Sterling Smith
“Black Freelancer was born from my personal experience. I want to create more opportunities for people like me. We are building a marketplace of exceptional, diverse talent and a community to support each other.”
What do you do professionally?
I am the founder of Freelancer Hub, the world’s largest community of diverse talent. Our first offering is Black Freelancer, which connects top Black talent with companies and recruiters. We have more than 5,000 Black professionals on the platform and are working with ten pilot customers. And this is just the start. We’re also launching Womxn Freelancer, Veteran Freelancer, and LatinX Freelancer, so stay tuned for that.
Tell me about your early career.
I majored in Computer Science. Early in my career, I worked as a software engineer for Walmart, Lockheed Martin, and Booz Allen Hamilton, including a stint in Doha, Qatar. I always wanted to give entrepreneurship a shot, so eventually left to build a startup studio that offered affordable consulting services to clients who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. Back then and especially now, I am motivated to level the playing field. I focused on helping non-technical founders to build MVPs in less than eight weeks and I mostly worked with people who couldn’t afford to work with larger agencies.
From there, I spun out my own company, Sandbox Commerce, a platform that helped Shopify and BigCommerce users build mobile apps for their stores. We were backed by Google for Start-ups and raised an angel round. However, I experienced friction when I tried to raise our first round of institutional funding. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve since learned the hard way over a long, persistent journey that less than one percent of companies funded are run by Black founders. Perseverance and persistence had always paid off in the past, but I learned about the reality of being a Black tech entrepreneur the long and hard way. It’s an uphill climb, to say the least.
What inspired you to start Black Freelancer? What is Black Freelancer today?
After I came to terms with all of that, I decided to freelance until I figured out what was next. There’s always demand for software engineers, so I assumed I wouldn’t have any issues finding work. I joined a well-known freelancer platform and despite having a strong engineering background at well-regarded companies and offering competitive rates, it was crickets. I tried everything. On a whim, I updated my profile photo to be one of a white man and wouldn’t you know it, but the inquiries and jobs came pouring in.
So Black Freelancer was born from my personal experience. I wanted to create more opportunities for people like me and I also wanted to create a platform that offered both a marketplace of exceptional talent and a community for that talent to support each other. There is a clear white space to help companies hire exceptional, diverse talent. From the beginning, I knew we had to nail the placement part of the product. We didn’t have the luxury of “throwing spaghetti at the wall” when it came to matching, so we focused heavily on the prescreening and vetting process. While we currently have over 5,000 freelancers in our community, in order to uphold our standard of exceptional talent, we only share about 1,400 of those profiles with companies and hiring managers. At the same time, we see a long-tail of opportunity to upskill and prepare everyone else in our community.
What is your professional superpower?
I am a connector. Most recently, this includes bringing people together to build a community of individuals who have experienced similar challenges to make the world a better place, and taking seemingly disparate but related ideas and features to build a cohesive, engaging product. I pride myself on connecting the dots to demonstrate that when we work together, we can change the world, even if we represent vastly different ethnicities and ideologies.
How has that superpower contributed to your professional success?
I connect my growing, burgeoning community with leaders who have the power of the purse and want to help their teams and companies increase the representation of diverse perspectives.
As the representative of a growing community of diverse talent, I spend a lot of time talking to CTOs who don’t have networks conducive to hiring diverse teams. A lot of them understand that there are revenue and financial benefits to having truly diverse teams, though. However, there is a gap between this understanding and the composition of their organizations. As an engineer, technologist, and leader in my community, I can have conversations with them and help them disrupt the status quo. For now, this is a solution for their lack of networks.
If I asked your team members what it’s like to work with you, what would they say?
They would say that I am incredibly passionate about the work I do. While it can seem like I have a million things going on at once, I prioritize based on my deep belief that we should be managing to the nearest constraint. That is, we should focus on the primary blocker to what we need to achieve. In the startup world, what this blocker is can shift very quickly so I pride myself and my team on being very adaptable so that we can pivot quickly. It can be a little frenetic, but that’s why I like early stage companies.
What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
Over the past 36 months, I’ve gone from being an operating founder at a startup, to working in venture capital for a bit and investing at startups and diverse founders, to now going all in to self-fund a startup to focus on what I see as an incredibly important challenge and a huge opportunity. I’m proud of the decisions I’ve made and that I’m working to solve a global issue. Black Freelancer is just the start.
Describe the business impact you’ve driven for organization and customers.
I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built at Black Freelancer. It’s the greatest impact I’ve made in my career. We’re building a solution on the shoulders of innovators who came before us and enabling connection between companies and exceptional talent, regardless of location. 35 percent of our talent pool is based in Africa where just being paid American minimum wage would place many of them in the top ten percent of their country’s earners. Black Freelancer has changed their lives. In a world where companies want to base compensation on impact, many of our members stand to make exponentially more than their parents and have a positive impact on their communities. I’m excited about this macroeconomic impact.
On the other side, our freelancers have helped companies uncover issues and opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise been identified. Their diverse experiences and perspectives have led to better data models, product strategy, AI solutions, hardware, physical products, and more.
What person or organization do you most admire professionally and why?
One person who inspires me is Maverick Carter, who is the co-founder (with LeBron James) and CEO of SpringHill Entertainment, an entertainment and content company, and Uninterrupted, an athlete empowerment company. He does so much to protect his brand and advocate for the upward mobility of people from diverse backgrounds. He is creating an empire beyond sports.
I also look up to my siblings. They are doing amazing things in the realms of medicine, legal, and public health. And of course my parents, who sacrificed so much to support the paths we’ve taken.
I admire anyone willing to build something that positively impacts others, even when it doesn’t benefit them directly. That type of selflessness will help change the world for the better.
In what ways are diverse perspectives good for business?
It’s not hard to see many ways that the lack of diverse perspectives have been bad for tech. Most tech entrepreneurs raise money and hire people who look like them, building homogenous teams and excluding diverse talent. There is a huge opportunity to promote and build the world that many of us want to see. I encourage all entrepreneurs and leaders to invite everyone to the room, especially in the early days. Promoting diversity leads to more innovation and drives positive impact and inclusion.
One personal anecdote: Ray Ban and Meta partnered to develop glasses you could take phone calls from. They promised exceptional call clarity. I bought those glasses and no one could hear me. Many African Americans have a different nose structure than white people and it turns out that the mic was covered when I wore the glasses. A whole class of people can’t use these glasses due to this design flaw. This is the type of issue I am hopeful to solve.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I’d call on any company looking to hire diverse talent to get in touch with me. I’d also love for any talent looking for meaningful work and to help build the world they want to see to join our platforms (Black Freelancer and soon so come: Womxn Freelancer, Veteran Freelancer, LatinX Freelancer).
Contact Sterling
LinkedIn Website Email: sterling (at) freelancerhub (dot) xzy
Email hello@trovecommunity.com or contact us for an introduction.
