Jessica Norwood (RUNWAY) and Rodney Sampson (OHUB) - Entrepreneurship and Racial Justice

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jessica Norwood is the founder of RUNWAY, an organization that uses entrepreneurship to close the wealth gap in Black communities by providing pre-seed and friends-and-family capital to fund Black-owned companies. Rodney Sampson is the CEO and executive chairman of Opportunity Hub (OHUB), a multi-campus entrepreneurship center and tech hub that empowers underestimated and under-tapped communities. In this conversation moderated by Stanford associate professor Chuck Eesley, Norwood and Sampson discuss how we can address racial disparities in startup funding, and build a more equitable and inclusive entrepreneurial community.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:06.7	This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.
0:10.7	Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner.
0:13.7	On this episode, we're joined by Jessica Norwood and Rodney Samson.
0:18.5	Jessica is the founder of Runway, an organization that uses entrepreneurship to close the wealth gap in black communities.
0:25.8	Rodney is the executive chairman and CEO of OHub,
0:29.3	a multi-campus entrepreneurship center and tech hub that serves as a startup pre-accelerator,
0:34.6	coding boot camp, and angel investing platform for founders from
0:38.5	underestimated and undertapped communities. Here's host and Stanford professor Chuck Easley.
0:45.4	Welcome, Jessica and Rodney. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here. It's great to have you guys.
0:51.8	So first, let me briefly share some of the reasons why I personally see this conversation as so important, as well as why I'm grateful to have you both here with us today.
1:04.6	It's really been a jarring and eye-opening summer with ongoing injustice and police brutality against Black America, highlighted by George
1:14.1	Floyd, Brianna Taylor, and now Walter Wallace, to disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable
1:20.8	communities.
1:21.6	And so from my perspective, I teach and do research here at Stanford on entrepreneurship, and both education and entrepreneurship are intended to be ladders upward in society, providing paths to economic justice and more equitable opportunities.
1:37.3	Yet it's clear from the data that historically our institutions have systematically excluded many from these very ladders to better economic opportunities.
1:48.0	Even among those who have against the odds succeeded, those narratives are often not highlighted as well as they should be.
1:56.0	Martin Luther King, in his speech, The Other America at Stanford in 1967 emphasized the importance of
2:03.1	economic justice for social justice and also emphasized the vital role of the student generation
2:09.5	in his speech. So one thing seems clear, which is that the future entrepreneurs who do master
2:15.1	these skills involved in creating diverse, inclusive organizations
2:19.3	will be the ones who not only move us closer to a more equitable society, but also create
	...

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