TED Talks Daily - Yes, you can be an entrepreneur too | Saamra Mekuria-Grillo
Episode Date: August 24, 2024Who gets to be an entrepreneur? Saamra Mekuria-Grillo says the image we most commonly see — a guy in a hoodie — is a limiting representation of entrepreneurial success. She highlights the... importance of young Black people seeing entrepreneurship as a possibility for themselves and explains the key to making the field more inclusive.
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TED Audio Collective entrepreneur, who would you see? Today's speaker saw young white guys in hoodies or people like
Elon Musk who don't look like her. Samra Makuria Grillo had to learn how to believe that she too
could be a businesswoman. The social entrepreneur shares the work she's doing to demystify
entrepreneurship for Black young people, why it's important, and how to make pathways to business
far more inclusive.
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My name is Samra, and I'm an entrepreneur.
But I didn't become an entrepreneur until I was 39 years old.
Before that, I was fascinated by innovation and entrepreneurship,
but I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur.
This is despite the fact that when I was in middle school,
both of my parents had started small businesses.
My mom as an independent filmmaker, and my dad as a solo lawyer. But if you had asked me then if I knew any entrepreneurs,
I would have said no. My parents didn't talk about themselves as entrepreneurs
or to me about entrepreneurship, so I didn't see them as entrepreneurs. They talked to me about
college and getting a good job.
They were overjoyed when I got an internship in finance.
But when I got my first full-time job
at an early-stage startup that perhaps you have heard of,
Google,
they were worried.
They said,
do real people actually work at that company?
What do they do?
I went through most of my education and career
believing that entrepreneurship was a pathway for some,
but not for me.
When I was at Stanford Business School,
I saw all of these eager entrepreneurial types around me
who seemed to know how to be an entrepreneur already.
They spoke the lingo, they knew which classes to take, and entrepreneurial types around me who seemed to know how to be an entrepreneur already.
They spoke the lingo,
they knew which classes to take,
which people and professors to hang out with
to make magic happen.
That's what it seemed like to me.
Magic.
There was this talk of unicorns
and this mystique around what would lead to success.
And the magical playbook seemed to have been shared
with a very specific group.
And that group did not look like me.
These people had the confidence and the connections to make things happen,
manifesting new companies from ideas on napkins.
I did not understand how to do that type of manifestation.
So I kept working to get good job after good job,
and I told myself I was not entrepreneur material.
I learned how to do jobs,
but I didn't learn how to make jobs.
It wasn't until I saw other black women around me
launching new ventures and calling themselves entrepreneurs
that I really began to believe I could do it too.
And by that point, I was 39 years old.
My journey is far from unique.
Even now, when I talk to young Black folks
about who they see as entrepreneurs,
I hear Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates.
And when they do name Black entrepreneurs,
there are very specific lanes.
In sports, Michael Jordan,
Steph Curry,
Serena Williams.
In entertainment,
Beyonce,
Jay-Z,
maybe Nipsey Hussle.
I want to change the narrative
around who becomes an entrepreneur in this country.
So this is the work that I do.
I work with young Black folks to help demystify entrepreneurship
so they can learn how to make jobs and not just do jobs.
We should all care about this.
Entrepreneurship has driven extraordinary wealth in this country.
Of the 100 wealthiest people in the United States,
63 of them built their wealth in their own lifetimes
through companies they founded themselves.
Only one of those 63 is black.
We should all care about this.
And it turns out there is a way to move the needle. We have an opportunity
to demystify entrepreneurship for Black young people. And if we get this right, the potential
for all of us is enormous. So what should we do? And now back to the episode.
First, we need to share the multiple pathways to entrepreneurship with young people so that
they can see themselves reflected in them. There are so many different ways to be an entrepreneur,
from side hustling to small business ownership, intrapreneurship,
building a high-growth tech company
and many more.
But one of those pathways,
the high-growth tech one,
gets way more attention than the others.
There's a whole culture and a guy-in-a-hoodie persona
that goes along with that pathway.
It's not really very inclusive.
So in our work, we share the origin stories of other entrepreneurs who have walked a path that our young entrepreneurs might want to explore. We help them understand that they can show up as an entrepreneur
in a way that feels authentic to them,
and that there's no one way to help them.
