Meet 26 Letters | Episode 2

Meet 26 Letters | Episode 2:

The fact that it's personal for me is actually a good thing. It adds value to what I bring to the table and it adds a certain level of urgency to do it all as well. 

This is the Lunar Startups Podcast and I'm your host, Twila Dang.

 Lunar Startups launched its first cohort in the fall of 2018. A startup accelerator determined to create better opportunities for women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color. But at the heart of this work were six companies—a group of entrepreneurs representing a variety of fields—coming together with the support of Lunar Startups to take their businesses to the next level. We'd like you to meet them. We asked the cohort Founders to share the origin stories of their businesses.

Carranza: My name is Caroline Carranza. And my company is called 26 Letters. 

So 26 letters is actually supposed to be a stand-in name. It wasn't supposed to be the permanent one, but the idea behind it is I'm multilingual and I really believe strongly in the power of language. So within this context we have 26 letters—I have 26 letters to arrange or rearrange to create language that can be inclusion or it can be exclusionary in practice and there's just so much power in those 26 letters. 

And so really that's what we want to pull out. That by the end of the day...it's about communication. It's about the language that we use. It's about being really wise about how we put those together in order to build communities that we want to be in. 

When I decided I wanted to just go out on my own after working in the corporate space for a few years, my goal was to really just kind of take some time and relax and just kind of regroup and recharge. In the process, I had always been involved somehow in diversity inclusion efforts within various organizations. Some that I was in and some that I just made connections through either speaking engagements or just being out and about. 

I started doing those types of speaking engagements about a year out of college. When we immigrated to the US, I went from...being a Kenyan in Kenya to being a Black person in the US. I was, I think 11 at the time—something around that. I think other African immigrants who came around that same age would probably attest to...you come from this place where it's more—I was a Kikuyu in Kenya, right, to like a Black person the US and it's very intense experience. I think that’s the best way to describe it. I was at a very young age. And so in addition to [that] I had an accent, you know, my food was weird. There's just like a lot of things in addition to just like teenage years, right? And so, I saw American studies when I went to college—I saw it as a way, as an opportunity to understand what that really meant. 

And so when I learned a little bit more about what American studies was, it felt like a really good place for me to kind of do that self-exploration and to understand a little bit better about the context that I was now in. So when I finished college, I went on to work in the tech space in general. Being one of the few one of the only women or Black women in those spaces, I often got questions like “How do you think we should do work around DEI—Diversity Equity inclusion?” or “Do you know anyone who would be interested in working here?” Just those types of questions. And I was already starting to be in community, especially with a lot of the local women who are in technology. 

Through that I, without knowing, started kind of semi-consulting, right? Whether it was in the companies that I was in or or other organizations around how they could do their work. In the process, because I found that I really wanted to be in a space that let me be my full self, I ended up doing a lot of my own work to make myself more knowledgeable around the topic, right? So like what does inclusion look like in the workplace? And again with this really strong academic foundation, I'd read a lot of really great theory around, you know, whether it was code switching or just thinking about socialization—just all these different pieces. And they really came into play when I was connecting it to the workplace in a very practical way.

So taking all of these theoretical concepts into practice was something that was really exciting. Somehow I was accidentally applying my school to make my life easier and better. That was kind of my perspective around it. And so at some point though, I really needed to just kind of take a break and take a moment for myself and I just figured I was going to you know—I'm a software developer; I'm self-taught—so I just figured I was going to do a little bit of that while I took a slight break. 

I still kept having conversations with folks about you know, what they could do within their organizations. And so I started to take that a little bit more seriously as a potential business opportunity. Through that, I was able to get some really great insight and knowledge as to how to basically sort of put a process behind these efforts that worked more consistently across a number of different types of organizations. Then I built the product for myself so that way it could help sustain some of the work that I was doing with those clients. At some point I was like might as well just, you know, give it to the clients and that was kind of the journey through that process. 

Yeah, a lot of it was very much volunteer-driven. At the time, you know, I was fine with that in part because a lot of the things that I was learning I found to be really useful and really interesting information that I wanted to share out as much as possible. But then I also had...a job to actually sustain my living, so that was nice. 

You know, the media that you consume outside of the US—and I'll speak to my experience at the time in Kenya—the American media was very biased. So, the perception that I had about what it meant to be American and what it meant to be white in particular than what it meant to be Black were basically whatever was coming out of the 90s and late 80s which you can imagine was what it was. 

So when I came here and having that label placed on me—also I was super young right? It was something that was hard for me to identify because it wasn't actually like the thing that I identify with. I'm kikuyu and people are telling me that I'm Black and that's like a very particular type of experience. But then also I was just like—it just didn't feel right. Like those representations didn't feel right. And so a lot of the lot of my young experience was unlearning a lot of those representations and a lot of those biases that I had consumed when I was even younger. 

So this is my early teens when I'm having to figure all this stuff out without the language, without the framework, without the support. I think the way that it shows up in the work today is that I believe very strongly that with the right structure and with the right resources, you can address both the systematic issues but then also the day-to-day unconscious implicit biases that we hold...that keep us from being able to see people as people. A lot of that...comes from being in a context where I got these very particular messages about things and having to come here and do the work of unlearning it without the structure in place.

I will say that it was...easier because even when consuming a culture you're just like ‘this doesn't feel right’. Already, by default you’re like ‘this is weird’. But then also just, you know, forming relationships and friendships and building community in those spaces also alters that perspective as well. And so I really believe that system change is possible and I believe that system change is possible in a much shorter period of time than we usually allow for. I don't think that it takes five years to address policies that are inequitable. I think it takes tools and resources and you can do it in a much faster time period. A lot of the tools and resources that I got—especially in college—I was able to apply again. A lot of that theory to practice shows up a ton in the work. 

