“Everyone said no,” he told NPR in 2020. “Meanwhile, I watched other people who fit a different profile get money thrown at them. Those VCs were ignorant and short-sighted … the only thing I could attribute it to was that I was Black.”
Yet there are high-profile Black entrepreneurship success stories. They include Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson, Daymond John, an investor on the reality TV series Shark Tank, and the thousands of Black startup founders running innovative businesses across the United States right now.
To better understand the intersection of race and entrepreneurship, we studied the experiences of successful Black entrepreneurs in the U.S., as shared on NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast. The challenges Black entrepreneurs face are well documented, so we focused our research on a different question: How does someone’s identity as an entrepreneur intersect with their racial identity?
