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I am a community builder and entrepreneur.
Over the years, I have become one of the only Black tech founder-CEOs in history to raise more than $5 million in startup funding without Silicon Valley VCs, and I did it by building a community of more than 100 angel investors. My travel platform, Localeur, helps travelers access authentic recommendations from locals in 200 cities around the world to discover the best local places to eat, drink and play. Localeur has been named a “must-have” by Travel & Leisure, Fortune, TIME, and The TODAY Show, and has partnered with Nike, Lyft, JetBlue Airways and Match.com, among others.
Not just focused on business, I have served on the boards for several major Texas-based nonprofit organizations including the March of Dimes, AIDS Services of Austin, ZACH Theatre and Austin PBS, and have advised the Mayor of Austin, ESPN X Games, South by Southwest Festival, the Beijing Olympics and FedEx on various issues over the years.
I get scale and intersectionality. As a speaker, I enjoy delighting audiences all over the country with compelling tales of how I went from a childhood of food stamps and an absent father to gracing the TED stage and rubbing elbows with the CEO of Apple, and what it will take for more people like me—people of color, women, folks from low-income backgrounds–to get their careers and brightest business ideas off of the back of napkins to building companies with global scale.