Black Girls Code is an organization founded in the Bay Area that aims to teach technology to girls of color. They provide culturally sensitive and welcoming environments for girls ages 7 to 17 to learn about technology. Their mission is to empower these girls to become creators of technology rather than just consumers. They have a vision to train 1 million girls of color to code by 2040. Despite the growing number of organizations focused on teaching coding, Black Girls Code remains the only organization with a singular focus on reaching girls from underrepresented communities. They currently have 7 chapters in the US and one in South Africa, and have reached about 3,000 girls to date. The founder of Black Girls Code shares some lessons she has learned along the way, emphasizing the importance of mentors and defining core values. She also highlights the lack of diversity in the technology industry and the need to level the playing field for women and girls of color.

- The speaker was motivated to start Black Girls Code after realizing the lack of diversity in the tech industry, particularly for Latinas and Native Americans.
- The organization's goal is to train 1 million girls of color to code by 2040.
- They have set big audacious goals, such as reaching 200 girls in a summer program and raising $100,000 through crowdfunding, and have successfully achieved them.
- Building a great team has been a challenge for the speaker, but they emphasize the importance of finding people who share the same purpose and drive.
- The speaker believes in envisioning the future and creating a grand vision for the company, with the goal of seeing former Black Girls Code members starting their own successful tech startups.

The speaker's future vision for their organization is to see a room filled with coders from Black Girls Code. They emphasize the importance of setting goals and following one's passion. The speaker believes that finding one's passion is essential and that focusing on it will lead to the answers to other questions in life.

- Black Girls Code is an organization that teaches technology to girls of color.
- Their mission is to empower girls to become creators of technology.
- They aim to train 1 million girls of color to code by 2040.
- They currently have 7 chapters in the US and one in South Africa.
- The founder emphasizes the importance of mentors and core values.
- The lack of diversity in the tech industry is highlighted.
- The organization has set and achieved ambitious goals.
- Building a great team has been a challenge.
- The speaker envisions former Black Girls Code members starting their own tech startups.
- Setting goals and following one's passion is emphasized.

Kimberly Bryant speaks at Y Combinator Female Founders Conference 2015.

Kimberly Bryant is the Founder and Executive Director of Black Girls CODE, a non-profit organization dedicated to “changing the face of technology” by introducing girls of color (ages 7-17) to the field of technology and computer science with a concentration on entrepreneurial concepts.

Kimberly has enjoyed a successful 25+ year professional career in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries as an Engineering Manager in a series of technical leadership roles for various Fortune 100 companies such as Genentech, Merck, and Pfizer. Since 2011 Kimberly has helped Black Girls CODE grow from a local organization serving only the Bay Area, to an international organization with seven chapters across the U.S. and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Black Girls CODE has currently reached over 3000 students and continues to grow and thrive.

I'm going to need a little bit of audience participation, especially in a room full of female founders.

It's definitely a pleasure to be here with you all this afternoon.

I actually just ran over from Mozilla headquarters because we are doing our very first leadership team summit.

So we have folks here from as far away as New York City to Memphis, Tennessee and the Bay Area.

But this was really a highlight for me to have an opportunity to speak to an audience such as this, which are other female founders that I feel a really strong connection to in our shared paths.

So thank you for allowing me to chat with you a little bit about our story.

Black Girls Code was founded right here in the Bay Area.

And as this picture shows, these are what we like to call our tech divas.

And we think that we are really here, put on this planet, to design the future of technology for women and girls of color.

We started in April 2011, and we really focused our work around creating these opportunities for these girls ages 7 to 17 to come in and learn about technology in a very culturally sensitive and welcoming atmosphere which pairs them with mentors that look a little bit like them.

Our mission is to empower these young women to go beyond just being consumers of technology and become the creators of it.

And our vision is to train 1 million girls of color to code by the year 2040.

And to become the de facto Girl Scouts of technology.

I don't know what the Girl Scouts thinks about that, but we like it.

When we started, I think it's very interesting, we talked a little bit about this in my fireside chat with the team this morning, That when we started in 2011, it was just at about the beginning of the whole learn to code movement.

And really it was even the beginning of the learn to code movement for adults.

Only a few organizations were really focused on teaching youth about coding and technology.

Since that time, I think it's no surprise to all of us in this room, the field has really exploded.

