My name is David Pierre-Louis. I'm from Brooklyn, New York.
I've been born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and I've been living in Seattle for about 14 years now.
I come from a family of entrepreneurs.
I'm Erin Ms. Hamer. I'm one of the co-founders of Black Dot.
Arif Garcell is a serial entrepreneur, which is, I think, AKA, sending them for just a hustler. I've been a hustler since I was a kid.
I figured out how to monetize those weaknesses, whatever the system is, and what entrepreneurship is, and I think our community specifically has a lot of entrepreneurs.
They might not know they're entrepreneurs. They might not use that term.
I think I was more like, it's innate. It's something that I think for the most part you're born with.
I think anybody can own a business, but being an entrepreneur is more of a way of life.
It's how you view certain decisions that you're making. It's about taking risks.
It's about looking for opportunities, but always thinking two or three steps ahead.
It's kind of really hard to explain, because I know for the most part people try to put entrepreneurship in a box,
and I feel like it's not something that's easily put in a box. You can't really teach.
I feel like you can't really teach entrepreneurship. You can teach business.
You can teach people how to own businesses. There are tons of books in regards to how you can view how to run a business successfully.
Being an entrepreneur, it's really about how you approach just doing business. It's almost like a way you approach doing business, and the creativity that comes into doing and making the decisions that you make on an everyday basis.
Being an entrepreneur, it can really be a struggle. You're battling so many things.
One, trying to have enough capital, maybe trying to find a space if you do have an actual brick and mortar model that you have to follow.
I know the big thing for me personally and some of our members who have come, their thing has been having an actual community.
There's just something so powerful about being around like-minded people, being around people who have a similar mission and goal as you.
One is because we already talked about this customer segment issue. When you talk to an investor on any level, most people want to see a business plan or an approach that has a pretty well-defined return on equity or return on investment.
If you don't have that, then you're selling from an emotional place, which most business people don't look from. A tried and true investor is going to care less about the emotional appeal of your pitch.
It's going to come down to, I can put my money over here in this safe vehicle and get a 15% return. Why would I do anything less? I'm not in the business of charity.
I think that is always hard when you think about doing that, raising capital. The second thing is our community faces the challenges that we don't come from money.
You know, Donald Trump would say, my dad gave me a small loan of a million dollars to get started. Nobody in our community makes such statements.
So when you don't come from money, getting money is even harder because you don't have the connections, you don't have the network, you don't even know the people who give the money, you don't know how to get a meeting with the people who give the money.
And most times, somebody from your community who looks like you have achieved enough to be that person, they're not turning around to go back into the community and help it. They've made it.
And so I've made it. I'm good. And let me figure out how to be a gatekeeper.
So when I think of technology, I think of almost time travel because information is able to be transferred so fast and so quickly and so broad. So for example, one of the rallies that took place on 23rd and Union just the other day, I was telling you all about it.
So literally for Draze, the local hip hop artist out here in Seattle, to put a post up on Facebook about this event that's taking place and for over 200 people to show up just from that source alone just shows you how powerful one social media is to technology because all of that is interconnected.
You know, even even payment forms. So I went to, I think it was like pike place market like one of those markets and a place only took cash. And I was like, we are in a time right now when you have so much technology and also you can just take cash because there because there's resources available.
You have PayPal swipers, you have squares. So so so technology is like able is allowing people to get money. And I think that is like the most the most beautiful thing, you know, if it wasn't for the different applications and the different software tools that are out there, I probably wouldn't
be as successful as I have been because from a communication standpoint, that's key in utilizing like various tools to communicate with people that I'm doing business with. For example, like the various Google apps that are out there that allows me to efficiently plan my
day, communicate with people all over the world. No, it's just it's key. At the same time, you know, our web design, I mean, our website, our social media presence, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Instagram, whether it's Facebook, all those things played adequate role.
If I want to be able to be on the same level of other people that are doing business as well too.
Yeah, you can't have this chip on your shoulder of the sources them have to look at specifically how people discover things.
We're living in a digital age. So if you don't have digital endpoints that are up to date that offer a UI and a user experience that people are accustomed to, you know, people get online and whatever your business services, they're punching that
keyword into Google or, you know, another search engine. If you don't have a marketing campaign that within a couple of clicks highlights you as a business, you're being lost in a sauce.
One of the workshops that we have here at black dot is the Africa town accelerator, which is taking place this Saturday and that's the the one on one essential marketing tools. We have a speaker coming out talking to our members about marketing and branding and strategies about how to get your
business out there and such like an oversaturated market, you know, it's like, you know, starting businesses is great and also feel like there's a lot of people starting up something right now.
The whole market seems really saturated. So it's nice to have people who know how to navigate those fields to specifically come to our members. So people who have been our events have really saying how beneficial they were and how how how much they learned.
Whether it's the Chamber of Commerce, you know, there's a lot of programs that kind of find out about the Chamber of Commerce, right? But you have to be present, you know, at those meetings, you have to really be, you know, active, right? Nobody's going to come in and just give you anything, right?
And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunities out there. The city of Seattle offers a lot of different business incentives and there's tax breaks for different companies, but you have to really seek it out. There's a lot of business owners in Seattle, so therefore it's not really just, you know, laid out for you to just take advantage of what you have to really see exactly what you're looking for.
Ultimately, you know, there's books you can read on digital strategy, there are meetups you can go to, there are videos online you can watch. First, I think the first step is knowing you have the problem.
Once you know you have a problem, getting help for the problem is a lot easier than like trying to diagnose the fact that you have the problem.
Once you know that, like, yeah, I'm conscious of this, I need to have this. There's a lot of things you can start reading. If it's a tech-focused business, the city of Seattle has a startup office where they give out resources and online, you can go.
There's plenty of online resources, plenty of startup meetups, angel investor meetups. If you got to get out, right, you're not going to do it from your chair in your living room. You got to get out, you got a network, you got a nurture relationship, you got to know what you don't know.
So you know where to go find it. So when you know what you don't know, you know what to ask.
