Last year, three Black tech startup founders in St. Louis wanted to do something coming out of the pandemic.

“We wanted to do, not just events, but social and things for the black tech community,” said Edwin Williams, founder of ZenHammer in a video call with EQ. “But… then we all got super busy and I was only able to do two events!”

I think most founders can relate! Of the two events last year, EQ partnered on one of them and I had the pleasure of MCing the discussion with Tara Nesbitt, Bryon Pierson and LaShana Lewis. 

This year, Edwin is partnering with WEPOWER for a series of events which will focus on the work founders need to do in the very beginning of their journey into entrepreneurship.

“A lot of people have ideas, but they don’t know how to validate that idea or what’s the next step,” Edwin explained to EQ, while sharing the purpose of the event.

“The goal of this series is to take people from that first step of, ‘You have an idea,’ and then all the way through every next step of, ‘how to make an MVP, how to do sales and here’s all the organizations who can help you.’”

The “In the beginning” event series kicks off next Thursday March 23rd, 2023 at TechArtista Downtown. RSVP Here.

“I will be happy if there’s one person who shows up and says, “this helps gets me started,” and then they’re willing to go down that journey to launch their own business,” said Edwin. “I just want somebody to get the fire in them from this event and then end up with their own business.”

Sam Cummings of DataPlant will be one of two guest speakers who’ll come in and talk about how they validated their startup ideas and explain what that process looks like. To get a sense of what you could learn and who you could meet at next weeks’ discussion, check out this interview with Sam, which was recently featured on TechSTL’s YouTube Channel.