So we have organizations like Code.org, Girls Who Code, Code Now, Codecademy, all focused on teaching young women and young men how to code and how to really break into the technology space.

But despite this exponential growth we've seen in the area, black girls code remains the only organization of its type with a singular focus on reaching girls from underrepresented communities.

Since we started, we have really seen our growth explode, not just here in the Bay Area, but across the U.S.

As well as a chapter in Johannesburg, South Africa.

And we've reached about 3,000 girls to date, and we continue to grow.

So when I tell you those little pieces of snippets of my founder story, it seems like we have it all under control.

When I was getting ready to give this presentation, I was asked to give the presentation, I asked the folks at YC, well, what exactly do you want me to talk about?

And they were like, well, yeah, just tell them your founder story, these are other women, and they would love to hear that.

And That really made me a little bit nervous, because I fundamentally believe that any person that's a startup founder, and excuse my French, I don't know if we know what the hell we're doing.

We're just trying to figure this shit out and see what works.

And that's exactly what's been kind of our path.

So what I thought about what I would talk to you about, I really didn't want to really talk at you.

I just wanted to kind of have a conversation.

Woman to woman, I don't know if there are any men in here, or girlfriend to girlfriend, and tell you a little bit about the lessons I've learned along the way.

And some of it I would say is the hard-knock lessons I've learned along the way.

So I'm going to tell you a couple of things.

Some of them are pulled from this great resource that I would recommend called good to great by Jim Collins.

And I think it has a lot of tidbits that will help any entrepreneur that's starting on this path or in the frickin' of it.

But I also was like, yeah, it's been a long month and I need more help than that.

Fifth grade is great, but that's not gonna get it.

So I was like, I need to call on the ancestors above to help me figure out something to say to these women that would give them a little bit of inspiration on their way.

So for me and our program with Black Girls Code, 1 of the things that is so very important to us is mentors.

And really having those mentors and role models that give you the tip to help you get across your heel.

For me growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I had this 1 mentor that I know that many of you probably know and love And I really felt that all throughout my life, she always had the answer, always had the answer.

So today I'm gonna tell you a few tips from good to great, but I'm also going to pull from the book, a Mother Oprah.

So Mother Oprah has an answer for anything you want to figure out in your life.

And she has been with me all along this path.

So I'm going to start this journey and this tip with using a little from this and a little from that.

The very first thing that I think was 1 of the lessons I've learned along the way is to do what matters most.

In his book, Jim Collins called this defining your core values.

Mother Oprah says always take a stand for yourself, your values, because you're defined by what you stand for.

So for Black Girls Code, we felt it was pretty obvious that what we stood for from the beginning.

We were looking at this space in 2011 and seeing that it wasn't very diverse.

The issue of diversity and inclusion was something that not a lot of people were talking about.

But we knew fundamentally 1 thing that we hold true even today, that if technology is designed mostly by males, males who make up only half of the population, we're missing out on the innovation and solutions and creativity that a broader pool of talent can bring to the table.

So our whole work, everything that we do is really grounded in that belief, in that focus and that value that this work about technology is more than just teaching kids to code.

It really is about equaling and leveling the playing field for everyone, especially women and girls of color.

So this is a little bit more like what we think the industry should look like.

This is what we feel that the new leaders in technology really should look like.

And our goal is to keep that value and focus in everything that we do.

Another key point that Jim Collins brings out in his book is really owning your purpose.

Purpose is so important to the work that you're going to do once you identify what your core values are.

Well, Mother Oprah says it a little bit differently.

She says the work of your life is to discover your purpose and then get on with the business of living it out.

So now this is 1 that's very interesting for me personally, because I always say that I consider myself an accidental social entrepreneur.

And by that I mean that when I started this path in 2011, trust me when I tell you I had no idea I would be running a non-profit 4 years later.

I really was just a mother of a very interesting and really different kid, a daughter, who was interested in gaming and computer science.

And I was looking for something to get her to be a little bit more productive than spending every weekend at GameStop buying the new games.

And I didn't know that this is the path that it would lead me down.

But when I really looked at the industry and some of the things that were really shocking to me at that time in 2011 is that I wasn't really aware how underrepresented women and girls were in the technology industry.

When I received my degree in computer science right at the end of the 80s, as you look at this chart, that is the peak.

So right about 1989, I was able to receive my degree in electrical engineering and computer science at a peak moment for women.

