CODE2040 helps tech plan for a non-white-majority USA

SAN FRANCISCO — Fact: Most big tech companies — from Google to Uber to Airbnb — have achieved their huge successes with a largely white workforce.

So why bother adding people of color to the ranks if things are just fine as they stand?

Because here's another fact: By the year 2040, the United States will have a non-white majority. In other words, today's playbook for financial victory will soon be outdated.

"Think about it, what if Facebook were founded in 2040, would it be Spanish-language first or English? It's a legitimate question that will be asked soon enough," says Tristan Walker, one of Silicon Valley's few African-American tech entrepreneurs and a co-founder with Laura Weidman Powers of the strategically named non-profit CODE2040.

"If you're a smart company, you'll want an ethnically diverse team empathetic about the needs of your diverse consumers," says Walker, 30, who runs Walker & Company Brands. "What we're doing at CODE2040 isn't charity work. We're trying to help tech organizations because there is a real business imperative here."

Founded in 2012, CODE2040 has a simple mission that dovetails with the growing chorus of social activists, progressive technologists and media outlets pressing Silicon Valley to use its significant brainpower to make tech less of an ivory tower.

The outfit provides college-age African-American and Latino students who have shown an interest in computer science with both an encouraging network of peers and, more pointedly, a summer internship program aimed at placing them at tech companies whose narrowly focused recruiting efforts often overlook them.

"We want to create a network of the highest-performing black and Latino technical talent," Walker says. "This group also happens to be among the most culturally influential, the most early adopting. So, if you can inspire the best consuming demographic in the world to be the best producing demographic in the world, imagine the amount of market change you can have in the world."

Of the few dozen CODE2040 Fellows, nearly 90% have seen their 10-week paid ($1,000-a-week minimum) fellowships turn into full-time offers. That's significant considering that the students often hail not from stereotypical tech-company feeder schools such as MIT or Stanford University, but schools such as University of California-Channel Islands and University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

"Companies just looking at the usual schools are missing the point, because there is simply a lot of talent they're going to miss," says CODE2040 CEO Weidman Powers, 32, whose own elite scholastic journey — Harvard University undergrad to Stanford business school — didn't blind her to the wealth of brainpower hidden at less famous institutions.

"The issue often isn't about not being smart enough, it's about feeling like there's no one you've seen from your community achieve success in tech, so why would you think you could," she says. "So that needs to change."

Weidman Powers, whose post-Stanford career found her working in product development at a few start-ups, says overseeing CODE2040's mission has the feeling of a calling whose moment is now.

"When we started, you'd get a lot of interest from junior-level people (at tech firms), but now we're getting CEOs and CTOs curious about what we do," she says.

She adds that not looking at a broader array of schools is just one factor in the paucity of minorities in tech companies. Others include black and Hispanic employees often feeling so culturally isolated at such firms that they tend to leave, a phenomenon that sometimes takes place even in college computer science classrooms.

"Many students tell us that they feel an added level of pressure being alone, as in, 'If I fail here, is that what they'll think of all African-American engineers?'" she says. "One solution is for companies to be more active in creating cohorts (for minority employees) so they don't feel so isolated."

Walker made his name and small fortune a few years back as head of business development at pioneering check-in app Foursquare and today counts as a celebrity in the valley. But he vividly recalls the many times he'd have a great phone conversation with a venture capitalist "and when we'd meet I would experience their shock to see I was a black male."

The truth is, Silicon Valley's image problem with minorities is simply that it's all but invisible as a career option to them, he says.

"I grew up (in Queens, N.Y.) wanting to make a lot of money and a difference, and the ways I thought you could do that were working on Wall Street or being an athlete," Walker says. "I did the former (as a trader) and hated it, and the latter didn't work out for me. But when I got to Stanford business school six years ago, I didn't even know Silicon Valley existed. And that's an issue."

Changing that is what drives the founders of CODE2040. Walker is adamant the non-profit is more of a business service than civil rights campaign, one trying to help tech companies save themselves from their own blinkered views.

"As our name implies, this won't be fixed in six months, and more likely in years," he says. "But these companies will realize that diversity leads to profits."