Tech In Black And White has released the first episode of RESILIENCE, a 15-minute documentary that hands the microphone to Black founders, investors and educators and lets them explain the economics of building in tech without a safety net.

The Atlanta- and Los Angeles-based production company has been documenting Black technologists since May 2018. This episode is its most direct business argument yet: the so-called pipeline problem is, first and last, a capital allocation problem.

A road trip through 30 cities

The film opens on a familiar frustration. "When people meet me, their first thought is not that I'm a computer scientist," one subject says, describing the hoodie-wearing archetype that still stands in for "technologist" in the popular imagination. "You see them in entertainment, but you don't see them in tech."

Rather than argue with the data, the filmmakers went looking past it. "I went out to seek more answers than what the statistics said," the narrator explains, before noting a 30-city search for Black people working in technology. The company is separately in post-production on a pilot called Atlanta Black Tech Mecca.

"The VC doesn't get it because the VC doesn't get you"

The funding chapter is the episode's center of gravity. Dr. Roshawnna Novellus, founder and CEO of the fintech platform EnrichHER, recalls being told to go find a technical co-founder. "My PhD in computer engineering doesn't count as technical," she says. "I worked at IBM Research."

Candace Mitchell Harris, founder of the hair-care recommendation startup Myavana, describes a market that had no frame of reference for her category. "VCs didn't know anything about the hair industry," she says. Her workaround was a circuit of pitch competitions that paid cash: "I raised like over $300,000 just winning pitch competitions," enough to fund the first build of the product. Atlanta angel investor Mike Ross, who appears in the film, was her first check.

Travis and Troy Nunnally, the Georgia Tech-trained brothers known around Atlanta as the Tech Twins, say Black entrepreneurs routinely have to take different routes to capital, without family money behind them. The episode’s blunt summary of the workaround comes from another founder: "Some people may give me $1,000, $100,000, even half a million dollars. That's all good, because I'm going to add it together."

Jay Bailey, president of the H.J. Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs, frames that scarcity as a paradox. "Back against the wall, zero options — that's where entrepreneurs are born," he says, arguing that Black founders would hold a competitive advantage outright "if we had the access, the exposure, the resources, the networks."

Build the pipeline or keep the photo op

South Atlanta instructional coach Andrea Miller delivers the episode's sharpest line on corporate outreach. "Stop giving out free iPads," she says. "My kids need internships that pay." One-hour coding events, she argues, are exposure without transfer: "Gone are the days of what I call the hit-it-and-quit-it interventions."

Her standard is numerical and unsentimental — handoffs from K-12 to undergraduate programs to first jobs that are "intentional and sustained," measured by whether the percentage actually moves. Dr. Jakita Thomas, co-founder of the esports education venture Pharaoh's Conclave, adds the structural read: "The current structures are serving the people who built them very, very well."

Exposure as an asset

Dr. Nashlie Sephus, an applied scientist at Amazon who sold her company to the retailer and now runs the Jackson, Mississippi nonprofit The Bean Path, traces her career to a single summer. A Society of Women Engineers camp at Mississippi State, two hours from home, "changed my life." She went on to a bachelor's at Mississippi State and a PhD at Georgia Tech, often as the only Black woman in the room.

The cost of resilience

The episode closes on the bill that comes due. One founder describes taking a month away from the company after burnout tipped into depression. "Slowing down is a better way to speed up," she says — a maintenance argument for anyone modeling a decade-long company rather than a quick exit.

For readers on the business side, RESILIENCE doubles as a pitch. Tech In Black And White has been open about seeking distribution partners and finishing funds, which makes this episode both a portrait of under-capitalized founders and an artifact of one.

Source

Tech In Black And White — "RESILIENCE Episode 1"