 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined today by Catherine Finney. She is the founder and managing director of Digital Undivided, a social enterprise. She's also the general partner in the Harriet Fund, which is a pre-seed venture fund for Black and Latina-led women's startup companies. Welcome, Catherine, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, it's good to be here. So, you are a real Renaissance woman in the tech industry. You are a social media visionary, you are an investor, you're an entrepreneur, you've worn many hats. Let's start at the beginning of your career and your first startup, Budget Fashionista. I love it. Well, when I started the Budget Fashionista, this was way back in the stone ages of 2003. Many of us can remember that far back. Barely, yeah. Barely, right? We were all just infants at that time. Right, exactly. And I started the blog really as a hobby. At that time, very few people had figured out how to monetize the web. So, Amazon wasn't doing so hot, Google had just came out with AdWords and AdSense, so no one had figured out how to really monetize content on the web. I don't think- Still something that people are struggling with that companies are probably- Still something people are struggling with. There's really no ad tech, even at that point. So, when I started, I started off as a hobby and within six months of starting, I had an interview with Associated Press that was interviewing people who were traveling to go shopping. At that time, most of the online publications did not really invest in online content. And so, a lot of their content came from new services like AP and other folks like that. So, this AP article went everywhere. And I'm often reminded of that Ode IBM commercial where, you know, a company gets started and as soon as they get on the web, they have one customer and then in five seconds they have a thousand. That was a good ad. They have like a million and they're like, oh no, what are we going to do? That's what happened to us. But it was just you, or did you have a team? I didn't have a team, but I had a husband. Okay. Okay. Almost as good. One of the tips I always give to other women in tech is marry someone useful. And I was lucky because I married someone who had a skill set. And my husband was in tech as well. And so he was the one who originally suggested that I start a blog. He was your IT guy. A glorified IT guy, yes. He was, yes. I outsourced to him. But I did learn how to call myself. I came from a STEM background. I was an epidemiologist, so I was a scientist. And we really built it together. And what was interesting, this was before the cloud. So our servers kept crashing and crashing and crashing. And there weren't a lot of options when you were at the consumer level, because most of the server services for enterprise. And we weren't enterprise by any stretch of imagination at that point. So it was really difficult. We were always like patching things together to keep the site up. And it wasn't until later that we discovered rack space and dream host and things like that. But in the beginning, it was really, really crazy. And so the site just sort of took off. We also benefited from the fact that in 2004, the world of blogging exploded because of that presidential election. It was really interesting to see how it's changed quite a bit since then. But in 2004, it was the big presidential election and blogs became the forefront because of the whole Swiftboat thing. So all of a sudden I found myself at the beginning of this sort of industry, of web content, and it was a really interesting time to sort of be around. But then you ended up selling the budget fashionista, which made you one of the first black women to ever sell a startup. Yeah, we were fortunate to grow and scale it to the point where it was a value to someone else. And we sold it to a Midwestern tech company that was interested in the community that we built, the traffic. We also had really strong partnerships with brands because we were one of the early companies discussing budget. Again, in 2003, not many people were on a budget. In 2008, everyone had to be on a budget. And so we found- There were sessionistas, yes. There were sessionistas. Everyone had to be on the budget. And so that put us in a very unique position to really capitalize and develop relationships with brands. So for us, it also made it a valuable property because we had these long-term relationships with the brands who were buying ads at that point. And those brands were the Targets and the Walmart and the TJ Maxx. Those were the only people who had money. So it became a valuable commodity to the person you sold it to. Very much so. So talk about your research, hashtag project Diane. How did that come about? Well, after I sold TBF, I came on to blog her, which is an organization that represents millions and millions of women social media folks and starts from a different side. Blogger was much larger. Blogger took venture funding. I didn't take venture funding for TBF. So I saw it from a different way. And blogger later sold too. So I was a part of two women-led startups that had exits, which was a really interesting position. And while I blog her, I was attending a lot of conferences and talking about being a woman in a startup space. And notice that I was often the only black woman and sometimes even the only woman and thousand person conferences. And I was like, what the hell is going on? Like this doesn't look like America in any way, shape, or form. And also particularly with your customer base. And the customer base, knowing particularly how women and people of color engage online at much higher rates, it just didn't make any sense. And so I had the idea to start a conference called Focus 100, which was just to gather black and Latina women like myself, who were in the startup space, were in tech. And blogger was so amazing. They gave me sort of the programmatic strategy. Also gave us a little bit of funding. Andreessen Horowitz was also a major early supporter, Ogilvy, and we had this conference and from there things really grew. We started in 2012 with just a day and a half conference. And by the time we had our final focus, it was an actual accelerator program. It was six weeks virtual, two weeks in person. And so as a result of that, we wanted to do something that was a little bit more larger, something that was a little bit more big. And so we knew in order to sell it to partners, we need to have data. So we went and we looked and we looked everywhere. And as a scientist, I'm not always interested in creating