The deal was this: a Krispy Kreme doughnut in exchange for retail intel. Ugochi Owo sat at the back of Quantum Coffee on King St. W., handing out dozens of the baked treats.

As Owo and her business collaborator Jeremy Tseung enticed about 200 people to share insights about their online shopping experience, one consistent theme emerged. Most customers hate the return process if a purchase doesn’t work out; items typically have to be shipped back and it could take weeks before a refund is processed.

From that doughnut-fuelled research last summer, a plan materialized to reinvent the online return process to make it as expedient and hassle free as possible. Simplified, it involves customers conveniently dropping off returned goods locally, perhaps on their way to school or work. Customers are happy because they don’t pay for shipping and often get their money back quicker, and companies, which pay to use the service, see value because of increased profits and customer loyalty.

Great idea but what could be done with it?

Fast forward to present day and Owo is hunkered down at the Ryerson DMZ readying Flindel, the fledgling company that evolved out of those café interviews, for a pilot run in September.

Owo is further developing her company as one of the first startups in the Black Innovation Fellowship (BIF), a program that helps black entrepreneurs in the tech sector. Owo’s startup is one of what will be between 10 and 25 companies in BIF’s first cohort.

The DMZ is an internationally respected technology accelerator headquartered in a six-floor workspace overlooking Yonge-Dundas Square. It helps startups that show the potential to grow into significant companies through mentoring from industry-leading experts and connections to investors and researchers. It was jointly ranked as the world’s top business incubator managed by a university in 2018. That designation was made by UBI Global, a Swedish firm that measures and tracks the performance of innovation hubs around the world.

Isaac Olowolafe Jr., a real estate developer and a longtime supporter of the DMZ, held a belief that more Black entrepreneurs should be benefitting from the Ryerson incubator but they needed to be exposed to it. He became the driving force behind BIF and his brainchild, the DMZ believes, is the first initiative of its kind in North America.

Olowolafe had success building condos, luxury homes and a boutique airport hotel. Growing up in Woodbridge, he says he was surrounded by people who worked in construction, property development and investment so that path seemed normal to him and that exposure gave him a base of knowledge in the field.

But he recognized that it is not always easy for fellow Black entrepreneurs to get the capital and support to pursue their goals. Olowolafe — the son of African immigrants who came to Canada at age 4 — also recognized that his own community was poorly represented within Toronto’s startup community.

At the DMZ, for example, only 10 per cent of its June 2019 startup roster has a Black founder. Olowolafe kicked in a $200,000 gift through Dream Maker Ventures Inc., the investment arm of his asset-management company, to help get BIF started. Shopify and BMO Financial Group are on board as founding partners while the Canada Women’s Foundation is also backing the program, which has a fundraising goal of $1 million.

“The biggest reason was because I saw the barriers as a young Black entrepreneur myself,” says the 36-year-old Olowolafe.

“I saw the barriers of getting access to mentorship, capital, access to resources to grow your business, access to a traction team that was able to open up doors so that your product could sell and then getting access to the training that allows you to prepare yourself on how to hire, how to market, how to enter a market and to pitch to a VC (venture capitalist).”

Olowolafe believes that BIF will break down those barriers and “by launching this program so that Black-led businesses that meet the milestone to get into the DMZ in general will be able to get that additional assistance that has helped other companies across different communities grow.”

The DMZ, which is not restricted to current students, has helped accelerate more than 400 companies and raised $625 million in capital funding since 2010. At present, there are 72 companies developing there.

Abdullah Snobar, executive director of the DMZ, says BIF wasn’t created as an isolated program for Black entrepreneurs but rather as a way for them to immerse into the environment and leverage everything the work space has to offer while building their companies.

“We’re not trying to build out an incubator for Black people in the back corner. Quite the opposite actually,” he says.

An important aspect of the program is the presence of role models so that tech developers from an under-represented minority understand that more opportunity might be available to them than they believed. Then, as new startups flourish, those companies will in turn inspire future Black entrepreneurs.

“Our hope is that in three to five years, once this program runs with several companies, there’ll be no need for this,” he said. “It will just be normal to see a fully diverse incubator, fully diverse VC firms and fully diverse startup companies.”

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As Owo, CEO of Flindel, gets closer to her pilot project, she sees BIF as an initiative that has helped level the playing field.

“A lot of people don’t have certain opportunities, not because they’re not smart, bright or talented but simply because of the fact they lack access to things that are typically handed to some people,” she said.

“So as opposed to them having to work 10 times harder to get almost nowhere, they now have the ability to achieve (and) to start at almost the same place, which I think is incredible. So regardless of someone’s socioeconomic background or their academic background or whatever, they can have the opportunity to be somebody as opposed to just kind of wistfully dreaming at their computer.”

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