Women at that time received about 36 or 35% of the degrees in computer science.

Since that time, the number has plummeted and is now only about 12 or 14% for women.

But for women of color, that number falls off the cliff even further than what you see on the chart.

African American women receive only 3% of the degrees in computer science.

And for Latinas and Native Americans, it's less than 1%.

So these numbers were really a wake-up call for me.

And I knew at that moment in time I would have to divert my path, which was originally to start a for-profit startup company, to really doing something to change those numbers, to change the reality for my daughter, and to create a more ideal future for her and girls that look like her.

We are really, really focused and see our purpose as changing the face of technology.

Because we really feel that there's more diversity of thought that will also be both a business imperative and a social justice imperative for the industry itself and for our nation as a whole.

And that's embedded in the purpose of our work.

The next thing that Jim Collins mentions that I think is very important is the BHAG.

The BHAG is really finding that big audacious goal and setting a stake in the ground that is what you're going to do.

1 of the things he says and 1 of the things we think is that if that goal is not big enough to make you a little bit scared that you may not reach it, it's probably not big enough.

For Black Girls Code, our goal is really focus on the work that we're doing.

So now I couldn't really find a really good quote for Oprah, Mother Oprah for this, but I did find a great picture.

But as we all know, there's nothing that Oprah does that's not big.

For Black Girls Code, our big audacious goal is to train 1 million girls of color to code by the year 2040.

We picked the year 2040 intentionally because that's the year when the demographics in the U.S.

Will shift so that those folks that we consider minorities now will become the majority.

So our focus is really to prepare these, this generation of young people to move into positions of leadership as well as to have the skills to be competitive in a changing landscape.

That was just a picture of many of the places that we've been.

We haven't quite reached a million yet, but that's the focus.

It's have a reckless disregard for the impossible.

And this 1 is very near and dear to my heart, simply because it took me about 25 years to recognize I really wasn't that great of a corporate employee.

Because I'm really 1 of those folks that kind of likes to break the rules.

So if you tell me I can't do something, That's pretty much a good indicator for making me to try to prove you wrong.

And that is exactly what you need if you're going to be a startup founder.

In terms of 1 of the examples that I would use in this case would be a use case for Black Girls Code would be our summer of code that we started in 2012.

Now in 2012, an interesting thing about Black Girls Code is that we were still like really new.

In 2011, we had 1 pilot, 1 pilot, with about 15 students.

So as we moved into 2012 and we started to have more workshops and we started to have more girls coming into our classes, we started to move into this period of growth, really fast growth.

But we didn't really think we were having the impact that we wanted.

So we were sitting around 1 day and we had a bright idea.

Why don't we take this thing on the road?

We're going to take Black Girls Code on the road, and we're going to go to 6 cities.

And oh, by the way, we're going to do this only in like 1 and a half or 2 months during the summer.

And yeah, we're going to reach 200 girls.

Now, that might not sound like a big goal when I told you we reached 3,000 students, but at that time, the largest class we ever reached was about 30.

So we were like, yeah, we're going to do this, going to reach 200 girls by the end of the summer.

But also it was something that we didn't really think was necessarily going to be possible.

Because at that time it was only myself and 1 employee.

And we thought that this, if we did not get this work done, no 1 was going to do it.

So as we were going on, we were doing all this work.

We did our first workshop in Atlanta, we walk into the room, pow, there's like 85 students in there, we didn't know what to do.

It was like, oh, this is fantastic, they really like this thing, we better get it together.

I told you I'm gonna be really honest, that's true.

And so we're like, OK, well, let's go to the next city.

We ended up at the end of the summer not only reaching 200 students, we reached 1,000.

And that's when we knew that we really had something, that we could have even a greater impact by migrating our organization from a very hyper-locally focused organization to 1 with chapters, and utilizing this very large pool of volunteers we had to execute this work in each and every city.

And if that wasn't enough for 2012, when we came into 2013, we're like, we're going to do it again.

But this time we're going to reach even more girls, going to reach 2,000.

And oh, by the way, we're probably going to want a crowd fund for that and we're going to raise $100,000.

Reckless disregard with only 2 people figuring out we could do that.

We reached $100,000 even when many people took we actually raised about $125,000 and most people thought we wouldn't do it.

So That really set our organization up for exponential growth with just all of the relationships and all of the goodwill and branding that we receive from setting these goals and have a reckless disregard for our potential supposed ability to meet it.

