Alicia Myles Sheares

My dissertation research explores Black tech entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and Atlanta and seeks to shed light on how Black tech entrepreneurs navigate through entrepreneurial ecosystems. I am currently looking for individuals to participate in my study. Interviews will be conducted in person, take approximately 60-90 minutes, and will center a participant’s entrepreneurial journey, including any possible barriers they’ve experienced. All information shared in the interview is handled as confidentially as possible, and any results from the study will not identify individual respondents.

Participants are eligible if they:

• Live in the Bay Area or Atlanta
• Identify as Black, Bi-racial, or are of African origin
• Are a (co)founder of a tech venture (tech defined as gaming, digital electronics, software, e-commerce, hardware and/or internet related)
• Commit at least 20 hours a week to their venture

In addition to interviewing Black tech entrepreneurs, I would also like to interview leaders of organizations that cultivate Black tech spaces and Black venture capitalists to get a holisitic understanding of the ecosystem.

Eligible participants are encouraged to reach out to Alicia directly if they qualify for the study at: amsheares@berkeley.edu.

More detailed study information

Protecting the identity of my participants is of the utmost importance to me. I fully recognize that the Black tech entrepreneurship community is incredibly small and participants could be identified if I divulged too much information related to the participant's gender, geographical location, and venture. I am safeguarding against this through multiple methods.

First, all personal and business names will be provided with a pseudonym. Second, in some situations, I will either omit potentially identifiable information completely (e.g."One founder mentioned she was able to get venture capital funding only after agreeing to take speaking classes, which she describes as abnormal." -- in this scenario, I have only identified the person's gender, but not the region where she lives, age, or venture information). Third, in other situations, I will change all of the information related to the person (e.g. if a man is a CEO of a cooking app, I will change the description to a woman who is CTO of a fitness app). I will switch up these strategies in the writing phase, making it difficult to identify a participant. Overall, I'm more so interested in patterns of experiences rather than who said what.