Ted Audio Collective As many of the listeners of this podcast probably know, becoming an entrepreneur can be a pretty scary leap, and that task can feel even more daunting when you don't know many other entrepreneurs or feel alone in the process.
The good news is that you don't have to do it by yourself, and there's no one right way to be an entrepreneur even if people and systems around you have told you otherwise.
We need to change the narrative of who gets to be an entrepreneur, and demystify how to become one along the way.
I'm Adupa Akinola. This is Ted Business from the Ted Audio Collective.
Our speaker today is CEO Samra Mikuria -Grillo.
She's dedicated her career to supporting emerging black entrepreneurs and making the process of building a business a more inclusive endeavor.
And she's also someone I've known for many years.
So after the talk, Samra and I are going to chat a little bit about what brought her to this work.
But first, a quick break.
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And now, Samra Mikuria -Grillo takes the TED stage.
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, 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 be 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 names.
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?
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, entrepreneurship, 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.
Not really very inclusive.
So in our work, we share all of the pathways to entrepreneurship with young people.
And we help them find what feels like the right fit for them.
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 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 Tope, who founded Calendly, or Chante, 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 and 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 lash tech 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 US economy by 2050.
That's a T, trillion.
And if you care about the resilience of our workforce, especially given 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. That was Samra Micoria Grillo at TED ED Educator Talks.
And now I'm so excited to have Samra join me here to dive deeper into some of these ideas.
Samra, thank you so much for being here.
It's so good to see you.
It's good to see you too.
Thanks for having me.
And I think that it's really important for us to share how we know each other.
As you know, we met through your husband.
So your husband was one of my mentees from college.
And also I helped recruit him to Bain and Company.
To me, that just tells about the power of social networks, which you discuss in your talk.
Tell us more about your thoughts on the importance of social networks for entrepreneurship.
Social networks really are the foundational currency of opportunity.
Think about some of the most important opportunities that you've gotten in your life and think about how you actually found out about them or who connected you to those or who maybe suggested that you pursue a certain thing and then kind of helped you to prepare for it.
And everybody has these stories of, oh yeah, it was my uncle or a teacher or someone who noticed that I was interested in something and then connected me to it.
Unfortunately, the reality is that those types of networks are not evenly distributed.
There's lots of people who kind of get access to those networks early on in life, whether it's you go to that sleep away summer camp and you meet a bunch of people, and that's how you start to build as a child, even some of the social capital you'll have later in life.
Or if it's that you go to a school where there are a multitude of different professional parents who if you express an interest in something as a fifth grader, there's someone you can interview or talk to.
And so I think the same thing applies when you think about entrepreneurship, but it's even more important.
Success as an entrepreneur is not just about the idea that you have.
It is so much about the resources that you have access to and the ways in which you can leverage those resources.
And unfortunately, I think for a lot of people who are becoming entrepreneurs kind of outside of the traditional innovation ecosystems, their access to those resources and opportunities is just not as prevalent.
And so we think about that in our work as how do we help to actually raise up some of those opportunities that might be less visible?
How do we make connections through things like near peer mentorship, or just connections between peers who are exploring entrepreneurship so that they can start to build those networks that will be instrumental to their success going forward.
You said something that I think is so important, which is entrepreneurship isn't always just about the idea.
So to me, that's one of a big misconception people have about entrepreneurship.
What do you think are some other misconceptions folks have about entrepreneurship?
When I was starting Formation Ventures, I talked to a lot of investors who unfortunately really had a very specific model of entrepreneur in their head.
And several of them told me we really think that what you're doing is important.
But when it comes right down to it, we invest based on pattern recognition.
So breaking out of those patterns is really hard because that's how we make our money.
And I just sat with that and was like, wow, yeah, that I mean, you know, you're kind of saying the quiet part out.
Yes. Yeah. And I've never been one to say like, I'm just going to accept that and keep it moving.
I sort of said, okay, well, what do we do to change that?
You could have gone the other way and been totally scared and wanted to run from this.
It's scary to be an entrepreneur.
What helped you take the leap?
What gave you the courage to keep pushing even in the face of some of this negativity that you might have heard?
No lie, it is scary every day that you're sort of fighting against not only any sort of systemic and other barriers, but also your own perception of whether you can do it.
That's an everyday battle.
Going back again to this theme of social capital, like I had a group of women around me who were cheering me on and saying, you know, you can do this.
Sometimes it's just about them listening and helping me process.
And sometimes it's about them saying, oh, here's a resource.
Here's a person you should talk to.
All of them have started their own businesses, some of them multiple.
And it's like, how did I solve this problem when I was at your stage?
Right. How can I help you think this through and, you know, hopefully push on through to the other side?
Yeah. What would you say are some of your key lessons learned along the way or even really useful advice that you receive?
And I just realized another problem that I feel like we need to solve for entrepreneurs of color is your parents being like, what are you doing?
You know, that is really risky.
And what advice would you want to give parents of kids of color?
What do they need to learn and know?
My parents have always been very supportive.
And also they did have in some cases the reaction of what is that job?
What are you doing?
Where are you going?
And so I guess like the best advice I could give is just to get curious.
I have two children.
It is very scary when your children are interested in something that you don't fully understand.
What is it about this that's calling to you?
Like, why do you care about it?
Help me understand from your perspective, like what's powerful about this.
And then I think that can also highlight some of the places where a young person might need some support to think things through a little bit more like, okay, that sounds like a really interesting idea.
How are you thinking about getting resources?
How can I be helpful in doing that?
Is there someone that I know that I could connect to you with?
Is there someone at your school that you could connect with about this?
I'm like giving my own self parenting advice here, because I feel like oftentimes we're trained to be the skeptic.
Yeah. As parents, we're trying to keep our kids safe.
We're trying to like teach them the lessons we think they need to learn.
And entrepreneurship is fundamentally a leap of faith in Denver.
And so the best thing I think you can do for your kids is hold their hand along that leap of faith and let them know you're there and can support them.
Samra, it has been such a treat to talk to you and to learn about all you've been up to and to see how the world is truly going to be a different place from the work you're doing.
So thank you for your time.
Thank you so much. That's it for today.
Ted Business is part of the Ted Audio Collective.
This episode was produced by Hannah King Klimon, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact checked by Julia Thompson.
Special thanks to Maria Lajas, Farrah Degrun, Daniella Balarrizzo, and Roxanne Hylash.
I'm Madupa Akinola.
Thanks for listening.
