From
Jodi Kantor's piece in the NY Times about Stanford's class of 1994
Scott Walker, one of the only African-Americans in the class to try founding a start-up, said in an interview that he regretted spending so much time at his all-black fraternity, which took him away from the white friends from freshman year who went on to found and then invest in technology companies.
Which brings me to the title question:
What were the frat brothers of (name of black frat here) doing where there wasn't enough of them to produce entrepreneurs?
Also isn't it rather stunning that of all the classes of people that he felt were "necessary" to get into technology, it was white people?
Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review.
So three white people got together, bonded and created billion-dollar businesses, one after the other and supposedly a entire black fraternity could not do the same. Again. what were these guys doing?
Let me lay it out: Back in the 1920s (even before, but for our purposes we will use that time frame), There were two major pushes in black America: Integration in the face of NAACP and Nationalism in the face of the UNIA.
The UNIA failed for various reasons including the total unwillingness of black folks to build business with, among and for themselves (to export to others). And so black America went to the latter in which we get to buy, consume and what-have-you, what other people create, build and sell. The purpose of school for black folk is to get a "good job downtown" rather than to create a job uptown that is better than the job downtown.
The "Billion dollar business" creators of the linked piece had the latter attitude.
