Start-ups and Diversity: Lessons from a Non-Traditional Tech Entrepreneur, 2021

Cheryl Contee ’93 spoke about democratizing access to capital to create a new economy that expands prosperity and equity for all.

Cheryl was a co-founder of social marketing software Attentive.ly at Blackbaud, the first tech startup with a Black female founder on board in history to be acquired by a NASDAQ-traded company. Her company Fission helped write the early source code for Crowdtangle, earning sweat equity in a successful social enterprise startup acquired by Facebook in December 2016. She now runs Do Big Things, a digital agency that creates new narrative and new tech for a new era focused on causes and campaigns. She also wrote the Amazon bestselling book Mechanical Bull: How You Can Achieve Startup Success.

Her talk was co-sponsored by the Yale Club of Washington DC, the Yale Black Alumni Association, Accelerate Yale, and 1stGenYale.