Joah Spearman is one of the few Black tech founder-CEOs in the country to have raised more than $5 million in startup funding, and he did it by building a community of 100 angel investors. His platform, Localeur, connects locals in 85+ cities around the world to recommend the best local places to eat, drink and play, has been named one of the “must-have” travel apps by Travel & Leisure, Fortune, TIME, and The TODAY Show, and has national partnerships with JetBlue Airways and Match.com. Joah sits on the board of directors for three major Texas-based nonprofit organizations, and has advised everyone from the ESPN X Games and Beijing Olympics, to the Mayor of Austin and FedEx on various issues.

Joah, in other words, gets scale. He delights audiences all over the country with his compelling tales of how he went from a childhood of food stamps and an absent father to gracing the TED stage and rubbing elbows with the CEO of Apple, and what it will take for more people like him—people of color, women, folks from low-income backgrounds–to get their careers and brightest business ideas off of the back of napkins to building companies with global scale. His ambition and resilience are contagious.

Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs Technology, Futurism, Innovation, Diversity, Diversity Topics, Inclusion,