1 of the things that I think if I would tell you any 1 thing that keeps me up at night, it is this 1.

So now, 1 of the things that Oprah says about building a great team is this.

Surround yourself only with people who are going to take you higher.

1 of the things that Jim Collins says in good to great is that starting a company or running a company is a bit like driving a bus.

We are the driver as the CEO or founders, but it's our responsibility to find the right people, the key people to put in those seats.

For me, founding a team or really finding the right folks to be on my team has been 1 of the hardest things that I have done as a startup founder.

Because everyone wants to ride on the bus, but nobody really wants to do all the work that is required to do get the job done.

But it's key for us as founders to be able to sort through finding the person that has the same shared purpose and drive and is the right fit for the company.

I think Another thing that I struggle with as a founder is that generally we come in with the ideas.

We are like the type A number 1 person on team.

But really to succeed as an organization, you have to hire people that are better than you.

More knowledgeable than you, better marketers than you, better sales persons than you, everything across the board.

You cannot be the best person on your team if you want your team to grow and succeed.

Today we're kind of close to getting there in terms of building our team.

This is a team that we just took this picture like yesterday that came from all over the country, but all different occupations to help grow the mission of Black Girls Code.

This 1 I always really like to bring it on home with in terms of really knowing the end in mind or keeping the end in mind and envisioning the future before you get there.

1 of the ways that Oprah describes this is to create the highest, grandest vision for your life.

Then let every single step move you in that direction.

Now while this is a personal goal, I would say This is the same for a company and when you're building your vision to understand where you want to see your company at the end of the line when you reach the goal, when you reach your mission.

For Black Girls Code yesterday, we did a little exercise and we created a future vision looking out to 220.

And this was 1 of the headlines that we thought we would see in 2020.

And it's a headline that is 1 of our aspirational goals.

But these 3 students are currently in their 13 and 14 year old age range in our program.

But this is what we think the headline is going to look like underneath their picture in a few years, in 2020.

Hot tech startup company founded by former members of Black Girls Code.

That's what I'm really looking for and that's what the future vision is for our organization, is to see a room filled with coders like this that are formerly from Black Girls Code, based on the work and the impact that we've been able to do with the organization.

So setting the goal in the mind and having that throughout our conversations as a team is what keeps us moving when the times are rough and things are hard.

Last but not least, this 1 is really 1 that I think we've all heard before.

If you had asked me this 4 years ago, I would have told you that is a cliche.

And I love her like no other, but It was getting on my nerves.

But until it happened to me and I stumbled, literally, I kid you not, until I stumbled across this work, something that I would do even if I didn't get paid for it.

And the way that Oprah describes this passion and being driven by this passion is, if you don't know what your passion is, realize that 1 reason for your sole existence on earth is to find it.

I feel very lucky, really lucky to be placed in this space, in this time, even in this body to be able to drive for this work.

And I have no doubt in my mind that this is what I was put on this earth to do.

If I could tell you any 1 thing, I would tell you to find what is your passion.

Then put All of your energy, all of your spiritual energy, all of your passion, your technology energy, your intellectual energy, and then focusing on that passion.

And then all the other questions will be answered for you.


Speaker 0: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to need a little bit of audience participation, especially in a room full of female founders. So I'm thanking you for that in advance. It's definitely a pleasure to be here with you all this afternoon.

I actually just ran over from Mozilla headquarters because we are doing our very first leadership team summit. So we have folks here from as far away as New York City to Memphis, Tennessee and the Bay Area. And so it's been a pretty hectic week. But this was really a highlight for me to have an opportunity to speak to an audience such as this, which are other female founders that I feel a really strong connection to in our shared paths. So thank you for allowing me to chat with you a little bit about our story.

Black Girls Code was founded right here in the Bay Area. And as this picture shows, these are what we like to call our tech divas. And we think that we are really here, put on this planet, to design the future of technology for women and girls of color. We started in April 2011, and we really focused our work around creating these opportunities for these girls ages 7 to 17 to come in and learn about technology in a very culturally sensitive and welcoming atmosphere which pairs them with mentors that look a little bit like them. Our mission is to empower these young women to go beyond just being consumers of technology and become the creators of it.

