Resource Stories: Luis Martinez, We Tha Plug

Luis Martinez remembers a moment early on in his time in San Diego. He was exploring the city’s startup community and attended the popular Startup Week on a veteran’s ticket. At the event, the founder of Startup San Diego, a white man, approached him and asked “How are you liking it here?”

Luis didn’t miss a beat. “Where are all the Black folks?” he responded.

The man paused. “We are trying to figure that out.”

Years later, Luis still remembers that scene. “The answer was BS, but at least he didn't blow me off,” he says. I asked Luis how he had the courage to answer like that, and he reflected, “If you ask a question, expect an answer.” It must be the New Yorker in him.

Luis is originally from New York – specifically, Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyn that some people know, the land of hipsters, five dollar lattes and gentrified Caribbean neighborhoods. Luis is from East New York, the “old Brooklyn,” the one that, as he puts it, you leave and don’t come back to.

Luis did leave, and his journey took him around the world before he landed in San Diego and eventually founded We Tha Plug. He played basketball in high school, while also cutting his teeth as an entrepreneur selling vacuum cleaners. He did a stint as a professional basketball player overseas, and then joined the Navy.

You can learn a lot about Luis by asking a simple question: “What did you do in the Navy?” The answer is that he did a little of everything – he ran the ship’s stores, managed its accounts, and even ended up working for a time as the ship’s barber.

Swap out the word ship and replace it with “startups”, and you can start to get a picture of all the hats that Luis now wears for San Diego’s BIPOC startup scene in his role with We Tha Plug.

The Startup Grind

After leaving the Navy, Luis enrolled in a master’s program and earned a degree in organizational leadership, all while working at the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego. He maintained his interest in entrepreneurship, reading magazines like Inc. and Entrepreneur in his free time, and exploring San Diego’s startup scene.

Luis began attending Startup Week events and offering his time as a volunteer: opening doors (literally), working in the coat check and helping in the kitchen. In his first year and a half, he built authentic relationships with the organizers and regular attendees, and in 2018, he inquired about implementing more diversity into Startup Week. “I knew the entrepreneurs working in the DEI space because I had already done the work,” he says. “It was easy.”

He was invited to join the Startup Week team to help build content for their diversity and inclusion track. Right away, Luis started packing rooms by inviting a more local audience to events.

When the co-organizers would ask Luis where he found everyone, he would bluntly answer: “They live here – they’ve been around.”

Luis built a name for himself as a connector, and when the director of Startup Grind San Diego moved on, he landed the job to be her successor. With this new role, he was running the show for the city of San Diego. For the first time, he wasn’t working on other people’s terms.

Building the Community

In 2019, Luis traveled up the coast to attend Startup Grind’s global conference in Silicon Valley, which had thousands of attendees from around the world. In a moment of inspiration, he decided to host a casual Black and Brown founders meetup, and sent a link via the conference app Slack for people to meet at a local coffee shop. He scheduled it at the same time as the conference’s popular pub crawl on purpose. He recalls, “I wanted to find out who was really about this life.”

He expected about seven people to show up. Instead, 80 people showed, some of whom had traveled over an hour to talk about issues like access to capital for founders of color.

“I pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and asked everyone to put their name and email on it,” he says. “I started a Slack channel, and two weeks later, a woman in Washington, D.C. got accepted into an accelerator program because she had met the program director through the group.” That’s when he knew he had something.

Luis started hosting regular meetups for BIPOC founders in San Diego with Republic, including a pitch competition that received some good press. Early on, he found that a lot of the entrepreneurs who attended his events were at the very early stage of building their businesses. “A lot of people didn’t understand how to build with minimal resources,” he says. “No one was teaching people how to fish – how to be efficient and learn to build on their own.”

That’s where We Tha Plug came in. Take Lekia Hills, a young woman out of Syracuse who had created an app called Powerful Voices to drive greater accountability for local politicians. “She had done a great job building relationships with local politicians and constituents,” Luis recalls. “But she didn't have any information on how to develop the app.” Luis says that We Tha Plug instilled in Lekia a sense of confidence and perseverance to build the technology.

We Tha Plug also adds value through their wide network. One founder who benefitted from this network was Paul Husbands, founder of a Caribbean music competitor to Spotify called SelectaCharts. Paul lives in Barbados and went through We Tha Plug’s virtual incubator. During an office hours session, Luis connected Paul with some former executives at Columbia Records (if you’re from New York, you are always one or two folks away from someone in the music industry). The executives loved the app, and now Paul is in the process of signing major Caribbean artists onto the service.

Advice from Experience 

We Tha Plug is founded on the core principle that the most useful and tangible advice comes from people who can relate to your personal experience. 

“I know that as a Black man who is very opinionated, I have to act in a certain way,” he says. “There are things I can’t get away with that a white man could get away with. So sometimes when a white mentor would give me advice, I’d think in the back of my mind, ‘I can’t get away with this.’ His advice is going to mirror his experiences.”

Luis has big visions for We The Plug. “We have a great product,” he says. “People know who we are. Now it's time to put revenue into what we are doing and begin charging for programs so we can hire a team.”

He has a vision to move to year-round programming, and to incorporate the tech tool No-code to teach founders fundamental skills so they can run their services without hiring a developer. He wants to teach future cohorts how to be their own beta testers, to run their own surveys and gather their own data – before they go look for funding.

If you ask him, Luis is more than happy to tell you where he came up with the name We Tha Plug.  “Anything with tech has a plug. But more importantly, we are the connectors. We can't wait for anyone to put us on; we have to put ourselves on. Just like I had to put myself on. We have to learn from others, and to keep pushing. It only goes up from here.”

- Written by Ambika Samarthya-Howard