Sukhinder Singh is cofounder of a newly minted startup called Yodlee. A foreign-born national whose family hails from India, Singh offers a more nuanced view of race in the Valley. She worked on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch (MER) and at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. before going to work for Junglee, a company started by four Indians and later bought by Amazon. She declares the Valley "the most diverse environment I've ever been in my life." But when asked if that mix includes many blacks and Latinos, she pauses. "From my perspective, blacks and Latinos are a little under-represented," she says. "But I don't think that has anything to do with discrimination. The Valley is a place where if you have a good idea, your race or your gender - or even your age - doesn't matter. This is an environment where you are judged on the merit of your ideas rather than on the color of your skin. If a meritocracy exists anywhere in this country, then it exists in Silicon Valley."
Yet ask someone black or Latino about the vaunted Valley meritocracy and the chance is good you'll hear something like a snort. "That's just total BS," says Dwayne Walker, CEO and chairman of Seattle-based ShopNow.com. "Anyone who says that the Valley, or the Internet space generally, is this great meritocracy is just full of crap. The reality is that if you're black or Latino - or if you're a woman, for that matter - it's that much harder to prove yourself, starting with funding. This notion that anyone, irrespective of race and gender, can get a meeting on Sand Hill Road is nonsense. The bar is that much higher for African Americans, Latinos, women and other minorities. If you're black or Latino or a woman, every step of the way it's a challenge just to get people to take you seriously."
Walker, who is black, is not someone who could be dubbed a firebrand. An engineer by training, he tends to carefully measure his words, deliberately selecting softer words over harsh ones. Throughout the interview, he tempers most of his comments with cautious qualifiers: "The tech industry hasn't necessarily made as concerted an effort as it should and could to reach African Americans and Latinos." But the term "meritocracy" clearly pushes a button, prompting Walker, ShopNow's founder, to unload about the travails he faced in the company's early days (when it was called TechWave): "The number of extra hoops I was put through. The number of times people wanted me to call them back. The challenges at every step. I was prepared for tough questions. I'm mindful that starting a company is extremely difficult. I'm talking about questions that were polite ways of getting at my character.
"Keep in mind I spent seven years at Microsoft (MSFT), so I had that magic credential. I at least could get in the door. I've spoken to enough African-American entrepreneurs to know I had it lucky," Walker says.
He doesn't doubt that anyone with a "9" or a "10" of an idea, regardless of race or gender, will receive ample venture funding. Nor does he doubt that someone with a "5" idea or below won't be getting funding from a respectable venture firm, no matter who might be presenting the business plan. For Walker, "it's the 6s, 7s and 8s when things get interesting. Who gets that money? That's when the filtering starts. That's when people wonder if they can take a chance on someone like you. ... It's my view that when an idea ranks between a 5 and 8, the playing field is not level for African Americans, Latinos and women."
How invisible are blacks and Latinos inside Internet companies? One black engineer, who works at a well-established Internet firm that employs thousands of people, not only insisted on anonymity for himself but also declined to allow his company to be identified. His reasoning? So few African Americans are on staff that he feared it would be obvious he was the one who had talked. "I can go a week or more at work and never see anyone African American or Latino," he says. "I mean zero, not a one." Adds a Latino who works for a large Valley-based software company: "The only time I see someone who looks like me [at work] is if a group of us goes out to lunch and there's a busboy clearing off dishes."
For his part, Walker has learned that when he gives a speech he can never say anything of substance within the first few minutes because people are distracted by the color of his skin. "You can see it on people's faces," says Howard Barokas, who heads ShopNow's outside PR agency. "It's like they're radios trying to tune in through all this static. All they're thinking is, 'He's black. Dwayne Walker is black.'"
Adds Walker: "As rare as it is to see a black CEO in the corporate world, it's rarer still to see a black CEO in the Internet space. And rare as it is to see someone black, it's even more rare to see someone Latino."
Conventional wisdom is that there just aren't enough blacks and Latinos to hire. One white CEO of a hot Internet startup (he, too, would speak only on the condition that neither his name nor his company were identified) repeats the enduring cliche that it doesn't matter if you're black, Latino or green with a set of Martian antenna - if you can code, you'll be hired in the current climate. His and others' assumption is that the lack of blacks and Latinos inside technology companies only reflects the lack of black and Latino engineers in the wider world. "We can't hire people if we don't get their resumes," he says.
It may be true that there are fewer blacks and Latinos in college engineering programs. According to George Campbell Jr., president and CEO of the New York-based National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, "African Americans, Latinos and American Indians comprise 30 percent of the college-age population and one-fourth of the workforce, but still receive less than 3 percent of the [engineering] Ph.D.s and only slightly more than 10 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering." One trade group, the Information Technology Association of America, estimates that African Americans, although they make up roughly 10 percent of the U.S. workforce, account for only 5 percent of the country's computer programmers. Similarly, around 4 percent of the country's programmers are Latino, while being 9 percent of the overall workforce.
