Hey, welcome to you Had Me at Black. I'm Martina Abrahams. This week is the second installment of our

Tech Inclusion series. If you're tuning in for the first time, Tech Inclusion is a conference that brings together

entrepreneurs and leaders within the tech industry to discuss solutions to its diversity

and inclusion challenges.

They invited us to host a storytelling segment at

their conference last year. So this next story comes from Leslie. He's led

engineering teams at some of the industry's largest and most influential companies and he continues to advocate for underserved communities.

One day, after a confrontation with his father, Leslie learns that his dad has gone missing and

sets out in search of him. Here's what happened.

I want you to breathe all this in. And I got... This is You Had Me at Black, the podcast where Black millennials tell true life stories. Hi. It's a really personal story and I have told it to personal friends but I've never

spoken about this in front of a group obviously but it was about so as as Martina said, I'm from Silicon Valley.

I was born in San Jose, East San Jose, to be exact,

which I call Hood Light.

Not quite the Hood, but not a place you want to be after dark in certain areas.

And it wasn't bad starting off, but as manufacturing declined, particularly there used to be manufacturing

in the Bay Area, Ford and General Motors both had auto plants in Fremont and Milpitas.

As that started to decline, neighborhoods

started to decline as well.

And when neighborhoods decline, people handle it different ways.

Sometimes people get other jobs they retrain

sometimes they descend into abusive relationships drug or alcohol abuse as well.

And this happened in my family.

...