you will get investment if you pivot your business and strategy, then not getting the investment because they did not think you could actually pull it off. When I spoke to the CEO he admitted to not being aware of anything that went on in the NYC program. He told me to get more traction and come back in a few months. I’m over it. To undestand my ehaustion, check out my latest piece Some White Men Hate Me and I Don’t Know Why.
