Northwestern University Alumni

Regina Gwynn faced many challenges as she worked to grow TresseNoire, a beauty tech startup that provides on-demand styling services for women with textured hair. After meeting fellow Black female tech entrepreneurs Lauren Washington ’11 MBA and Esosa Ighodaro, Gwynn realized she was not alone.

“Our stories were so similar,” she says. “We had started businesses in different industries but experienced the same kinds of problems, including a lack of access to capital, technical talent and advisers, and the resources needed to grow and scale our businesses.”

In 2017, Gwynn, Washington, and Ighodaro created Black Women Talk Tech (BWTT), a collective of 500 Black women tech entrepreneurs with a mission to identify, support, and encourage their members to build profitable businesses. The group’s annual Roadmap to Billions conference connects the women with investors and other tech founders. With chapters in 10 cities in the United States and United Kingdom, BWTT also provides educational workshops and networking opportunities.

Gwynn’s own path to entrepreneurship started in North Carolina, where she began selling Avon products to her neighbors and teachers when she was nine years old. Her father and grandfather had also started their own businesses, prompting a lot of talk of entrepreneurship around the dinner table and planting the seed for running her own business someday.

Building on her interest in fashion and beauty, Gwynn began her marketing career at Macy’s Inc. and earned an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in 2009. The degree helped expand her understanding of how businesses work. Following jobs as a management consultant for Monitor Deloitte and a marketing executive for The Apparel Group, Gwynn turned her dream of entrepreneurship into reality.

In her own words, Gwynn shares how the experience inspired her mission to help Black women tech founders overcome the unique challenges they face when working to build their businesses and what Black Women Talk Tech is doing to address them.

On why she launched a beauty tech startup

I started my business seven years ago. My business partner and I were really tired of how long we had to wait in the hair salon to get our hair done. I would bring a laptop, food, water, books, and a charger—it was ridiculous. It made us discover how many different pain points there were in the textured hairstyling experience.

So we looked at the new on-demand technologies. You could push a button and your groceries would come to you. You could push a button and your car would come to you. Why not push a button and your stylist would come to you? We created the first on-demand, on-location beauty booking app for women with textured hair.

We recently pivoted to become a virtual beauty coach app that creates a customized beauty regimen designed by experts. We’ve been in private beta for the past several months to get it ready for market in 2021.

On starting Black Women Talk Tech

I had received my MBA and found myself to be a fairly decent marketer and brander, but I was not what we call a technical founder. I didn’t have an engineering or coding background, but I knew I had a great idea with a huge market that had very real pain points that technology could solve.

When I started my journey, I met two other women of color (Lauren Washington ’11 MBA, cofounder of Fundr, and Esosa Ighodaro, cofounder of Nexstar). Oftentimes, you’re the only woman in these rooms, conferences, or conversations. And usually, you are the only woman of color.

Lauren, Esosa, and I had already grown our businesses to a certain point, and we had the knowledge and skills to get to step one and two. But how do we get to step seven? How do we get to step 25? How do we get to step 100? That was the impetus behind creating Black Women Talk Tech—to create an environment where women could come and get the skills, education, and networks to power their businesses.

In 2017, we hosted our first conference. We hoped to get 30 or 40 Black women entrepreneurs, and we had over 300 RSVPs. It was then that we realized there were more of us out there. Fast forward to 2020. We hosted our fourth annual conference in New York right before the pandemic hit, with more than 1,300 entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, and technologists.

On the challenges Black women entrepreneurs face in starting tech companies

On average, Black women raise about $45,000 in venture capital funding—that’s less than one percent compared to $1.1 million raised by white men. When we think about the funding that is needed to start a tech company, this disparity starts at the earliest level. The friends and family round is the seed capital that you get for your business from your dad, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, and your friends. Black women often don’t have the networks to build this friends and family round. When you don’t have that initial funding, you have to continue to work, right?

We commissioned a report with Samsung called “The New Face of a Founder: Uncovering BLACK WOMEN as the Next Billion Dollar Founders,” which discovered that 91 percent of Black women entrepreneurs are still working another full-time job while building their startup. This is considered a negative in an investor’s eyes that you haven’t committed yourself to your business.

The report also found that 70 percent of Black women founders are solo entrepreneurs. This is also looked upon negatively by the venture world because you don’t have the networks to find the right people or the funding to find the right team. But the idea that being a solo founder is an indicator of failure or that you’re not prepared for your business to grow is categorically incorrect.

On the need to change the face of a tech founder

We have to change the idea of what a founder looks like, because this is how it manifests in terms of being able to put the resources and bandwidth into your business. We truly believe that investors are missing out on markets that are untapped and on consumers and revenue opportunities that would provide huge returns if they were adequately resourced and funded.

That is how we have gotten quite a few investors to come to Black Women Talk Tech experiences. We’ve actually put 25 to 30 businesses in investment pipelines and helped them either close their rounds or get funding. At our very first conference, we had a founder get her first check. Two years later, she closed one of the largest Series A rounds ever by a Black woman founder. It’s those kinds of stories and clear examples that allow us to feel confident in the work that we’re doing.

On Black Women Talk Tech’s pandemic pivot

The economic fallout of the pandemic has hit Black businesses, and particularly tech businesses, very hard. Figuring out how to pivot, pause, close gracefully, and navigate this completely new environment has been our focus as we retool for next year and focus on resilience and recovery with the companies that are still standing.

All of our in-person conferences and educational workshops moved to a virtual presence this year. We want to offer a platform that provides access to ongoing education on various topics, such as financial literacy.

Some companies are thriving because of the changes in the economy and the changes in consumer behavior. There will still be an opportunity for innovation, and we will continue to change the idea of what an innovator looks like. It’s not just a guy from Harvard or Stanford or Northwestern, but it’s a Black woman in Atlanta or Austin or El Paso who’s creating the next Google or Facebook. We are here to nurture and educate and raise up and support that woman.