Everette Taylor is the CEO of Kickstarter, the premier crowdfunding platform for bringing creative projects to life. Taylor is a creative entrepreneur who is passionate about art, supporting creators, and helping people bring their dreams to reality. He is experienced in building and growing successful businesses as a founder, CEO, and chief marketing officer.
Taylor spoke with rolling out to talk about his 10 Black tech commandments.
Share your 10 Black tech commandments.
Be constantly curious and constantly learning. The tech space shifts all the time. Jay-Z said in one of his songs, “I have a hustler spirit.” I see myself as a hustler that’s always versatile, agile and adjusting because things that were once hot 10 years ago aren’t hot. We were talking about NFTs a year ago, now things are shifting.
Stay true to yourself because none of this matters if you can’t look at yourself in the mirror and feel good about yourself. If you feel like you need to code-switch or be a different person, that’s a weird space to be in. You don’t have to do that in the tech world. I’m an example of someone who stayed true to himself. There are a lot of other examples of people who have stayed true to themselves, stayed authentic, and have been able to be successful in this space.
You have to be financially savvy. You also can’t get distracted from the short-term validation that comes from social media and all these other things. You need to invest in your business and yourself. Hold off on that Rolex and that Mercedes-Benz if you aren’t able to invest in yourself and grow in the ways that you need to, instead of wasting your money on external validation. That money can be put toward something that can help you build your career or your company within the tech world.
Have a tight circle of friends that genuinely support you. They don’t have to be in a tech space, and I recommend that they’re not in the tech space. These are the people that are going to hold you accountable, keep you humble, and that you can lean on in this space because things are going to get incredibly hard.
Get sleep. A lot of people have this toxicity around, “Hey, you have to grind and lose sleep.” You’re going to be the best version of yourself if you can get the proper amount of sleep.
Learn your technical language. You might be a non-technical founder, or you might be a marketer, but you have to speak the language of engineers. You have to understand how to get the best out of engineers.
Make sure that anything you do, whether you’re taking a job, creating a product or project, or whatever company you have product market fit for, that you have a fit in the market for your product. You can spend a lot of marketing dollars and do all of these different things, but if you don’t have a product market fit with your product, it doesn’t matter.
Learn how to delegate. You have to be able to dish out and do things. You can’t do this by yourself. You need a team, you need people and obviously, you’re limited by your resources, but just understand what you’re good at and find the people that are good at the things that you’re not good at.
Hire diverse people. When you hire diverse people, companies are more successful.
Take care of yourself.
