Society, driven eco block chain and cryptocurrency across industries and for social impact, active in primarily technology and currently represent more than 1. 5 trillion in investment capital. The motto is fund revolution. I love that. So were celebrating a book tonight thats very compelling story, very important story, kind of lesserknown in the annals of history. And people have been working toward justice inside the technology industry. Black software, Racial Justice to the net and black lives matter by charlton mcillwain, and published. Welcome. [applause]. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction and thanks for all of you that have come out and maybe a few others will trickle in along the way. So this is a great, its a great place to be. Im wrapping up whats been about a month and a half long tour promoting this book and i can think of no better place to end up this part of the tour in this historic moment. I was just telling these gentlemen before we started that when i got out to the west coast and i was telling everybody where i was headed next and i said city lights and everybody forgot about the book. They just go, oh, my gosh, i grew up there, spent all this time there and theres a bar across the corner and so its a great thing to be here to talk about this book and to talk with and thank you, david, for joining me out tonight. When i give awe back story about the book and get into some conversation. I dont know where to lead. Ive got a starting point, but i have a feeling we might jump off course, who knows, and well throw out the q a to the audience at some point. So, i thought id start by telling you how black software came to be, at least where the journey started for me and that was very simply to explain or try to explain black lives matter. Here was this movement, a movement that was powered by digital technology, by folks who had harnessed these new Digital Tools to do something that people had not managed to do since really the late 1960s, and that was to put the issue of race, Racial Justice, and really the issue of the way that black folks suffer at the hands of the u. S. Criminal Justice System back onto the u. S. Public agenda. Not sense the early 1970s had that happened, but come 2014, 15, 16, you saw that everyone across the country, even beyond the country, knew who black lives matter was, knew what they stood for, knew what their message was and even some folks who were not predisposed to agree with their positions found themselves agreeing and saying, yes black folks are treated differently in this country and particularly in terms of criminal justice. I wanted to understand where did this Movement Come from. To know things like this dont just materialize out of thin air, so where did it come from . Where was the genology . Where did thee folks trace their lineage, mostly in terms of racial and social justice work, but also the facility, the knowledge of a relatively new technology. So thats where i began and i thought i knew the story i was going to write. So this is you know, for anyone who has written a book here, the anxiety that there is when you think you know what youre writing about and then find out you have no idea what youre writing about and that happened over and over and over the course of about three years or so writing this book because it did really start off as black lives matter. And the more i started going back in time and finding folks like david here and well talk about this much more, the story just began to change, discovery after discovery of different people, different times and different stories that then compelled me to say that theres something bigger, theres something broader here. But let me start where i first began, which was the 90s, right . And when this is where it comes online and everything happens and a natural place to start, but those of you everybody except for maybe a couple, you all remember the 90s. If you were thinking about black folks and technology in the 1990s, those are two words you undoubtedly remember or talked about, want to remember . Youre too young in the 90s. [laughter] the Digital Divide, right . That was the way in which we began to think about black folks in technology at that point on. And as much as larry irving and other policy makers had good reason for trying to point out the gap between access to technology, i thought that there was a tremendous erasure that was affected. And so, in some of these talks where i have projections, i usually put up on the screen a number, 5. 6 million. 5. 6 million were the number of people in 1995, number of africanamericans who had computers at home and who were online in 1995. But that is a story of that 5. 7 million, 5. 6 million that we know heretofore nothing about because we presumed the story was black folks do not have access, therefore they have contributed nothing to this new medium and to this platform. And so my story began then trying to understand who were the 5. 