my own data if someone's already done it. What we found is no one had collected the data. No one had thought to quantify what was happening with black and Latina women. In fact, no one had really thought to quantify even what was happening with women. Because when we first looked at CrunchBase, there were statistics about everything except gender. And we were like, well, how do we, how are we going to be able to assess growth in the industry if you don't have a baseline? And so we went and we looked, we looked at CrunchBase, we looked at MatterMark. We looked at all of these different databases to try to find this data and no one had it. So we started our own research project called Project Diane. And Diane is named for it. Diane Nash, she was one of the civil rights icons. She was really an architect of the civil rights movement that most people don't know about. So in homage to Diane, you are looking at the gender breakdown of these women. And what did you find? Let her give us some sexy statistics. They were not really sexy, they were really kind of sad. When we first got them, we kind of like had tears. We were like, oh, it's really nice. It's hard out there for a system. But what we found was after we went through CrunchBase, we went through MatterMark, all the databases, is that we found that Black women received 0.2% of all venture funding, which is scary considering we're about 7% of the US population. We also found on average that Black women were raising $36,000 of outside investment for their startups compared with the $1.3 million that failed startups, mostly led by men, mostly led by white guys raised. And this $36,000 was mostly friends and family? Mostly friends and family. Some of it was debt, definitely, because the SBA and other organizations were the ones funding. Most of it was not equity-based investment. And so we realized that even the most talented Black women-led startups were raising less than even the worst startups raised by white guys. And that really shocked us. So you have this aha moment, that things are as bleak as they are. And that was really what led you to form, did. Digital undivided. Well, digital divided was formed before then, but what it did was it highlighted that there was a problem. And it's very difficult to deny a problem once you've quantified it. The numbers speak. Data's person, I have never met a spreadsheet I didn't love. So for me, it was like, here it is, the problem is in front of everyone. Now what are we going to do? And so we didn't just record the data, we asked, okay, why is it that way? And what we found, there was three major reasons. It was lack of training, lack of network, and lack of capital. And so we created the Big Innovation Center and the Big Accelerator Program to address those sort of three pillars of the reason why there weren't more Black and Latino women in the startup community. So where are you now with this accelerator, with this training program, what is going on now? So we opened the first Big Innovation Center, it's located in downtown Atlanta, and it's really focused on fostering innovation within the Black and Latino communities. While we focus on those communities, everyone's welcomed and we've had a lot of diverse people come because it's fun and we have Oprah Wallpaper, because why not? Oprah Wallpaper, I love it, I love it. And we're also in the middle of the first Big Accelerator Program, which is a accelerator program for high-growth startups led by Black and Latino women. We have approximately five companies doing things ranging from machine learning and AI to e-commerce and social media. And it's been really fascinating. The reason why we focus on the group is that we were looking at some of the larger accelerator programs, the Wine Combinators, the 500 startups, the Techstars, and we saw that it was really dismal numbers in terms of diverse women. We also looked at women-led startup accelerators and we found that their numbers were actually worse than the Wine Combinators and Techstars. That's not what you would think intuitively, right? They were actually worse. So we knew that there was some disconnect happening. We had close to 100 applications to our first cohort of the Big Accelerator Program. It was incredibly hard. One of the things that we did was in order to address the capital issue, knowing that most startups get their first major tranche of funding from friends and family, but we knew in our community we don't really have friends and family who can give money like that, is that we start the Harriet Angel Network. And Harriet Angels gives the first sort of, call it the confidence money to companies that say you can do this and we believe in you. So every- And I think I know who Harriet is named for, but- Yes, it's named for Harriet Tubman, who was this amazing visionary, did all this great stuff, is going to be in the 20, so we thought why not, you know? Yes, that's right. When it helped give them some Tubman as President Obama would say. Yeah, it's great. And so we give $20,000 to all the companies that go through the Accelerator Program. It's an equity-based investment. For many, it's their first equity-based investment. And that's important because they learn what is expected in terms of an equity-based investment and it prepares them for other folks to come in and give money. And then we also have the Harriet Fund, which is the first fund dedicated to investing in black Latina women founders. It's a $20 million fund. It's led by Gaila Jennings-Alburn, who's a former executive from JPMorgan Chase. I want, we need to wrap up here, but I want to ask you just, we are here at Grace Hopper. It's an enormous conference. There are, you know, you talked about the dearth of women and women of color in the technology industry. And yet here we are, there's a lot of them here. And so what is it like to be here, be part of this, feel the energy? Well, I think what is great is because gender is not a factor, you can just be smart. And I think that's probably the strongest sentiment. I can just be smart and talk business, and I don't have to explain why I'm here and why someone like me is sitting here and talking to you. I think that's probably the strongest sense I get from Grace Hopper is that I can just be smart and brilliant and all that other stuff is kind of left outside on the streets of Houston. Great, I love it, that's smart, that's smart. That's a good answer. Catherine Finney, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight. This is the Cube Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. We'll be back after this break.