“It makes no sense that this thing that affects us all isn’t available to us all. “When it was brought to my attention, I was like ‘ok, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed,'” he said. “I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”īefore Ne-Yo’s preliminary meetings with Holberton’s founders, he says he wasn’t aware of the racial and gender diversity problem in tech. Since Ne-Yo got involved, the number of African American applicants has doubled from roughly 5 percent to 11.5 percent. More than half of Holberton’s students are people of color and 35 percent are women. The startup’s emphasis on diversity is what attracted Ne-Yo to the project and why he signed on as a member of the board of trustees.
Holberton has used that capital to expand beyond the Bay Area. A school in New Haven, Conn., where the company hopes to reach students who can’t afford to live in tech’s hubs, is in development. Holberton has since raised an additional $8 million from existing and new investors like daphni, Omidyar Network, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle. Ne-Yo participated in Holberton’s $2.3 million round in February 2017 alongside Reach Capital and Insight Venture Partners co-founder Jerry Murdock, as well as Trinity Ventures, the VC firm that introduced Ne-Yo to the edtech startup. Holberton says their former students are now employed at Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox and Tesla. students helping and teaching each other there are no formal teachers or lecturers. It relies on project-based and peer learning, i.e. It has a different teaching philosophy than your average coding academy or four-year university.
Holberton, a proposed alternative to a computer science degree, is free to students until they graduate and land a job, at which point they are asked to pay 17 percent of their salaries during their first three years in the workforce. Last year, Ne-Yo finally made the leap into venture capital investing: his first deal, an investment in Holberton School, a two-year coding academy founded by Julien Barbier and Sylvain Kalache that trains full-stack engineers. The singer returned to San Francisco earlier this month for the grand opening of Holberton’s remodeled headquarters on Mission Street in the city’s SoMa neighborhood. “But tech is changing the world, like literally by the day, by the second, so I feel like it just makes the most sense to have it accessible to everyone.” “Little black kids growing up don’t say things like ‘I want to be a coder when I grow up,’ because it’s not real to them, they don’t see people that look like me doing it,” Ne-Yo said.
His goal, he explained, is to use his wealth to encourage people like him to view software engineering and other technical careers as viable options. Ne-Yo, like Kutcher, is interested in pursuing a side gig in investing but he doesn’t want to waste time chasing down the next big thing. Ne-Yo, for his part, is known for a string of R&B hits including So Sick, One in a Million and Because of You. His latest album, Good Man, came out in June.