And our vision is to train 1 million girls of color to code by the year 2040. And to become the de facto Girl Scouts of technology. I don't know what the Girl Scouts thinks about that, but we like it. When we started, I think it's very interesting, we talked a little bit about this in my fireside chat with the team this morning, That when we started in 2011, it was just at about the beginning of the whole learn to code movement. And really it was even the beginning of the learn to code movement for adults.

Only a few organizations were really focused on teaching youth about coding and technology. Since that time, I think it's no surprise to all of us in this room, the field has really exploded. So we have organizations like Code.org, Girls Who Code, Code Now, Codecademy, all focused on teaching young women and young men how to code and how to really break into the technology space. But despite this exponential growth we've seen in the area, black girls code remains the only organization of its type with a singular focus on reaching girls from underrepresented communities. Thank you for that.

Since we started, we have really seen our growth explode, not just here in the Bay Area, but across the U.S. And abroad. We currently have 7 chapters in the U.S. As well as a chapter in Johannesburg, South Africa. And we've reached about 3,000 girls to date, and we continue to grow.

So when I tell you those little pieces of snippets of my founder story, it seems like we have it all under control. And we know exactly what we are doing. But that is not true. When I was getting ready to give this presentation, I was asked to give the presentation, I asked the folks at YC, well, what exactly do you want me to talk about? And they were like, well, yeah, just tell them your founder story, these are other women, and they would love to hear that.

And That really made me a little bit nervous, because I fundamentally believe that any person that's a startup founder, and excuse my French, I don't know if we know what the hell we're doing. We're just trying to figure this shit out and see what works. And that's exactly what's been kind of our path. So what I thought about what I would talk to you about, I really didn't want to really talk at you. I just wanted to kind of have a conversation.

Woman to woman, I don't know if there are any men in here, or girlfriend to girlfriend, and tell you a little bit about the lessons I've learned along the way. And some of it I would say is the hard-knock lessons I've learned along the way. So I'm going to tell you a couple of things. Some of them are pulled from this great resource that I would recommend called good to great by Jim Collins. And I think it has a lot of tidbits that will help any entrepreneur that's starting on this path or in the frickin' of it.

But I also was like, yeah, it's been a long month and I need more help than that. Fifth grade is great, but that's not gonna get it. So I was like, I need to call on the ancestors above to help me figure out something to say to these women that would give them a little bit of inspiration on their way. So for me and our program with Black Girls Code, 1 of the things that is so very important to us is mentors. And really having those mentors and role models that give you the tip to help you get across your heel.

For me growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I had this 1 mentor that I know that many of you probably know and love And I really felt that all throughout my life, she always had the answer, always had the answer. So today I'm gonna tell you a few tips from good to great, but I'm also going to pull from the book, a Mother Oprah. So Mother Oprah has an answer for anything you want to figure out in your life. And she has been with me all along this path. So I'm going to start this journey and this tip with using a little from this and a little from that.

The very first thing that I think was 1 of the lessons I've learned along the way is to do what matters most. In his book, Jim Collins called this defining your core values. But what does Mother Oprah say? Mother Oprah says always take a stand for yourself, your values, because you're defined by what you stand for. So for Black Girls Code, we felt it was pretty obvious that what we stood for from the beginning.

We were looking at this space in 2011 and seeing that it wasn't very diverse. The issue of diversity and inclusion was something that not a lot of people were talking about. But we knew fundamentally 1 thing that we hold true even today, that if technology is designed mostly by males, males who make up only half of the population, we're missing out on the innovation and solutions and creativity that a broader pool of talent can bring to the table. So our whole work, everything that we do is really grounded in that belief, in that focus and that value that this work about technology is more than just teaching kids to code. It really is an issue of social equity.

It really is an issue of social justice. It really is about equaling and leveling the playing field for everyone, especially women and girls of color. So this is a little bit more like what we think the industry should look like. So look at those faces. And look at that fashion.

Do you see that? This is what we feel that the new leaders in technology really should look like. And our goal is to keep that value and focus in everything that we do. Another key point that Jim Collins brings out in his book is really owning your purpose. Purpose is so important to the work that you're going to do once you identify what your core values are.

Well, Mother Oprah says it a little bit differently. She says the work of your life is to discover your purpose and then get on with the business of living it out. So now this is 1 that's very interesting for me personally, because I always say that I consider myself an accidental social entrepreneur. And by that I mean that when I started this path in 2011, trust me when I tell you I had no idea I would be running a non-profit 4 years later. I really was just a mother of a very interesting and really different kid, a daughter, who was interested in gaming and computer science.

