CHARTING A PATH FORWARD SERIES
Systemic Racism, Inequity, and the Role of Tech Entrepreneurship
with Marcus Bullock, CEO and founder of Flikshop; Anil Dash, founder and CEO of Glitch; Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO and co-founder of Promise; and John Madsen, chief architect for technology and partner at Goldman Sachs; and moderated by Lili Gangas, chief technology community officer of Kapor Center
Wednesday, August 26
7:00-8:30 PM EDT
Webinar details included in RSVP confirmation email.
As the country continues to experience a mass movement for social justice and equality to end centuries of racism, how can we all contribute to lasting change? Tech, as a sector that shapes so much of our daily lives, has the opportunity to lead in the fight for equality and racial equity.
Organized by Justice Through Code and supported by the Center for Justice at Columbia University and the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, this session will explore how the tech sector can address systemic racism and how entrepreneurs, innovators, companies, and investors are pursuing opportunities to transform our individual and collective understanding, and pursuing high impact ventures and business innovations designed to achieve racial equity outcomes.
Speaker bios:
Marcus Bullock
CEO and Founder of Flikshop
Marcus Bullock is an entrepreneur, justice reform advocate, and TED speaker. Following his 2004 release from prison, he launched a construction business that grew to employ other returning citizens. Bullock is also founder and CEO of Flikshop, Inc., a software company that builds tools to help incarcerated people stay connected to their families and build community.
The Flikshop mobile app enables families and non-profit organizations to send personalized postcards to any person in any cell in the US, with the mission of using social connections to decrease recidivism. He also founded the Flikshop School of Business, a program that teaches returning citizens life skills and entrepreneurship via computer coding and software development. As Forbes writes, “Will Flikshop, the Instagram for prisons, solve all of [the mass incarceration] issues? No. But Flikshop typifies the sort of work that needs support to scale to address these issues from many angles.”
Bullock is an inaugural cohort member of Techstars Anywhere 2018 and John Legend’s Unlocked Futures business accelerators. He was selected as one of The Root’s 2019 100 Most Influential African Americans in the US. Shortly after, Bullock was named a 2020 Halcyon Incubator Fellow. He is also a member of the Justice Policy Institute’s board of directors, Advisory Board member for Princeton University’s Prison Teaching Initiative, and serves as an advisor to the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund. Married with two children, Bullock’s story has received coverage from Forbes, CNN, Washington Post, Black Enterprise, and NPR.
Anil Dash
Founder and CEO of Glitch
Anil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly developer community that's the easiest way to create web apps. He is recognized as one of the technology industry's staunchest advocates for more humane, inclusive and ethical technology through his work as an entrepreneur, activist and writer.
He serves as a board member for companies like Stack Overflow, the world’s largest community for computer programmers, and non-profits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy and expression, Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society, and the Lower East Side Girls Club, which serves girls and families in need in New York City. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, and today advises major startups and non-profits including Medium, DonorsChoose and Project Include.
Described by the New Yorker as a “blogging pioneer”, his Webby-recognized personal website has been cited in sources ranging from the New York Times to the BBC to TMZ, and in hundreds of academic papers. As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018. In 2013, Time named @anildash one of the best accounts on Twitter, and he is the only person ever retweeted by Bill Gates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Prince, a succinct summarization of Dash’s interests. Dash has been a featured speaker and guest in a broad range of media ranging from the Aspen Ideas Festival to SXSW to Desus and Mero's late-night show.
Dash is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife Alaina Browne and their son Malcolm. He has never played a round of golf, drank a cup of coffee, or graduated from college.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
CEO and Co-founder of Promise Pay
Prior to co-founding Promise, Phaedra ran revenue and operations at the startup Honor. For more than 4 years, she served as manager for the musical artist Prince where she led the effort in securing ownership of his masters. Before that, she was CEO of the anti-poverty organization Green For All.
Earlier in her career, Ellis-Lamkins was the Executive Officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, an organized labor federation representing more than 100 unions and more than 110,000 members in California's Santa Clara and San Benito counties. She was also Executive Director of Working Partnerships USA, a coalition of community groups, and labor and faith organizations working to address economic disparities in California's Silicon Valley.
John Madsen
Former CTO and Current Partner at Goldman Sachs
John is a managing director at Goldman Sachs. He is a member of the Firmwide Technology Risk Committee, Technology Americas Diversity Committee and Investment Banking Division Technology Investment Committee. John is also a managing director ally to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Network, covering Technology. Previously, he was global head of the Enterprise Platforms team. Prior to joining the Technology Division to lead the Enterprise Platforms team in 2014, John led the Securities Division Core Strats team. He joined Goldman Sachs in 2003 as an associate on the FICC Core Strats team and was named managing director in 2008 and partner in 2014. Prior to joining the firm, John worked for several Internet start-up companies and pursued a PhD in Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and Rutgers University. He earned a BA in Philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1992.
Moderated by:
Lili Gangas
CTO of Kapor Center
Lili Gangas is the Chief Technology Community Officer of The Kapor Center. In this role, Lili helps catalyze Oakland’s emergence as a social impact hub of tech done right – where tech, diverse talent, and action-driven partnerships can tackle pressing social and economic inequities of our communities head-on. Before coming to the Kapor Center, Lili was an Associate Principal at Accenture Technology Lab’s Open Innovation team, building bridges between startups and Global 2000 commercial clients through cross-sector collaboration. She was also a founding member of the team at Booz Allen specializing in crowdsourcing, prize challenges, and open data solutions for the public sector. Before that, Lili could be found in the lab working on firmware solutions for the aerospace industry as a Senior Multi-Disciplined Software Engineer at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems. Lili holds an MBA from New York University Stern School of Business, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and Systems Engineering Certification from UCLA Extension. In addition to her day jobs, Lili was an active TechStars Startup Weekend DC organizer, a judge of the Small Business Administration (SBA)’s Startup in a Day Challenge, an open data innovation panelist at the White House Council of Women and Girls session, and advisor to Dreamwakers.org and OpenDataNation.com. Outside of work, Lili enjoys getting to know cities via distance races – she’ a 5-time half marathoner and last year completed her first full marathon.
About Justice Through Code (JTC)
JTC is a joint partnership between the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise and Columbia University’s Center for Justice, which provides opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals to begin to grow and develop into the technology leaders of tomorrow. It works to constructively address the damage that mass incarceration has caused by providing equitable access to life-changing career track roles in the tech sector. Based on the disproportionate effect that our justice system has on communities of color, conversations on systemic racism must include mass incarceration and its collateral consequences that prevent returning citizens from employment, housing, and many other opportunities.
About the Charting a Path Forward Series
The series is designed to explore long term solutions to dismantling the foundations of racism and discrimination and to determine areas where the tech industry can go beyond discussion and take action to achieve equal opportunities for all.