Brian Brackeen and his wife Candice Matthews Brackeen are the co-founders of Black Tech Week and Lightship Capital, a venture capital fund based in Cincinnati. Their mission is to invest in exceptional businesses led by founders of color, LBGTQ+, women, and innovators with disabilities.
During Black Tech Week, Brian Brackeen told rolling out what he hoped people gained from the conference.
What are your five Black tech commandments?
– Learning is everything in this industry. It changes so much. Nobody that’s going to see this video knew what ChatGPT was two years ago because it didn’t exist. Now it’s a part of our common understanding. It’s pushed forward what we think is possible in the last six months, so if you’re not constantly learning, you will be left behind, and it is so dangerous for us and our people for that to happen because we are the culture. We’re where it comes from, and you’ve got to continue to lead in that area.
– You can do anything. I used to work for Steve Jobs at Apple, and he was the last CEO I ever worked for. Steve taught me that perfection is possible, and you just work hard and keep going. If you have relentless belief in the product, and you can see the customer, you can do it. That’s important for everybody.
– Design matters. Products have to be elegant, beautiful, thoughtful and exceptional. It’s a gentleman named Dieter Rams, and he’s like the father of modern design. He worked for Braun years ago, and he has 10 design commandments that we follow.
– Wherever we’re going to go, we got to go together. We find that peer-to-peer relationships and peer-to-peer networking is critical to success. You’ll learn more from your brother and your sister than you will from someone who did it 10 years ago.
– Connections happen at places like Black Tech Week. Go to conferences, and meet each other in person. We all love Zoom, we can sit in our pajamas and be on calls, but if you’re not in person, you’re missing out on some important connections.
What do you want people to take away from this conference?
We’ve sold over 300 student tickets this year and almost 10% of the tickets to the conference are students and young people. We’re super proud of that because they are the future. They’re why we do it. One, I hope they take away that the tech that they use every day is being built by people that look like them and that they can build that tech. Two, I think it’s important to know what’s possible in the realm of investment, and that your ideas can be invested in by people that look like you like investors like myself. Third, what young people need is not all from school. I’m a big school guy, I love it. I tell my daughter to get great grades, but you’re going to learn a lot of things from coming to conferences like these, and I’m learning through doing this and I think tech is an example of an industry that almost requires you to learn from doing.