And I was looking for something to get her to be a little bit more productive than spending every weekend at GameStop buying the new games. And I didn't know that this is the path that it would lead me down. But when I really looked at the industry and some of the things that were really shocking to me at that time in 2011 is that I wasn't really aware how underrepresented women and girls were in the technology industry. When I received my degree in computer science right at the end of the 80s, as you look at this chart, that is the peak. So right about 1989, I was able to receive my degree in electrical engineering and computer science at a peak moment for women.

Women at that time received about 36 or 35% of the degrees in computer science. Since that time, the number has plummeted and is now only about 12 or 14% for women. But for women of color, that number falls off the cliff even further than what you see on the chart. African American women receive only 3% of the degrees in computer science. And for Latinas and Native Americans, it's less than 1%.

So these numbers were really a wake-up call for me. And I knew at that moment in time I would have to divert my path, which was originally to start a for-profit startup company, to really doing something to change those numbers, to change the reality for my daughter, and to create a more ideal future for her and girls that look like her. And that's the work of Black Girls Coup. Thank you. We are really, really focused and see our purpose as changing the face of technology.

We say that a lot, but we truly mean it. Because we really feel that there's more diversity of thought that will also be both a business imperative and a social justice imperative for the industry itself and for our nation as a whole. And that's embedded in the purpose of our work. The next thing that Jim Collins mentions that I think is very important is the BHAG. The BHAG is really finding that big audacious goal and setting a stake in the ground that is what you're going to do.

1 of the things he says and 1 of the things we think is that if that goal is not big enough to make you a little bit scared that you may not reach it, it's probably not big enough. For Black Girls Code, our goal is really focus on the work that we're doing. So now I couldn't really find a really good quote for Oprah, Mother Oprah for this, but I did find a great picture. But as we all know, there's nothing that Oprah does that's not big. Everything that she does is big.

For Black Girls Code, our big audacious goal is to train 1 million girls of color to code by the year 2040. We picked the year 2040 intentionally because that's the year when the demographics in the U.S. Will shift so that those folks that we consider minorities now will become the majority. So our focus is really to prepare these, this generation of young people to move into positions of leadership as well as to have the skills to be competitive in a changing landscape. Clicking.

That was just a picture of many of the places that we've been. There and many of the girls. We haven't quite reached a million yet, but that's the focus. Secondly, I really love this 1. I love it a lot.

It's have a reckless disregard for the impossible. And this 1 is very near and dear to my heart, simply because it took me about 25 years to recognize I really wasn't that great of a corporate employee. That was just not my thing. Because I'm really 1 of those folks that kind of likes to break the rules. So if you tell me I can't do something, That's pretty much a good indicator for making me to try to prove you wrong.

And that is exactly what you need if you're going to be a startup founder. In terms of 1 of the examples that I would use in this case would be a use case for Black Girls Code would be our summer of code that we started in 2012. Now in 2012, an interesting thing about Black Girls Code is that we were still like really new. In 2011, we had 1 pilot, 1 pilot, with about 15 students. And that's what we ended 2011 with.

So as we moved into 2012 and we started to have more workshops and we started to have more girls coming into our classes, we started to move into this period of growth, really fast growth. But we didn't really think we were having the impact that we wanted. And we were only here in the Bay Area. So we were sitting around 1 day and we had a bright idea. Why don't we take this thing on the road?

We're going to take Black Girls Code on the road, and we're going to go to 6 cities. And oh, by the way, we're going to do this only in like 1 and a half or 2 months during the summer. And yeah, we're going to reach 200 girls. Now, that might not sound like a big goal when I told you we reached 3,000 students, but at that time, the largest class we ever reached was about 30. So we were like, yeah, we're going to do this, going to reach 200 girls by the end of the summer.

Again, big audacious goal. But also it was something that we didn't really think was necessarily going to be possible. But we didn't care. Because at that time it was only myself and 1 employee. And we thought that this, if we did not get this work done, no 1 was going to do it.

So we didn't care. It was reckless disregard. And we started on our path. So as we were going on, we were doing all this work. We did our first workshop in Atlanta, we walk into the room, pow, there's like 85 students in there, we didn't know what to do.

