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Oakland, Calif.'s Startup Weekend Promotes Latinos in Tech

More than 130 people participated in a 54-hour crash course that concluded with pitch sessions to several venture capitalists and successful tech entrepreneurs.

(TNS) -- Before Carolina Huaranca became a venture capitalist, before she came to the Bay Area, before she founded her first startup, she was a mentor struggling to understand why the honor student she was helping could not read at his grade level.

He was 14, a driven Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx, not so different than the members of Huaranca’s Peruvian family. But, she quickly realized, he read like an 11-year-old.

Huaranca, who credits her own success to her parents’ moving their family to an affluent neighborhood with good schools, said it was the first time she saw how important access can be.

It’s what pushed Huaranca to quit her job on Wall Street to create an education tech startup for young children and, eventually, found the national network of Girls Who Code. It’s also what pushed her to assemble a team to bring a new kind of startup weekend to the Bay Area — one focused entirely on Latino entrepreneurs.

The three-day event, called “Startup Weekend Oakland: Latinx Tech Edition,” brought more than 130 participants to the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Oakland over the weekend for a 54-hour crash course in building a startup that concluded with pitch sessions to several venture capitalists and successful tech entrepreneurs.

For many who attended, it was the first time they had ever met someone from a similar background, ethnicity or experience who works in tech.

“The ratio was totally flipped, and it was so powerful to walk into this room and 80, 90 percent of the people there” are Latino, said Lili Gangas, the chief technology community officer for the nonprofit Kapor Center, which promotes diversity in tech. Gangas, who emigrated from Bolivia when she was 6 years old, began her career in aerospace engineering and helped organize the startup weekend.

Latinos, currently about 18 percent of the U.S. population, are a rapidly growing group with increased buying power. Nielsen, a global data-tracking firm, has said that Latino customers represent a $1.5 trillion market.

And those numbers only stand to grow. By 2060, population estimates show that 30 percent of Americans will be Latino.

About 13 percent of undergraduates who earn degrees in computer science, computer engineering or information studies are black or Latino, according to 2015 data from the Computing Research Association. But at tech companies in and around the Bay Area, they remain a small minority.

Only about 6 percent of the people working at tech firms are Latino, compared with the 22 percent of workers in industries outside of tech, according to an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report released this year.

Google and Facebook, two of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley, trail even further behind. About 2 percent of Google’s employees identify as Latino. At Facebook, it’s 4 percent.

The reasons for this deficit are numerous and hotly debated.

Some point to loaded language in job descriptions that discourage black and Latino applicants. Others, including Facebook’s head of diversity, have pointed to issues of access that begins in early education.

In California, more than half of all K-12 students are Latino, but just about 7 percent of AP computer science test takers were, according to test data from 2012.

But, Huaranca said, there’s more to it than that.

When tech companies talk about a pipeline problem, she said, they’re usually talking about K-12 and college education. But the pipeline, she said, doesn’t stop there.

“It’s not linear,” Huaranca said, noting when people of color leave tech because they feel unwelcome or unsupported, that, too, is a “pipeline problem.”

It’s why she believes having events like the “Latinx” startup weekend matter.

Between 1990 and 2013, the number of Latino-owned businesses more than tripled from 321,000 to 1.4 million, according to a 2014 report by Partnership for a New American Economy. But in tech, less than 1 percent of venture-backed startups have a Latino founder, according to a 2010 data analysis by CB Insights.

It’s not that they don’t have ideas, Huaranca said.

“I am actually the product of a startup weekend,” Huaranca said. “I saw myself for the first time as a tech entrepreneur.” Now, she said, she’s aiming to bring that experience to others.

“Latinx” (lah-teen-ex) is a word Huaranca and her colleagues chose on purpose. It is a gender-neutral term gaining popularity among young Latinos for its inclusiveness.

The startup weekend, which drew dozens of would-be entrepreneurs from across the country, yielded several startup ideas that, Gangas said, pointed to some of the key issues facing Latino people including financial management, finding jobs and mentors, homelessness and the preservation of culture.

“Entrepreneurs tend to scratch their own itch,” Huaranca said.

The winning enterprise, named Prezta (a riff on “prestar,” the Spanish word for borrow), was made to outline clear legal terms in loans of $1,000 or more between friends and family members. The app would track payments and help with negotiating the terms of the loan, including the ability to promise payment in services — in addition to cold, hard cash.

“It was very, very refreshing to work with a group of people who not only looked like me, but were bringing up issues and experiences I could relate to,” said Pamela Martinez, 25, one of Prezta’s founders. “And that’s something I don’t always feel in tech spaces when they don’t have a lot of underrepresented minorities. This felt a lot more like home.”

©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.