The online obstacle : a study of African-American enterprise on the Internet

Iconic Web companies based in the US, along the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have exhibited some racial/ethnic diversity among their founders, yet there appears to be a dearth of African-Americans in the group. In this thesis I conduct an empirical investigation into the potential existence of a set of impediments to blockbuster success for African-American founded consumer Internet companies -- or an "online obstacle," as I have chosen to term the condition. In utilizing a short-form survey and telephone interviews to collect the thoughts and opinions of 16 black entrepreneurs who have made at least one attempt at launching a consumer Internet start-up, I document three recurrent themes. First, there do not appear to be enough African-American graduates of engineering and computer science disciplines to facilitate creation of promising Internet ventures that could achieve blockbuster status. Second, black Web entrepreneurs by-and-large have not achieved the heights of capital infusion that seems to be necessary to transition a concept from "successful" to "blockbuster." Lastly, African-American founders of consumer Internet companies do not in any significant numbers appear to live and play in the start-up ecosystem that is Silicon Valley, inhibiting development of relationships and access to resources needed to ascend to blockbuster status online. Overall, my findings suggest that the online obstacle I seek to identify is very much a collection of barriers that has a direct correlation to issues black entrepreneurs have spoken about for decades, suggesting that any revealed online obstacle very much lacks an online origin.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Lamb, Allen T. (Allen Terrel)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Denise Lewin Loyd.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/59001

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59001