Celebrities Who Invest In Tech: Ne-Yo Wants To Help Solve Silicon Valley Inequality

Written by Dana Sanchez

Black celebrities are investing in tech and some are using their art and their platform to talk about it. This is part 1 in a Moguldom series where we shine a light on celebrities who are investing in tech and in the process, helping turn Silicon Valley stereotypes on their head.

The Grammy-winning artist Ne-Yo isn’t the first musician to invest in Silicon Valley, but he is one who wants to put his money and talent to use helping to solve diversity challenges facing the tech industry.

Famous for songs like “Miss Independent,” R&B artist Ne-Yo this year invested in a Silicon Valley coding school that doesn’t charge tuition the usual way. Instead of paying tuition up front, graduates pay after graduation, giving about 17 percent of their salaries or internship earnings to the school for three years.

It’s a model that is giving people access to jobs in Silicon Valley from populations notoriously underrepresented in tech — black people and women.

This is the first tech investment for Ne-Yo, TechCrunch reported. The artist has produced hit after hit and is a judge on NBC’s “World of Dance” along with Jennifer Lopez and Derek Hough.

He has a net worth of $16 million, according to The Richest. In addition to singing, recording and producing music, he’s made money acting and through dance. Born in Arkansas, Ne-Yo’s full name is Shaffer Chimere Smith.

The San Francisco-based Holberton School for Computer Science and Software Engineering describes itself as an alternative to college that trains students to become highly skilled full-stack software engineers. In February, the school announced that it had raised $2.3 million in funding.

Ne-Yo was one of the investors in the funding round and he has joined the school’s board of trustees.

Paris-based venture capital firm Daphni, which usually invests in European startups, led the funding with private equity and venture capital from firms including Reach Capital, Trinity Ventures,

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and Jerry Murdock, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners.

Holberton said its approach has helped the coding school attract a student body that includes 40 percent women and almost 50 percent people of color.

“They are turning Silicon Valley stereotypes on their head,” said Marie Ekeland, co-founder at daphni, in a press release. “We loved the admissions process that has resulted in a gender flipping near equal enrollment of men and women as well as almost an equal number of people of color. We also loved their approach to education, creating a collaborative community where everyone teaches and learns from everyone else.”

Ne-Yo talked to Business Insider earlier this year at a party hosted by Trinity Ventures in San Francisco celebrating his new role at Holberton:

“(Tech) is not a realistic career for people who came up like me. It’s more realistic to do what I do, be a singer or an NBA star. Thanks to these guys it now is. I have a platform, and I’m going to use this platform to spread the word.”

Ne-Yo told TechCrunch he joined the Holberton board of trustees to help attract people from underrepresented groups to learn how to code:

“Everybody knows that tech and all these things are the wave of the future,” Ne-Yo said. “I just love the fact of what they’re doing with the school — that they’re making it easier for underrepresented people in the world of tech. They’re giving them a platform and access to this knowledge that they probably wouldn’t get otherwise. I think that’s one of the coolest things about this whole situation.”

Ne-Yo insists that investing in tech is not “some vanity thing” for him:

“This is not, ‘oh, let me attach my name to something.’ This is something that I’m genuinely passionate about,” he said. “You know, diversifying the tech world. Tech is changing the world by the second so it makes sense to get the people that live in the world to be part of this thing that’s changing it, as opposed to just this one group of people.”

Getting accepted to Holberton is twice as hard as entering Harvard, the school acknowledges. The school accepts less than 2.5 percent of applicants but said it plans to expand the program from 30 to more than 100 students a year in response to overwhelming demand from applicants and companies.

Here’s how Holberton works:

The school helps keeps its costs low by not hiring formal teachers or giving lectures for two-year program. Instead students work on projects and help teach each other under the guidance of mentors from companies such as Uber and LinkedIn. Some of Holberton’s students have interned or been hired by Apple, NASA, Dropbox and Docker:

We give our students increasingly difficult programming challenges to solve, and give them minimal initial directions on how to solve them, Holberton said in a press release. As a consequence, students naturally look for the theory and tools they need, understand them, use them, work together, and help each other. We are focusing on teaching how to learn instead of teaching a specific tool or programming language.

 
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