The online obstacle : a study of African-American enterprise on the Internet

Abstract

Iconic Web companies based in the US, along the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have exhibited some racial/ethnic diversity among their founders, yet there appears to be a dearth of African-Americans in the group. In this thesis I conduct an empirical investigation into the potential existence of a set of impediments to blockbuster success for African-American founded consumer Internet companies -- or an "online obstacle," as I have chosen to term the condition. In utilizing a short-form survey and telephone interviews to collect the thoughts and opinions of 16 black entrepreneurs who have made at least one attempt at launching a consumer Internet start-up, I document three recurrent themes. First, there do not appear to be enough African-American graduates of engineering and computer science disciplines to facilitate creation of promising Internet ventures that could achieve blockbuster status. Second, black Web entrepreneurs by-and-large have not achieved the heights of capital infusion that seems to be necessary to transition a concept from "successful" to "blockbuster." Lastly, African-American founders of consumer Internet companies do not in any significant numbers appear to live and play in the start-up ecosystem that is Silicon Valley, inhibiting development of relationships and access to resources needed to ascend to blockbuster status online. Overall, my findings suggest that the online obstacle I seek to identify is very much a collection of barriers that has a direct correlation to issues black entrepreneurs have spoken about for decades, suggesting that any revealed online obstacle very much lacks an online origin.