The Mission:

NewME’s mission is to accelerate underrepresented and women technology entrepreneurs around the world.

Here’s a little background….

NewME (short for New Media Entrepreneurship) started in 2010 with a conference in Washington DC that gathered some of the brightest minority led start-ups, seasoned business leaders, venture capital stakeholders and key government officials from the SBA, FCC, and NTIA (DOC). Our goals were to:

• Foster ideas and best practices to provide minority entrepreneurs with opportunities and platforms to freely explore, create, and innovate in ways that will spur new growth and participation in the free market;

• Formulate an action plan to increase the number of successful minority new media ventures.

• Develop a policy framework for advancing and stimulating the growth and sustainability of minority new media start-ups.
• Bring a confluence of individuals together to move the Internet economy in a more diverse and inclusive direction.

We learned so much from the day and a half conference! By bringing together these individuals we were able to hear from entrepreneurs, the venture capital community, and government to try create real solutions. The NewME Accelerator is a product of that gathering and launched Spring 2011 in Silicon Valley.  During our inaugural session CNN documented our journey in it’s award winning InAmerica series.

And now for the WHY….

Only a small percentage of startups are run by individuals from underrepresented groups and we want to change that.

• Increase exposure to talent,
• Connect founders to access of early stage capital,
• Provide mentorship from qualified individuals,
• Collaborate and build successful companies in the heart of Silicon Valley,

And most importantly, we want to…

MAKE HISTORY

It’s not going to be easy (but nothing is) and the life-cycle starts here.