Читать книгу Upper Hand - Sherrell Dorsey - Страница 16

To ignore the value of the “mom and pop” shop job experience is a missed opportunity. To discount communities shaped by inner cities, naming innovation solely to large campuses or downtown environments, misses the point that talent and skill are often cultivated in the community. And that's also from where innovation can stem.

I grew up alongside nerdy Black kids whose value was skipped over too often—the neighbors' kids, teaching themselves how to turn their home computers into beat machines, making their own music, and selling beats across marketplaces while helping their mothers pay the electric bill.

They didn't have space camps to go to or homes that were adjacent to doctors' or software engineers', but they existed and made do with what tools they had. They launched informal companies or helped the ones in their community, just like I did.

A startup isn't just what happens in a garage, dorm room, kitchen table, or tech conference. It's what builds a community, wherever that might be. And I think we wholeheartedly miss the opportunity to be transformative within our communities when we dismiss the opportunities all around us. From the coffee shop to the daycare center to plumbing services, we skip out on very necessary parts of the American economy when we hyperfocus and invest solely in things that will be high growth and high tech. Until robots can watch our children for the day, development needs to happen across the board because civics matters and ping‐pong tables in the conference room aren't and perhaps shouldn't be the only reality toward upward mobility.

Never, in the history of ever, do we name the inner city or lower or disadvantaged communities as hubs for innovation, despite the creators who live there. We don't name a science building, drop 3D writing spaces into the place, or see them as anything but city problems.