6 million . What were their stories . What did they do . With are did they come from . Where did their journey start . And thats where i first met david ellington. And i want to start the story there with reading a small portion of the book and i didnt know that david hadnt gotten his copy from oxford yet so maybe this will be a little bit of a surprise. But i want to read in and sort of finish out the story and tell us what this moment meant. Chapter eight is called the battle for black cyber space. And it starts here, beginning on april 12th, 1861 america engaged in the great civil war. On january 1st, 1863, president Abraham Lincoln emancipation, proclamation. Half nothing changed for many slaves. Then Major General george granger, and union troops arrived in galveston, texas. There he read the proclamation. The people of texas are informed in accordance with the proclamation from the executive of the United States all slaves are free. This involved an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer. No slave was free until all slaves were free and so black people commemorated the day, they called is juneten juneteen juneteenth130 years later to the day, they assumed general grangers role and their announcement was as revolutionary as that historic moment when that last slave received word that she was free. It started in and there was a launch and malcolm, beck and david, back down to the dungeon, there malcolm gave david a glimpse of the future. Ill stop reading right there, but david, tell us about that beginning, that moment and it might be a little tell us about what ultimately became net noir and the significance of what it is that you malcolm and the team of technologists and others launched. First, thanks for inviting me, hosting city lights. You just kind of blew me away. I completely forgot that. Specifically and for you to even tie it and remind me about juneteenth. Thats the way that we launched intentionally. Junete juneteenth tied to emancipation and your eloquence kind of captured it better than i could have. So i was in los angeles. I had gone, well, i need to back up further. Why would i care about or do something in africanamerican culture just because im from african descent, an africanamerican. I went to Howard University for graduate school and got a masters degree in african politics in the 80s. I then so i had a passion. I really wanted to know my culture and you know, the myths in the black community that we walked around like kings and all that, i wanted to know the truth. I went for two years and got this degree so it was always a part of my life, but then i knew i wanted to go to law school so i ended up working to make a long story short, i ended up going to law school in washington, went to georgetown. Go to georgetown law and i knew i wanted to start at least my practice on the west coast. I had lived overseas for a bit and i wanted to be on the pacific rim. I went to tokyo for a while, i came back, went to law school then when i graduated i said let me be on the pacific rim so i moved to l. A. L. A. Is is the entertainment world and all of my clients were black, surprise. Mostly stages thing called hiphop and r b and also the time when gangster rappers started and all that. But i realized i was really getting my feet wet in this medium and i was really excited about it, and this guy, since id lived in tokyo, and still kept in contact with some folks there. There were only seven or eight black people in tokyo at the time and guess what . We all knew each other. [laughter] especially in that age group. And separate from the military guys, right . You were outside of tokyo. Anyway, theres this one guy, a wild background. His name is kenny. He was a deejay, but he was born in south africa, raised in namibia, they went to sweden. A tall, beautiful guy, a model in tokyo, and okay. Hey, whats up. And we became friends and stayed in touch. I moved back to america, went to law school, then went to l. A. And they said there is a kid malcolm, went to mit under grad and going to stanford and i told him to come visit you first. I said okay, fine. He came down over, he was on a motorcycle he comes up to stanford, and starts school there so his undergrad Computer Science and going to get his masters in Computer Science. Im practicing law and an entertainment lawyer in los angeles so my parties are better. So he comes down all the time. Hes was going to just go to school at stanford. And so eventually i go to visit him and long story short, i with ent went to visit him once and he was at stanford, living in palo alto and i went to, apparently the Computer Science students called their lab the dungeon. All right. And the dungeon. So i go and hes always a crunch, school at Computer Science in stanford, okay, you can come in, ive got work to do, come down to the lab to see it, but i cant walk you through stuff ive got to finish this project. I said cool. And he sets me in front of this computer, big computer still, chunky stuff and big keyboard and im trying to keep myself busy and playing around on this thing and then the room for the computer room, its not pretty, its in the basement of the campus. Im looking around and clicking around and how one of my favorite games back in the day was othello and flipped from black to white, black to white and i was playing the game. And it turns out i got into the university of stockholms site. There was some kind of something and back in the day when it was all text still. So i tried to get out of it and im sitting in there theres a chinese guy sitting next to me at the computer and im like i cant figure this out and i cant find malcolm anywhere and this guy, i said, do you know how i can click, click, click, brought me back out. He said if you want to find stuff, here, you can use this that i created, its called this guy, working on his ph. D. , blah, blah, blah, i said what is it called. A list of text of things and click on and go somewhere and it was called get another high arcual and organization, it was yahoo jerry yang, later became jerry yank and he was getting his ph. D. And his later partner david. And this is the world i got exposed to and when i saw that, being an entertainment lawyer and knowing my culture, i saw there was nothing in all of those clicks, seems like only 2,000 links, text links, right, this is before the worldwide web, which means there was no www. Thats when all the graphics and sounds and videos added. Before there was just text, it was internet, mostly scientists and the dod, defense probably using to design bombs. So i decided that there was something here so when i went back to l. A. , thats when i had