Outsiders in the Valley: The Navigational Strategies of Black Tech Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Black tech workers face numerous racial barriers in the technology industry, from their extreme underrepresentation to blocked advancement on the job. These challenges are compounded in entrepreneurship as less than one percent of venture capital dollars - $130 billion in 2018 – went to Black tech entrepreneurs. Yet there are some Black tech professionals who do find success, which raises questions about how they understand and navigate this unequal landscape to achieve their professional goals. I explore this question through an empirical case study of Black tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. By linking insights about strategic action and racial matching, I present a theory of racialized legitimacy - the process through which members of racially minoritized groups must consider both systemic racism and field specific organizational logics in their individual decision making processes. Through in-depth interviews, I find that Black tech entrepreneurs structure their actions in accordance to the process of racialized legitimacy. However, these approaches were not uniform. Instead, strategies varied depending upon one’s placement within the field of Silicon Valley. This article makes numerous contributions to the academic literature. Substantively, it expands current scholarly knowledge on Black entrepreneurship, which to date largely concentrates on those in the service sector. Theoretically, it spotlights systemic racism as a foundational organizational logic within elite fields. In doing so, it also underscores the covert and insidious way that racism reproduces systemic inequality within elite fields.