After earning his law degree from Columbia University in the mid-1990s, Williams, 52, says he lucked into a tech career when he took a chance on an up-and-coming web company called AOL. A year into a legal gig, he moved to sales, working his way up in New York and London and sticking around through the merger with Time Warner in 2001 — then the largest in U.S. history.
He made enough money from his stock to be able to set off on his own. And in 2011, the Jamaica-born, New York-raised Williams moved with his family to New Orleans to set up Torsh, a company that uses digital technology to train teachers.
The move, he says, was partly to fulfill a mission to get more people that looked like him into the tech industry. Though it has improved somewhat in recent years, the tech sector notoriously skews toward White males. In Louisiana, Black tech workers account for 19 percent of employment in the sector compared with 30 percent of the state's overall workforce. Women are also underrepresented, accounting for 27 percent of tech jobs in the state, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association, or CompTIA, in its 2022 report.
Two years ago, Williams also founded Skillz Academy in an effort to overcome some of the barriers he'd encountered in recruiting minorities into tech. It's a "JobsTech" company that aims through training (funded by New Orleans), "to create a pipeline of talent ... that is highly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, class and gender, with a particular focus on low-income, minority women."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think it is important to have a diverse workforce in your area of tech, educational technology?
I think it makes a big difference when we go to these education conferences and meet a school principal who will say, 'So OK, I run a school that's 90 percent free and reduced-price lunch, almost all my students are Black or Brown,' if the person that's trying to sell him or her products or services is also Black or Brown. Then the principal will feel this person may have a better understanding of the students they're dealing with and it makes them more likely to want to talk because they feel that there's a certain level of empathy.
Why do you think Black and Brown people have been so underrepresented in tech?
In order to aspire to something, you have to be able to see yourself as that thing, and the quickest way to do it is to see other people like you, from your neighborhoods, in those roles.
For a lot of young Black men and women and Brown men and women, they're not exposed to people that are in this industry and they don't think it's for them. They're like: 'It's not a place I'm going to be successful.' A lot of people think tech means you need to be an engineer, they think tech means that you probably have to write code. Well, there's a huge part of tech that's business, that you don't have to write code. I've never written a single line of code.
So, with Skillz Academy, you've said you're particularly targeting lower-income minority women; why is that?
If I'm being honest — and I like to be honest — I'm probably likely to be hiring more Black women than Black men, because when you look at the educational attainment of Black women, it outstrips the educational attainment of Black men. If you want to increase the wealth of the Black community, you have to go through a Black woman because there are a lot of Black single mothers who are raising children, and if you increase her salary, if you double her salary, you're directly impacting the Black community.
You mentioned that one of your big success stories was a middle-aged White woman who got into educational sales after a long career working for a nonprofit. So, you're casting your net wider than minority communities?
When I started Skillz Academy, the way we framed it was our mission was to recruit, train and place individuals from diverse backgrounds. That was poor Whites, poor Blacks, older people, people with no previous tech experience. One of the big clichés of the industry is that these (venture capital investors) are all just looking for 22-year-old dudes to drop out of college and go start the next company. Yeah, but there are lots of 50-, 55-, 60-year-old people with a great amount of knowledge that can do work and they don't get those opportunities. For me, diversity was written large, it was ethnic, it was gender, it was socio-economic status.
The non-nerdy opportunities you talk about in tech are primarily in sales, where you emphasize that people can quickly find themselves pulling down high six-figure annual salaries, like the woman you cite who made the late-career change and is now making over $200,000 a year. Is money the main motivator?
I fundamentally believe that the solution to our problems lies heavily in our ability as a community to control our own destiny by having more money and more political power. In America, money brings political power. So for me, I'm always focused on how I get more people that look like me into jobs that allow them to feed their families, take care of their needs, and have leftover income that they can actually get involved in some stuff.
It's about helping to foster a middle class, getting a share of a sector that has been responsible for a lot of wealth creation in the last couple of decades?
For me that's the crux of it. We will have a very different situation with crime, for example, if we had more people making more money. So for me, personally, I want to have more impact in 10 years. I want to say I've been involved in a program and did something: that 10,000 people have different jobs today and are earning 30 percent to 40 percent more.
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