We'll be right back after the break. 

Welcome back to the Lunar Startups Podcast. 

Carranza cont’d: So, there’s this woman here, locally, in particular. She was a champion for me from the very beginning. There were a couple of other people that I kept in connection with to just help me figure out the day in and day out of this potential business. Danielle was one of them. This was all when she was over at a different organization. And then there were just friends and family, who are in my space that really were instrumental in allowing me to show up with confidence and show off this work.

I was a very, very shy kid. I'm pretty sure my parents didn't think I could talk until I was like seven. I just like literally wouldn't say anything and then in middle school,

I had a teacher who basically was like, ‘I think you should learn how to talk. You should learn how to talk in front of people’. Just because I was super shy and he was like whatever topic you want. [He said] ‘Everyone's gonna have to do this, but I'm really going to mentor you in particular’. He really wanted me to succeed in that class. 

And so I really wanted to talk about elephants. So I wrote an entire report on elephants and why they're amazing and why they're fantastic. They really are and if anyone out there has not done it, just [do] a quick Google search on elephants—they’re amazing. 

I did that and it turned out so well. A lot of it was [because] I just practiced so much. I really paid attention to the details and the nuances and my voice. This was a really long time ago. Going up there and giving the talk and having so [many] people just be fascinated with what I was, you know, saying about elephants. All the other students in the class gave me the confidence to be like, ‘huh? I really like that feeling’. I like that feeling of sharing something that I thought was interesting and getting people's feedback and their questions. That was really...kind of...my first step into any sort of public speaking. 

I still get super nervous. I’m in a panel later today and I'm already like ‘oh my God, what am I gonna wear?’ I think as an adult, it's completely different because there are so many more factors to it. So now when I think about public speaking, it's not only ‘what am I going to say?’ It's about ‘what am I going to wear?’ and ‘how am I going to make sure that I don't drift off?’. I say a lot of ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ and ‘yeahs’. How do I get rid of those? How do I stay conscious in my speech while still being able to catch up with whatever it is that I'm going to say? See, I just kind of did it right there. 

So yeah, it's different. It's different but I definitely still get nervous. I think I get more nervous now as an adult.

A couple months ago, I helped facilitate a training with a mentor of mine. He's an immigrant as well. He's Black but from Latin America. He talked a lot about the biases that he had, especially towards African Americans when he moved here to the US. Same thing, right? The media that we consume abroad is just...yeah. When he was that honest about himself, everyone else in the room...you felt the air just change. People felt like they could really talk about the challenges that they're facing without necessarily having to worry about being precise or exactly perfect or in the language of all those things. 

We also created a space where we allowed everyone to also, you know, correct other people and give feedback that was critical but meaningful. I think the key thing is being really honest from a personal perspective and also being able to talk about some of the biases that you might hold and talk about how you're addressing them. I think as a person in this space and as someone who's working with other organizations on this, sharing your own journey and your own processes and showing that you're a human, right? 

I don't know everything. I have tons of mentors and other folks in this work as well and they also don't know everything. [We’ve created] that space where people can really be themselves and be human. Providing that structure where we are here to give each other feedback and to be critical of some things helps them talk more honestly about the challenges that they're facing. Because I think the hardest thing around this work and, especially in the midwest because that's my experience, is that we don't actually want to say that we hold biases that are prejudiced towards certain people. 

So if that's not stated as a fact, then you can't really go anywhere. Often times I [hear people say] ‘We're actually really inclusive. We’re pretty amazing or just working on this one little tiny thing’ and it’s just like ‘Well, I can't help you. Like, clearly you're perfect. You got it’. So giving people a space to be more honest about that, I think, is more of the challenging thing. I think this work allows me to encourage other people to go into the spaces and the sectors that I really care about, which is technology. Diversity is a huge challenge in technology. I can't, in good faith, encourage other people to go into it knowing full well the numbers around how quickly they often jump out of it—people who look like me. 

 The fact that it's personal for me is actually a good thing. It adds value to what I bring to the table and it adds a certain level of urgency to it all as well. I’m proud of what we've been able to do so far. I'm proud of where we are. I'm excited about the feedback that we get from people who are using our platform and using our services. 

I was just on a client call for a, you know, really large company. I think they gross like 300 million dollars or something a year. To hear from an organization with that [many] resources—that they're excited about the strategies that we're initiating. They're just like, ‘This is fantastic. We finally have a journey for how to do this’. Now in the back of my mind, a company with that many resources behind them, should. Then again to the other side, it just means that we're really bringing something special and valuable to the table. Being that they're super excited to roll out their equity initiative—I love hearing that. I love hearing that people are excited about the equity work that they're doing. I love hearing that it feels accessible to managers who don't know how to talk about this, so instead they just never talk about it. They just never talk about equity. 

So, knowing and seeing that they're excited because they feel like this is accessible, this is something that they can actually speak to...we're providing them the tools and the resources and the language and the types of questions that they need to discuss—that's really exciting to me. And that makes me feel really proud. It makes me want to wake up. It makes me want to go right now back over to work and get going. 

Music plays.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. 

If you'd like to learn more about Lunar Startups or apply for an upcoming cohort, check out their website at lunarstartups.org. 

We'd like to extend a special thank you to the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media, Knight Foundation, and Osborn370 for their continued support of Lunar Startups. 

This podcast is a Matriarch Digital Media Production. Executive producers: Twila Dang, Brittany Arneson, and Josette Elieff.