Black@ Launchpad

Our incubator and approach to building companies rely on 4 pillars:

• Communication and storytelling

• Social Capital

• Collaboration

• Technical Prowess

The most successful businesses are well-capitalized, connect clearly with their customers, and create relationships with partners to accelerate growth. Our approach for our incubator focuses on reinforcing the skills needed to help participating founders ideate, iterate, and initialize.

We execute on those four pillars in the following ways:

Communication and Storytelling

Communication is the key to all that we will do. Founders will be trained to speak confidently as experts in their field. We will also arm them with techniques to simplify their business presentations to an audience/individual who may not be as familiar with the problem they are trying to solve. Along with oral communication, we will practice written communication. Written communication will be the main way founders engage with investors, as those investors are looking for ways to track the company's progress. By focusing on writing updates that keep all stakeholders abreast of new developments — and setbacks — within the company, we will help founders create habits that demonstrate consistency, transparency, and clarity.

When it comes to fundraising it all comes down to storytelling, acquiring customers, and hiring a company’s first employees. Before there is a product or revenue, all there is to sell is the story. We will help founders craft their stories to be engaging while remaining authentic. Throughout the program, we will focus on public speaking and customer discovery. The emphasis on storytelling will help founders gain early customers and early investors before they have “traction.”

Social Capital

When it comes to historically underrepresented founders — LGTBQIA+, women, people of color, and Black founders — raising the “family and friends” round can be challenging and often feel impossible. We will help founders unlock the capital in their existing network of family and friends while teaching them practices to unlock access two and three degrees away from them. While barriers to entry and systems of bias and prejudice exist, we will equip founders with the ability to connect with anyone i.e. “show 'em how to move in a room full of vultures.”

Collaboration

In our program, we preach collaboration over disruption. When a company is founded with disruption as its goal, it focuses on what other companies already offer and tries to replace them. When a company is founded with collaboration as its goal, it will identify players in the market and find ways to complement its offerings. As we help companies get started, we will identify ways for them to collaborate with industry incumbents as well as other private and public companies to find product market fit more quickly.

Technical Prowess

We pride ourselves on not just our ability to create, move and influence culture but also in our ability to influence the technology that houses and delivers culture to the masses. Historically, we have been excluded from the conversation on building the technology that culture lives on. However, this incubator is the first step to not only owning culture but building the infrastructure needed to power culture. In doing so, it is incredibly important that our products be technologically sound so a large portion of the incubator will be spent testing and developing the codebase of the projects we're incubating.