it started, just started. With him on the phone, back and forth, and thats when we and then finally said, something super net or black no not black, thats too hard weve got to so i came up with noir. He came up with net noir. And i want to read the part. Thats one of my favorite parts of that particular conversation in the book. We suddenly, this is you and malcolm, let me start earlier. David was the approaching middle age lawyer and. [laughter] this is malcolm. This is malcolms talk to him later. Malcolm was a young geek, david took the lead and his vision was dead on, but malcolm was there to remind david that his execution, his proposal lacked, well, a kind of technological charm. Yes. We suddenly realized the idea of a network of black culture was an opportunity, the potential names for the venture that began exploding in their minds. Afro net was first out of the gate. They ruled it out and discovered that a company with that name already existed selling hair nets. Not to mention malcolm pointed out there was an Online Service named afro net that already existed. Malcolm suggested cyber black. David squashed it, too hard he said. I could have easily gone down the path of being the blacker than black service and i had to say hold it were going about to enter the 21st century its about creating a place for people to talk and debate and have fun. The Business Model of the next century was inclusion and then it happened and malcolm said net. David said noir. Unbelievable that he that he we were doing the project together, but thats exactly what happened and then the story is ultimately he had this plan for net noir. You come before ted, who is magic man handing out buckets of money looking for great entrepreneurs and buy you all in, you made your pitch and the rest, as they say was history. What was that in a previous version of the book i had a chapter that was titled remember when the internet was black. And it had everything to do with net noir in that moment and that sort of the relation about your idea, malcolms idea, and recognition from ted and aol that, say, this is going to be big. Well, yes. And by the way, just to tie the last piece up, so we built the thing for six months in the early part of 95 and juneteenth we flipped it on aol. Yeah, what happened was really also because of my then wife, who since passed, wendy marks. She was working for a Company CalledRedgate Communications and the president and founder was ted. Steve case bought Redgate Communications and presence of America Online while dave was ceo and teds First Initiative im going to find and identify and fund info printer words and big thing. And company wide, they said submit your idea called net noir and introduce it to ted and we were the First Company funded by America Online. So today, another brand you may know, mottley fool, the only other went that is still around. There was six of us, one or two or three others. Thats exactly what he wanted. He knew that content would be compelling, people would want to join and pay monthly for some service and those were the only Online Services and we talked about earlier before you guys got here, the 1200 baud and right, the 2400 baud and then America Online with all of these diskettes and there was compuserve and thats how they wanted to step away because of what they did. So we were able to we got in front of ted. We were infopreneurs and there was some weird number, but by doing oh, hed have 5 of the company so a Million Dollar valuation, and like, right, you know, youre a made man, and we wrote this check go out and make money and thats when i went to Venture Capital and thats why we were different in the marketplace. We were the first Venture Capital professional money invested in because a lot of people started things, including new york online. Right. That was and his partner at the time. That was new yorkers primarily. Great that was a predecessor to us and a bunch of other ones as you well know. We were the ones that got oh, theres an opportunity here so not only a corporate Strategic Partner and distribution, also Venture Capital check. So corporate money from ted at America Online and then Venture Capital money from ciscom from jones, and from the space and also bet. So what does it mean for you to think that to know that, to live the first big commercially successful Venture Capitalbacked property, as it were, online that brought millions of folks to this new medium that as we were talking about, nobody knew what it would be for, what was did about to think about a black Internet Service that featured black content, had black owners . Tell us about the significance of that moment both for that time, but also looking back, knowing what we know now about the Current Technology landscape and well, of course, i got a lot of hype, a lot of media attention. Malcolm did as well. It was novel, it was different. We did get fortunately were not in the Digital Divide basket, they tried to put us there, but we were doing pretty well. So its that 5. 6 is we were talking market and think about it, if you have black folks online and puts in certain category just like white folks or anybody. So, we showed we could demonstrate to Mercedes Benz this is where you should advertise and all of that came about. My dream was to make sure you know, id gone through all of these conferences and ill never forget i was at this theater in San Francisco in the castro theater and it was packed, it was 500, almost all white guys with pocket protectors and they were announcing the grateful dead cdrom. And ooh. And the cdrom which is obviously online, not connected to the internet. Thats how it evolved, went literally from cd roms and then Online Services and then put it in and dial up to an Online Service and then obviously the internet, but the point being t