It was like, oh, this is fantastic, they really like this thing, we better get it together. I told you I'm gonna be really honest, that's true. And so we're like, OK, well, let's go to the next city. We went to Chicago, same thing. We went to Detroit, same thing.

New York. We ended up at the end of the summer not only reaching 200 students, we reached 1,000. Yes. And that's when we knew that we really had something, that we could have even a greater impact by migrating our organization from a very hyper-locally focused organization to 1 with chapters, and utilizing this very large pool of volunteers we had to execute this work in each and every city. And if that wasn't enough for 2012, when we came into 2013, we're like, we're going to do it again.

But this time we're going to reach even more girls, going to reach 2,000. And oh, by the way, we're probably going to want a crowd fund for that and we're going to raise $100,000. Reckless disregard with only 2 people figuring out we could do that. But we did. We reached that goal.

We reached $100,000 even when many people took we actually raised about $125,000 and most people thought we wouldn't do it. So That really set our organization up for exponential growth with just all of the relationships and all of the goodwill and branding that we receive from setting these goals and have a reckless disregard for our potential supposed ability to meet it. 1 of the things that I think if I would tell you any 1 thing that keeps me up at night, it is this 1. Building a great team. So now, 1 of the things that Oprah says about building a great team is this.

Surround yourself only with people who are going to take you higher. 1 of the things that Jim Collins says in good to great is that starting a company or running a company is a bit like driving a bus. So you need a driver. You are the driver. We are the driver as the CEO or founders, but it's our responsibility to find the right people, the key people to put in those seats.

For me, founding a team or really finding the right folks to be on my team has been 1 of the hardest things that I have done as a startup founder. Because everyone wants to ride on the bus, but nobody really wants to do all the work that is required to do get the job done. But it's key for us as founders to be able to sort through finding the person that has the same shared purpose and drive and is the right fit for the company. Because it is a make or break situation. I think Another thing that I struggle with as a founder is that generally we come in with the ideas.

We are like the type A number 1 person on team. But really to succeed as an organization, you have to hire people that are better than you. Better than you. Smarter than you. More knowledgeable than you, better marketers than you, better sales persons than you, everything across the board.

You cannot be the best person on your team if you want your team to grow and succeed. Today we're kind of close to getting there in terms of building our team. This is a team that we just took this picture like yesterday that came from all over the country, but all different occupations to help grow the mission of Black Girls Code. This 1 I always really like to bring it on home with in terms of really knowing the end in mind or keeping the end in mind and envisioning the future before you get there. 1 of the ways that Oprah describes this is to create the highest, grandest vision for your life.

Then let every single step move you in that direction. Now while this is a personal goal, I would say This is the same for a company and when you're building your vision to understand where you want to see your company at the end of the line when you reach the goal, when you reach your mission. For Black Girls Code yesterday, we did a little exercise and we created a future vision looking out to 220. And this was 1 of the headlines that we thought we would see in 2020. And it's a headline that is 1 of our aspirational goals.

But these 3 students are currently in their 13 and 14 year old age range in our program. But this is what we think the headline is going to look like underneath their picture in a few years, in 2020. Hot tech startup company founded by former members of Black Girls Code. That's what I'm really looking for and that's what the future vision is for our organization, is to see a room filled with coders like this that are formerly from Black Girls Code, based on the work and the impact that we've been able to do with the organization. So setting the goal in the mind and having that throughout our conversations as a team is what keeps us moving when the times are rough and things are hard.

Last but not least, this 1 is really 1 that I think we've all heard before. It could be a big cliche. If you had asked me this 4 years ago, I would have told you that is a cliche. Follow your passion. Oh my God, Oprah says that all the time.

And I love her like no other, but It was getting on my nerves. But until it happened to me and I stumbled, literally, I kid you not, until I stumbled across this work, something that I would do even if I didn't get paid for it. And the way that Oprah describes this passion and being driven by this passion is, if you don't know what your passion is, realize that 1 reason for your sole existence on earth is to find it. I feel very lucky, really lucky to be placed in this space, in this time, even in this body to be able to drive for this work. It truly is my life passion.

And I have no doubt in my mind that this is what I was put on this earth to do. If I could tell you any 1 thing, I would tell you to find what is your passion. Then put All of your energy, all of your spiritual energy, all of your passion, your technology energy, your intellectual energy, and then focusing on that passion. And then all the other questions will be answered for you. Thank you.

Thank you. You

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Kimberly Bryant Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015