AfroTech Conference News

“Competition is for losers,” said Earn Your Leisure host Rashad Bilal at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference .

Bilal joined his business partner and co-host, Troy Millings, on the main stage for a live recording of the “State of Black Business,” featuring Blavity founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun, to discuss the importance of collaboration in the Black community. He argued that not embracing that mindset can stem from ego and encouraged people to become more selfless.

“Collaboration is the only way. … You don’t want to partner with somebody because you want your name on it. [You’re] about to lose $100 million…,” Bilal explained. He later added, “My goal every single day is to see how I can make other people money … Because if you make money, then if I made you money, you’re gonna make sure that I make money.”

Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley believes the people most affected by a lack of policy should be the ones best positioned to change it.

Pressley represents Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District and serves on the Financial Services Committee, which covers issues ranging from Wall Street to housing affordability and cryptocurrency, as well as the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where she leads reparations efforts as the lead sponsor of H.R. 40. At the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference , Pressley began by acknowledging the significance of gathering with visionaries working to shape a better future in the wake of the midterm elections. She reminded attendees that “we have always been the defenders of democracy.”

“A decade, what an incredible achievement and milestone, and on the heels of the election, it feels especially good to be here after Black people did what we always do. We have been the defenders of democracy. … We’ve always been the architects of revolution, of progress. And so to be in this room of tech entrepreneurs and innovators and experts, it just feels so good,” she said on the main stage.

National civil rights attorney Lee Merritt wants Black professionals to understand their power in the workplace.

Merritt is a nationally recognized civil and human rights attorney who litigates under the federal law of Section 1983 and is a street organizer. He has worked with families to represent cases such as those for Ahmaud Arbery, Botham Jean, and Atatiana Jefferson. At the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference, Merritt spoke on how Black professionals can build power at work during a time when “the current administration is actively taking shots” at that progress, as he put it.

“I’m used to empowering us in the courtroom, but the workspace is under attack,” he told the audience. “Black women’s jobs, Black folks’ jobs are under attack. The Black unemployment rate is skyrocketing. We needed to address the power.”

Ryan Wilson and TK Petersen, the founders of The Gathering Spot, spoke about building the club into a decade-old business at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference .

Founded in 2016, The Gathering Spot is celebrating 10 years in business. The founders took the conference main stage in a year when AFROTECH™ is also marking its 10th anniversary.

The panel, moderated by Arielle Clay Poteau, was titled “Third Spaces & Building Real Community with The Gathering Spot.”

Travis Hutchinson’s mission is to keep media and education from being “divorced from one another.”

The Yale University graduate and Brooklyn, NY, native studied behavioral economics to understand how people make decisions and, when technology is added to the equation, how they “decide about what their experience is like overall,” he told AFROTECH™.

In 2019, he began working as a product manager at Instagram, initially focusing on “how do we create representations of human beings,” he said while speaking on a panel at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference. He specifically worked on Explore Relevance and multimodal video understanding for Meta AI. He was also part of the team that launched Reels, which he described as a “phenomenal opportunity.”

Andrew Yang got right to the chase during the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.

Yang was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and is co-founder and CEO of Noble Mobile, which provides customers with unlimited data for about $40 per month. The company also returns compensation to customers for unused data at the end of the month, along with 5.5% interest, he confirmed while speaking on a panel moderated by AFROTECH™ Brand Manager Will Lucas .

He told the audience that he was offering them six months of free wireless service as well, redeemable 48 hours after his panel.

SQUIRE President Dave Salvant has advice for founders looking for funding.

Salvant left business school because he was convinced that “barbershops and salons are the linchpin of communities around this country.” This belief led him to co-found SQUIRE, a barbershop management platform. Salvant, a private banker, and Songe LaRon, an attorney, decided to purchase and operate a barbershop located in Manhattan, NY’s Chelsea Market “to learn about the nuances from the owner’s perspective,” he said while speaking at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.

“There’s a phrase in Silicon Valley, in tech, more or less, ‘you have to eat your own dog food,’ and what that means is you really have to put yourself in the shoes of the owner and the customer and really walk that path,” Salvant said on stage with Monica Melton, assistant editor, New York Public Radio/WNYC. “The best founders and the best companies come from a place where they’re uniquely positioned to understand that market and thus have operational leverage in building a better product because they come from it, they experience the pain. So I and my co-founder experienced the pain of booking and getting a haircut. But the real unlock and the real opportunity was on the business side.”

As Jay-Z once rapped, numbers don’t lie. But what happens when the data is skewed?

During the HealthStack Conference portion of the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference , journalist Segun Oduolowu sat down with two health care professionals for a panel titled “Bad Data Is Costing Black Lives” to discuss how flawed data harms Black patients and how to push back on a health care system they say has long practiced systemic racism.

The AFROTECH™ Conference is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Houston. The conference runs through Friday, Nov. 6, and tickets are still available for the rest of the week.

Dr. Timnit Gebru believes Black people should not be devalued in the pursuit of tech innovations, particularly in AI.

Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Institute, author of the memoir “Deep Unlearning,” and a co-author of the research paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” The paper, which examined the dangers and implications of large language models, led to her being fired from Google in 2020, where she had co-led its Ethical AI Research Team, according to MIT Technology Review.

X Eyee, a partner at Offline Research, moderated a panel featuring Gebru on the Main Stage at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference. X Eyee noted that the Stochastic Parrots paper was cited 18,000 times and became “one of the most influential papers in computer science.”

Thai Randolph worked with one of the world’s largest creators. Now, she’s building the infrastructure to help more creators scale.

Randolph’s career began in advertising at digital agencies. As a group director in social and emerging media at VML/Y&R, she learned that traditional brand building would be disrupted. Working at Sony, and then Meta, showed her how technology could be either a disruptor or a propellant for “how stories are told and brands are built,” she said at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.

When she stepped into the CEO role at Hartbeat, the global multi-platform entertainment company Kevin Hart founded, she recognized creators’ growing influence.