So, we share the origin stories of entrepreneurs
who have walked a path that they might want to explore.
We share the origin stories of entrepreneurs who have walked a path that they can show up as an entrepreneur in a way that feels authentic to them,
and that there's no one way to be an entrepreneur.
And that leads to the next thing we need to do.
We have to intentionally provide a much more diverse set
of role models to young people.
We can talk about Marc and Elon,
but we also have to highlight Taupe, who founded Calendly,
or Shante, who created Black Girl Sunscreen. There's Robert, who started Compass Real Estate,
and Julia, who launched Planet Forward, a decarbonization platform. There is a deep
legacy of entrepreneurship in communities of color. And there are countless Black innovators across every industry
that we can and should be raising up as role models.
And we need to make those role models feel proximate
so that young people can say,
I can see myself in this person and their journey,
and I don't have to wait 20 years to get started.
One of the best ways to make role models proximate
is through near-peer mentorship.
Our near-peers are young entrepreneurs
who are just a few years farther along in their journeys,
like Ahmed, who's a freelance filmmaker,
or Jada, who has her own LashTech business,
or Florence, who's an emerging product designer.
Each of these mentors can bring their own authentic identity
as a young entrepreneur
to demonstrate what's possible for other young people.
Finally, when I think about the biggest drivers of entrepreneurial inequity,
in the end, it all comes down to relationships.
Who has access to the relationships who will help them achieve their goals?
And who doesn't?
This is social capital,
and it's just as critical to entrepreneurial success as financial capital.
Every successful entrepreneur I've spoken to
can point to an introduction or an opportunity
that came to them through their relationships
that changed the trajectory of their journey.
And accessing and mobilizing your social capital
is a skill that can be learned.
It's not just something that some people know how to do and others don't.
So in our work, we help young people understand
who is in their networks already.
We help them build the confidence to reach out to those who might be willing to support them.
We help them build fluency with tools like LinkedIn.
We help break down what can feel like a really complex and scary process around building your entrepreneurial network into more approachable pieces.
And we take an asset-based lens,
affirming that young people already know people
who can help them achieve their goals.
I've seen young people go from tentatively curious about entrepreneurship
to seeing themselves as entrepreneurs in the span of 10 weeks.
I've seen the spark that grows when young people see
identity-affirming role models, often for the
first time, who are innovators. And I've seen the feeling of power and agency that comes from
recognizing the social capital that you already have that can help you achieve your goals.
This is the real magic. This is the work that I do,
but we should all care about this
because it matters well beyond the young people we serve.
If you care about equity,
the median Black family holds only 15% of the wealth
of the median white family.
If we're only teaching Black young people how to do jobs
and not make jobs,
then we will continue to see that wealth gap persist.
If you care about the economy,
closing the earnings gap could add over $8 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2050.
That's a T, trillion.
And if you care about the resilience of our workforce,
especially given technology technologies like AI,
it's imperative that we teach young people how to make new jobs.
By one estimate, people in the lowest income brackets
could be up to 14 times more likely to need to change jobs due to AI.
If we're only teaching young people how to do jobs that exist today,
then we're not actually preparing them for their futures.
I'm proof that you can start to see yourself as an entrepreneur later in life
and still do something meaningful.
I started my organization four years ago at 39,
and while we're still early, I believe we have big things ahead.
But I also believe that if I had started at 19 or even 29, I would be at a different stage as an entrepreneur today.
I'd probably be on my second or third startup.
I'd have already learned some lessons that I'm learning right now.
I'm also working to unlearn decades of not seeing myself as an entrepreneur.
Imagine the magic that would be possible,
not just for them but for all of us,
if our young people could start to see themselves as makers of jobs
and not just doers of jobs earlier on.
Thank you.
Can Indigenous ways of knowing help kids cope with online bullying?
At the University of British Columbia, we believe that they can.
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Support for this show comes from Airbnb. Visit ubc.ca forward happens here.
Support for this show comes from Airbnb.
If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel.
They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home.
As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs,
I pictured my own home sitting empty.
Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do and with the extra income I could save up for
renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home
might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host.
That was Samra Makuria-Grillo at the TED-Ed Educator Talks event in 2024.
If you're curious about TED's curation,
find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team,
Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green,
Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar.
It was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner,
Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessey.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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