Weekly Black Tech Saturdays
The signature gathering: industry leaders, workshops, and trainings that help everyone see themselves in tech — and get further in it.
Impact · Black Tech Saturdays
Making tech a path to generational wealth
Less than 1% of venture funding reaches Black and Brown founders. Black Tech Saturdays was built to change that — with access, opportunity, mentorship, and pipelines to capital.
The approach
Community wealth as a trampoline to generational wealth
Less than 1% of venture funding reaches Black and Brown founders. Black Tech Saturdays exists to close that gap — not with a single program, but with an ecosystem: access, opportunity, mentorship, and pipelines to capital and pilots.
The model is community wealth as a trampoline to generational wealth. Founders learn business models and meet the people who can hire them, fund them, or pilot their product — and they watch companies go from zero to funded in months, because enough people shared enough of what they knew.
- Mentorship from industry leaders and operators
- Pipelines to pilots, funding, and hiring partners
- Pitch competitions with real prize capital
- A community that shares what it knows
$3M+
Raised for community tech programs
1,000+
Free workshops hosted nationwide
Thousands
Founders supported — from idea to IPO
2023
Black Tech Saturdays founded in Detroit
Programs & initiatives
The work, in practice
From a weekly gathering in Detroit to a 1,000-student summit and a nationwide slate of workshops — here's how the mission shows up.
Detroit Digital Empowerment Summit
A three-day event that brought roughly 1,000 metro-Detroit students to the Michigan Science Center to explore careers in technology.
Pitch Competitions
Real capital for founders — pitch competitions have awarded as much as $175,000 in prizes, funded by partners like Rocket Mortgage.
Youth Golf & Tech Expo
Pairing golf with STEM to reach Detroit students where they are — planting seeds early so the next generation gets much further.
1,000+ Workshops Nationwide
Since 2023, more than a thousand workshops across the country — turning the Detroit model into a national community of founders.
Founder Pipelines
Connecting founders to mentorship, pilots, and funding — so talent gets as many swings at bat as possible, from idea to IPO.
“Watching a company go from zero to funded in less than six months — that happens because we shared enough of what we know.”Johnnie Turnageon Black Tech Saturdays
Partner with the mission
Sponsors, mentors, hiring partners, and funders make this work possible. If you want to help more founders win, let's talk.