Resource Stories: Deldelp Medina, Black and Brown Founders

In elementary school, Deldelp Medina was the only girl in her after-school computer class.

Even at eight, Deldelp was passionate about programming. Growing up in San Francisco in the early days of the tech boom, she would code her own video games, simple inventions where the push of a button would move characters three pixels to the right or left. She bought a Commodore 64 when she was sixteen years old (“It cost as much as a used car”) and watched the Bay Area’s tech scene evolve from a collection of coders to the center of global innovation.

Still, she always saw herself on the outside of mainstream tech. “I was definitely in that corner of programming that was punk, quirky, queer,” she remembers. “I interacted with folks with shaved heads; they were from a different culture. Corporate wasn't my culture or training.”

This experience growing up helped her see another side of tech – and ultimately set her up to help co-found one of the largest networks for founders of color in the United States, Black and Brown Founders.

DIY Tech

Deldelp was born in New York City but raised in Barranquilla, Colombia, on the Caribbean Sea. Her name is a tribute to her mother, Delfina Bernal, a painter and artist (yes, the ‘p’ is silent). The family moved to San Francisco when she was eight, and Deldelp spent her childhood moving regularly; she has attended 13 schools throughout her life and lived with nearly every family member.

“My parents ate because their parents were entrepreneurial,” she says. “One grandmother would sell shoes, the other started a preschool.”

Deldelp’s entrepreneurial streak showed up in her interest in coding and technology – a fortunate skill in the early days of Silicon Valley. In college at Berkeley she found a virtual bulletin board, the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, where students, professors and locals chatted online about everything from chess to politics to art; a precursor to AIM and online chats. There was a DIY vibe to it: “People would develop their own chat programs; it was what the world looked like before the Apple store.” 

After college she became a dotcommer, working for a variety of early tech companies in the Bay Area. But the entrepreneurial bug never left; she knew she wanted to build something of her own. That eventually took the form of a tool for childcare providers that she coded herself. She needed money to get it off the ground. But despite living in the venture capital hub of the world, she realized that she didn’t have the network or connections to get the funding she needed. 

She started to notice that none of the Black and Brown people she knew were working in tech. San Francisco was booming, but only for a certain type of person. “Brilliant people couldn't get a dollar; other people didn't have a clue and were becoming billionaires.”

The experience pushed Deldelp to move into the tech advocacy space. She became the president of the Latino Startup Alliance, and then moved to become Director of Residency at Code2040. That’s where she met and started talking with Aniyia Williams.

Williams was a former tech entrepreneur who joined Code2040 as their entrepreneur-in-residence. She spent her residency tinkering with an idea to fill the gap in access to venture capital for founders of color. After many conversations with Deldelp, Williams started a nonprofit called Black & Brown Founders, and asked Deldelp to join. She was happy to oblige.

Rewriting the Playbook

Black & Brown Founders (BBF) provides community, education, and access to Black and Latinx entrepreneurs across the United States, allowing them to launch and build tech businesses with modest resources.

“A tiny fraction of venture funding goes to Black and Latinx founders, yet we are the driving force behind small business creation in America,” Deldep says. “We teach founders of color the rules of the Silicon Valley game, and how to make it work from their perspective.”

BBF works with startups at the ideation stage. Their main offering is a ten-week Bootstrapping Bootcamp to help founders take an idea from “concept to coins.” Founders get access to video lessons as well as group and 1:1 coaching with “been-there-done-that” instructors. They also get access to a supportive community of peer founders that now exceeds 60 people, who “will encourage you during the hard @$$ journey.”

“The fact is that ‘bootstrapping’ doesn't look the same for Black and Brown entrepreneurs as it does for others,” Deldelp says. “Money doesn’t flow abundantly in our communities. We don't usually have family or friends who can invest or loan us cash to get started. But it’s still possible to build thriving businesses with modest resources.”

The bootcamp is complemented by community events; they’ve run gatherings for founders of color in Oakland, Philadelphia, Austin, and San Francisco, all focused on sharing skills.

Deldelp says BBF’s special sauce is that they have created a tight-knit community. “The one thing everyone has in common is people want to be part of the community,” she said. “Our oldest team member is almost 80; she's been doing work in nonprofits for a long time. We are folks launching tech with modest resources.”

Deldelp’s co-founder Aniyia Williams is one of the creators of Zebras Unite, a community dedicated to reimagining capital that fits the needs of founders, and BBF is a big proponent of ideas like patient capital. “We believe in investing in patient capital – capital that is not expected to have returns on a timeline from the needs of investors,” Deldelp says. 

Currently, startups operate on an investor's timeline; most venture capital funds need to deliver a return on investment in four to seven years, so they encourage their portfolio companies to grow exponentially. “Patient capital is about being patient enough to understand that the needs of entrepreneurs come first. If you are investing in what this country is going to look like, you have to be patient in that process.”

“The longer I've been in tech, the whiter it’s become,” Deldelp says. She looks back at all the times that the common wisdom in Silicon Valley missed the boat. “People kept saying ‘English is going to be the only language to use for apps.’ That turned out to be wrong. They kept saying ‘Black people don’t use the internet.’ That turned out to be wrong.”

“Black and Brown people create the culture of this country. And we over-index on tech. We are on devices longer. If we stopped using systems, they would collapse. But all our labor and cultural outputs are co-opted.” 

Deldelp is all about solving the problem, now. “I'm not waiting for someone else to fix all this,” she says. “I want to work with people to create solutions.”