This Black Woman Is Opening The Door For People of Color In Tech – Essence

For the ESSENCE Best & Black Owned series, Work & Money Editor Marquita K. Harris and her team learn about the ups, downs, and in-betweens of running a business.

The lack of diversity in the multibillion-dollar technology world is more than evident. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission more than 60 percent of the tech industry is white and that unbalanced demographic plays a huge part in the outcome of the overall industry.

Tech veteran, marketing consultant, app entrepreneur, and publicist Amanda Spann is keenly aware of the industry’s shortcomings. For that reason, she’s been the catalyst for creating a number of new opportunities for people of color navigating Silicon Valley.

To date, Spann is the
mastermind behind companies like TipHub, an impact driven innovation community
for Africa-based entrepreneurs and Afridate a dating app connecting eligible Black
singles by nationality and
ethnicity. Though, she’s widely known for creating Happii, the app and business
development company which not only assists young entrepreneurs in the early
stages of their career but helps them gain the necessary promotion to make
their business a success.

With a plethora of successful business-related ventures, Spann has mastered the art of creating quality companies that satisfy the needs of society, with an emphasis in helping minorities step and succeed in the world of tech. Ahead she shares her journey and offers up some evergreen advice for Black women who aspire to work in tech.

ESSENCE: Was a career in
tech always in the cards for you?

SPANN: I always knew I
was interested in tech but I initially felt like I couldn’t be involved in the
industry if I wasn’t coding and for a while I let that fear impede me from
making progress. My career began to take off in tech when I fully accepted that
I was as competent and capable of being in the industry as any other
professional, regardless of what I did or did not know at the time.

ESSENCE: What made you
want to become an entrepreneur?

SPANN: I think I’ve
always innately been an entrepreneur. I was born with a knack for solving
problems or approaching solutions creatively in addition to coming from a
family of entrepreneurs and side hustlers. The hardest part has been
bootstrapping all of my own projects, staying focused and discerning which
ideas and products I want to allocate my time to. But seeing how something I
built or information I provided impacts someone’s life is the real rewarding
part.

ESSENCE: Can you tell us about your various business ventures?

SPANN: I run Happii, a
startup studio that works with aspiring founders as well as enterprise-level
companies to build and brands tech products. The company is divided into a few
different business verticals including:

• Number one is products. We
  have TipOff App. TipOff is a word-guessing game for the culture.
  It’s just like the board game Taboo, but for you. [There’s also] CultureCrush
  App. CultureCrush helps Black daters make cultural connections. From Rio de
  Janeiro to Richmond, users can search for potential mates of their nationality,
  ethnicity, or tribe in any city on the globe. [Lastly, there is] DubbleTap.com.
  DubbleTap helps you grow and manage your Instagram following with ease. Auto
  post, schedule and manage your content to your feed or stories from the
  convenience of your desktop.

• Number two is one-on-one coaching for aspiring
  & emerging founders and enterprise Consulting.

• Number three is online learning through marketing and product development workbooks and courses for entrepreneurs.

ESSENCE: Since Happii
was the platform that launched a number of your businesses, take us through how
you got started in developing Happii?

SPANN: After I created
my first app I was approached by dozens of people daily who wanted to build an
app or a product but didn’t know where to start. While I couldn’t work directly
with everyone I recognized there was an opportunity and a need to providing content,
products and services for those who were truly committed but we’re simply
experiencing a learning curve. I created Happii to fill this gap and provide
them with accessible tools, resources, and insights to help them go from
concept to creation.

ESSENCE: How can the
tech industry do better? What are they currently excelling in?

SPANN: The tech
community treats inclusion as a trendy after-thought, as opposed to a mandatory
and essential component of business development. There needs to be self-imposed
pressure from executives, investors and entrepreneurs to mirror, match and
diversify the type of consumers or stakeholders they service, as well as
intentional efforts to build and seek out a pipeline of new talent and ideas to
disrupt and elevate the industry as whole.

We as a community
however must hold ourselves accountable for eliminating the innovation deserts
in our own neighborhoods, schools and colleges, providing our youth with early
exposure to technology programming and education, encouraging entrepreneurship
and the development and cultivation of our own ideas as well as viewing
ourselves as producers first and not just consumers.

ESSENCE: What do you think we should expect for diversifying the future of tech?

SPANN: What I expect is a number of small-scale programming, partnership and funding initiatives that superficially put a bandaid on a bullet wound.

What I hope for is a
larger understanding and commitment to knowing and treating diversity as a
bottomline. It should be treated as a best practice and business standard for a
healthier and more robust ecosystem. I would like to see us take the reigns and
building out our own products, programs, curriculum and proposals for working
with, along side and in competition to the companies we aspire to integrate
into as I have little faith in most of their proactiveness to change the
current state of affairs.

ESSENCE: What would be your one piece of advice to young Black women looking to enter a career in tech?

SPANN: Start where you are and use what you have. When people talk about transitioning into the tech industry they often think very narrowly about the role they can play and the tend to undervalue the power of their existing skills and network. The tech industry at its core is just a collection of businesses – and all businesses need support on a variety of different levels, accounting, legal services, operations, marketing, digital, communications, HR – take inventory of the skills you have an start thinking strategically about how you can transfer them as a professional or apply what you already know or aspire to know to create solutions to problems as a founder.