Honored to Be in LinkedIn's 'Top Voices'

I have been a writer for over a decade, and being included in LinkedIn's Top Voices for 2016 is a real honor. It doesn't necessarily mean my startup is more likely to succeed or that I'm going to have an easier journey raising venture capital on Sand Hill Road, but it does mean that others have taken notice of the authentic way I've tried to share my path as an African-American technology founder and Austin, TX-based entrepreneur.

Of course there were school projects, book reports and poems for middle and high school classmates I had crushes on, but it's only been the last decade or so that I'd truly consider myself a writer. In college, I started blogging - first on MySpace and later on TypePad - and after college I became the principal speechwriter for the Director of FEMA just a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina (Michael Brown's successor). I wrote speeches and talking points that shaped interviews on CNN and stories in the New York Times, but it was after that job that I fully discovered my voice as a writer.

A few years later, in early 2010, I co-authored a book called, "Real Role Models: Successful African-Americans Beyond Pop Culture," which University of Texas Press published. This book, written with Dr. Louis Harrison, a professor at UT-Austin, enabled me to chronicle some of my own journey as the first person in my family to graduate from college, which I recently shared in greater depth here.

More recently, I became a fan of LinkedIn as a platform to share my journey as an entrepreneur when I realized that this was a unique opportunity to reach an audience I cared about (the people I'm connected with) and have an authentic place to write. I started by re-publishing the story I first wrote on Medium about being rejected by YCombinator two years ago. Later, I began doing original pieces on LinkedIn directly including one in which I shared some of the pros and cons to running a startup in Austin.

Today, whether it's commenting on current affairs in tech like the rise of Vice Media or the discrimination policy of Airbnb or if I'm sharing the latest news on my own startup, Localeur, LinkedIn has become my go-to platform to authentically share my own point of view and experiences. There's a lot of angst from some professionals that there are topics now being discussed on LinkedIn that were traditionally reserved for news media or even Facebook, and I respect this perspective. However, my experience as a writer for ten years - blogging, publishing and writing for other individuals - leads me to believe that more and more people are interested in unique, insightful content.

And I've come to realize that if this content helps people understand broader issues that are shaping the future of the workplace and our professional lives, be it diversity and inclusion or the ever-evolving techn industry, this is a dialogue I want to embrace. So thank you, LinkedIn, not only for including me in Top Voices, but also in providing me with a unique platform where my perspective is valued more than my high school crushes ever valued my eight-line poems.