At its core, entrepreneurship is the unyielding refusal to accept the world as given—it cannot be manufactured, mentored, or programmed into existence.

For the entrepreneur who happens to be Black, it’s a visceral response to necessity—a defiant act of building something yours in a world designed to deny you.

But everywhere I look, there is another Black non-profit rebranding entrepreneurship as a “deliverable”. 

Our ancestors understood segregation’s grim lesson: dependency is death.

And these dependency programs turn pioneers into petitioners. This institutionalized approach is not only ineffective but also dismantles the competitive spirit—settling for status-quo mediocrity, driven by programs run by people without entrepreneurial success under their belt. This is counterintuitive and counterproductive to winning.

Real entrepreneurship cannot be templated, taught, or transcribed into a syllabus. If it could, every MBA graduate would be a titan, and every incubator a forge of unicorns. The entrepreneur’s "textbook" is written in scars and sunk costs, not case studies. They succeeded not because they followed a playbook, but because they burned it.

Dependency programs, with their worksheet guidance, "risk mitigation" webinars and workshops breed mediocrity. To workshop entrepreneurship is to neuter it—to trade lightning for a lantern.

By-The-Numbers

A 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research and NYU Stern looked at roughly 750,000 U.S. startups that went through 329 accelerators. Researchers Youn Baek and Deepak Hegde found that 60 to 80 percent of those programs left founders worse off than going it alone. Even Techstars, which promoted the findings on its own blog, put it bluntly: "Most accelerators burn your time, dilute your cap table, and push vanity metrics." 

The study did find a small group of top-tier programs that genuinely multiply a startup's long-term trajectory. Pay attention to who sits at the top of that list. Techstars backs its founders with up to $220,000 in funding, and Y Combinator writes cheques for equity too. The programs that work are the ones betting their own money on the founder.

At the highest level, the money trail is impossible to miss. Harlem Capital, a diversity-focused venture firm, tracks every Black- and Latino-founded unicorn in the United States. Its 2024 report counted 42 of them, which together raised $24 billion and reached a combined valuation of $125 billion. In its earlier analysis, Series B and later rounds made up more than 95 percent of the capital these companies raised. That's institutional venture capital, the kind that demands traction and punishes excuses.

Calendly tells the story well. Tope Awotona bootstrapped the company before raising seed money from Atlanta Ventures in 2014, and Calendly hit unicorn status in January 2021. Andela and Somatus, also on Harlem Capital's list, followed the same path through private risk capital.

Founders themselves are saying the same thing. In a 2025 post for MIT Sloan's Kuo Sharper Center, Salma Baghdadi shared results from a poll of Tunisian founders ranking what they want from startup support organizations. Networks and communities came first, followed by funding and then real business opportunities. Here's what founders told her they're looking for:

• Strategic connections: Introductions to clients, partners and investors carry more weight than invitations to events.
• Direct access to funding: Founders want help getting cash, whether that comes through grants, convertible notes or investor introductions.
• Business opportunities: Pilot projects, procurement access and partnerships that bring in actual revenue.
• Operational support: Practical help with legal, financial and accounting work that saves time and prevents expensive mistakes.
• Personalized mentoring: One-on-one sessions with experts who have relevant experience, in place of generic workshops.
• Media and international exposure: Visibility that builds credibility and opens up new markets.

Generic training landed at the bottom of the list. In Baghdadi's words, "traditional training modules were the least requested." Her conclusion was that support organizations need to start taking equity or revenue shares so they share the risk with founders. 

That poll was taken in Tunisia. Any Black founder in Canada who has sat through yet another pitch-deck workshop will recognize the frustration.

Harlem Capital’s research exposes the hard truth: formal and informal funding networks, venture capital and bootstrapping, not grant-funded “accelerators,” fuel transformative success. 

Yet we have a slate of Black nonprofits springing up across Canada with hollow slogans about “fuelling Black entrepreneurship.”  But fuelling Black entrepreneurship without capital is like claiming to heat a home without a furnace. 

The problem isn’t intent—it’s architecture. Nonprofits prioritize ceremonies over capital, self-congratulation over skin-in-the-game risk. They host summits on “access” while intermediating the very resources they claim to democratize. Traditional community informal pools of capital or venture funds, for all their flaws, demand accountability: pitch a $1B vision, prove market traction, or perish. Incubators, by contrast, reward grantsmanship over grit, trading rigorous scrutiny for platitudes about “representation.” The result? Startups groomed for grant dependency, not market dominance—a recipe for irrelevance in the real world where scale demands ruthless innovation, not applause for participation.

These are not serious people or organizations. Either fund Black businesses like contenders, not curiosities—or stop wasting our time. 

The market does not reward performative grievance nor grade on morality. It rewards only those who obey its oldest law: Own, or be owned. Our ancestors knew this, and the future will belong to those who do. But that future will not forgive us if we betray their suffering.