For years, Silicon Valley liked to call itself a meritocracy. The funding numbers told a different story: Billions of dollars poured into startups, and Black founders and other underrepresented entrepreneurs still got scraps. The industry knew the problem existed. Acknowledging it felt like progress. Actually rebuilding the system that created it? That was another matter entirely. Most founders just accepted the gap as something to push through on their own.
Angela Benton looked at the same disparity and saw something else: a market screwing itself out of good deals. If talent was being overlooked because of who had access and who didn’t, that wasn’t just unfair, it was inefficient. So in 2011, she started NewME, the first U.S. accelerator built specifically for underrepresented founders. The pitch was simple: give people the mentorship, networks, and capital that Silicon Valley normally reserved for insiders. Plenty of investors doubted there was even enough minority founder talent to justify the idea.
Benton bet otherwise. Benton bet otherwise. Instead, its founders went on to raise more than $47 million collectively. Turns out the diversity gap was never about talent. It was about who got let in the room. Instead, its founders went on to raise more than $47 million collectively. Turns out the diversity gap was never about talent. It was about who got let in the room.
She Built a Pipeline Into the Room Where Capital Moved
Her contrarian bet was straightforward: the shortage of funded Black founders wasn’t a talent shortage. It was an access shortage.
NewME’s first residential program pulled eight entrepreneurs into a house in Mountain View for nine weeks. They lived together, went to industry events, met investors, and eventually pitched at Demo Day. Some quit jobs to be there. Some left their families behind, temporarily, to make it work.
None of it was guaranteed to succeed. NewME had zero track record. Benton had corporate contacts, sure, but almost no relationships in venture capital when she started. Early on, the whole thing ran on sponsorship money just to stay afloat.
Still, it caught fire fast. More than 300 founders applied for the second class. Sixty percent of the first cohort had already raised capital, over $500,000 combined, by early 2012. Andreessen Horowitz signed on alongside Google, HP, and Tagged as early sponsors and partners.
By the time Benton sold the accelerator in 2018, NewME alumni had raised over $47 million.
Benton’s Three Rules for Building Around Broken Systems
Go Where the Bottleneck Can Be Removed
When relationships are the product, geography isn’t optional. You go where the access lives.
“If you’re going to be in technology, then you come to Silicon Valley.” Benton, in CNN’s Black in America documentary.
She moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 and built NewME around exactly that principle: investor introductions, mentorship, real proximity to the tech industry. By 2012, Demo Day at Google’s San Francisco office put seven companies in front of more than 100 investors and supporters.
Scale the Outcome, Not the Format
When your delivery method becomes the bottleneck, keep the result and blow up everything else.
“I saw all of this demand that really wasn’t being served. I felt kind of stuck.” Benton, at Inc.’s 2015 Women’s Summit.
The original 12-week, equity-based model could only handle around 16 companies a year. That’s a hard ceiling. So in 2014, Benton started testing something shorte, boot camps and coaching instead of a long residential program. Same outcomes, she found, but reaching hundreds of entrepreneurs instead of a dozen.
Reject Capital That Changes the Mission
Funding gets expensive fast once the person writing the check starts deciding who you serve.
“When you take money from people, they control the narrative.” Benton, on the GHOGH podcast.
Success exposed a new problem. The more NewME grew, the more outside partners wanted a say in what it should become. Others wanted the program narrowed to technical founders from Ivy League schools. She walked away from both.
The Partnership Breakup That Rebuilt NewME
Here’s the useful failure buried in Benton’s story: she let external partnerships get too central to how NewME actually ran.
Popularity didn’t equal stability. Partnerships came with strings, and eventually Benton realized several of her Silicon Valley partners wanted a fundamentally different company than the one she was building. Cutting them loose was risky; reputations move fast in that world, and investor chatter travels faster.
Her fix wasn’t a pep talk. It was structural.
She redesigned the delivery model. Tested the one-week format quietly before rolling it out wider. Cut the sponsorship dependency. Rebuilt the whole thing around founders instead of partners. In 2017, the Knight Foundation stepped in with $191,000 to help NewME expand into South Florida, including a relocation to Miami.
The takeaway: misaligned capital isn’t just a financing headache. It’s a design flaw waiting to surface.
The Network Became NewME’s Real Competitive Advantage
Google, HP, Tagged, and Andreessen Horowitz brought sponsorship, mentors, and access early on. The Knight Foundation later funded the Miami expansion.
Hajj Flemings of GoKit came through early. So did Brian Brackeen, whose company Kairos later pulled in serious venture funding. McKeever Conwell’s company entered the program as NoBadGift, Benton pushed him to rethink the name.
The real product was never the curriculum. It was the compressed distance between underrepresented founders and the investors, mentors, and corporate partners who usually stayed out of reach.
Steal Her Bottleneck Test
Before you add another program, hire, or funding round, ask yourself one question: what’s actually stopping your customer from succeeding?
Is it knowledge? Capital? Relationships? Access?
Find the answer, then build around it. Benton didn’t try to convince Silicon Valley to change. She built a system that worked around its biggest bottleneck.