Venture Capital Firm Invests in Tech Company Owned by Young Pasadena City College Grad

On June 5th , Marquett Burton and the SmartyPants App team will be leaving Pasadena for a lakeside summer in Michigan with free housing, free co-working space, a $50,000 investment and $200,000 in services and perks courtesy of Coolhouse Labs, a Michigan based accelerator and venture capital firm. Having both revenue and a partnership with the country’s second largest university, Marquett and his ed tech company are one of the stars of the growing movement to bring diversity to the national tech landscape.

If you were asked to name 3 Black technologists you would probably have to scratch your head as less than 1% of venture backed companies are run by African-American founders. Marquett Burton, a product of Hamilton Elementary, Eliot Middle, Blair High and Pasadena City College, provides a replicable success stories that any Pasadena kid can follow. What can we
learn from Marquett’s story?

He was born to a single mother savaged by the 1980s crack epidemic. While his mother recovered, Marquett lived with his grandmother who was suffering the onset of dementia. Despite her own challenges, she was able to instill the values that have made him a successful tech CEO. To motivate his team he often repeats this story about his grandmother’s deferred dream and how easy it is for us to achieve ours:

“In the 2nd grade I told my grandmother I didn’t want to go to school. She then explained to me that as a child she wanted to become a writer as she loved stories. However, she was forced to end her education in the 3rd grade to pick cotton on her father’s farm in Lonoke, Arkansas. She described how her back would ache after hours of picking cotton by hand under the blazing sun. After that, I always felt like everything I had to do was comparatively easy.”

How many times have you thought of a great idea for an app? Well, Marquett though of an idea for a simple app that could make it easy for students to organize study groups and he decided to actually create it. The problem was that he had never taken a single computer science or business course in his life. Having no relation to software, his experience in Teach For American and his degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins were useless.

In two years, with determination, a few online books and a lot of YouTube videos, he independently hacked together an MBA and software development education. Today, he’s won every tech competition he’s entered, finding national recognition through tech-business awards in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore and even Indiana. Marquett has come a long way from the kid who tested out of Blair High at age 16 because, as his counselor put it, “no college will accept you with these grades.” Today, he heads a revenue-generating tech company that has been offered over $300,000 in investment. Marquett hopes his story will inspire more of us to take the plunge into technology.

For more information, email marc@smartypantsapp.org.