David speaks with Dawn Dickson, a businesswoman, inventor, author, and investor with over 20 years of experience in technology and business development. She founded the retail technology company PopCom and women's shoe company Flat Out of Heels. Dawn was the first woman in the world to raise over $1 million through a secure token offering under a new Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act regulation.
They talked about:
🚀 Lessons in innovation and persistence
⚖️ How to succeed across diverse business ventures
💰 The hidden costs of venture capital
⚠️ How lack of communication causes startup failures
🌍 The future of black entrepreneurship
🧠 The power of a global mindset
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:05] The early influences on Dawn’s career
[03:21] How Dawn chose entrepreneurship over a traditional career
[04:49] The journey of building a business from scratch
[07:25] Dawn’s transition from tech to retail
[09:13] Lessons in business adaptation
[12:42] How to validate demand for your innovative idea
[15:09] Why Dawn chose crowdfunding
[17:45] Does every entrepreneur need a social media presence?
[20:04] Why honest and frequent updates matter
[22:27] Lack of communication causes startup failures
[25:04] The ongoing struggle for black women to secure funding
[27:20] Africa is the future for black entrepreneurs
[29:56] The world is your market
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
LLC | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company
Black Panther Party | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party
Blockchain | https://theknowledge.io/what-is-cryptocurrency/
Mailchimp | https://mailchimp.com/about/
Klaviyo | https://www.klaviyo.com/about
D1 Consulting | https://dawndickson.square.site/
PopCom | https://www.popcom.shop/team-members/dawn-dickson
Techstars | https://www.techstars.com/accelerators
Crowdfunder | https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/
FTX | https://ftx.com/
Sam Bankman-Fried | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried
Elizabeth Holmes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
Murder of George Floyd | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_George_Floyd
Paul Kagame | https://www.paulkagame.com/
👤 Connect with Dawn:
Twitter: https://x.com/THEDawnDickson
Website: https://dawndickson.me/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
Dawn Dickson: Being able to identify a problem that you can solve and that you can get people to pay for. And that's really like the whole journey. As you see, none of my businesses really actually correlate, they relate, but they're very different in their functionality. I guess a problem that I realised that I could solve. So the main thing is like, don't start anything you don't know anything about. Don't start a business until you know that there's a customer willing to pay for it. Definitely do your market research and understand how far you can go with that business.
And I do all of these analysis before I start anything. I don't just like start businesses. That's why my businesses have been around for so long.
David Elikwu: This week I'm speaking with Dawn Dickson. Dawn is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Pop Com. Pop Com is a vending machine business unlike any that you've seen before. If you look at these machines, they are incredibly futuristic looking. They can utilise Web 3 a bunch of different technologies. Her business has designed both the software and hardware for this and built them from scratch.
Dawn is incredibly inspiring for everything that she's been able to prove out through her work ethic, through her business mind, everything she's been able to build in the world. Both traditionally through venture capital as one of the very first black women to raise over a million dollars. First through traditional venture capital, but then also through equity crowdfunding, where she's really been a pioneer, I think raising over four to six million dolllars now, and not just doing it for herself, but also paving the way for others and being really intentional about teaching others how to create wealth locally in their communities through their networks.
And I think if you are an entrepreneur that is considering scaling or building or raising money, this is gonna be an incredibly notable episode for you.
So you can find Dawn on Twitter @THEDawnDickson. And if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you.
David Elikwu: So I'd love to maybe start with your background. You have been an entrepreneur for something like, 21 years, I wanna say. I think you started your first business in
Dawn Dickson: 2001 so this is 21.
But before that I was definitely an entrepreneur, but that was like my first official real LLC, you know, the LLC, the famous Instagram LLC that was my first like real business that was incorporated. But I've always been an entrepreneur, like my whole life since I was a kid.
David Elikwu: Okay. I mean, let's go all the way back there. What was your first introduction to entrepreneurship?
Dawn Dickson: My parents, my mom and dad were both business owners, so that's what I saw. My dad never seen my dad have a job. He owned real estate. He did home inspection. He was doing house flips before, that was like a popular thing, and he was always just very enterprising, always investing in things. He invested in my first business, so I've seen it there and then my mother had an in-home daycare. And it was very successful and it made a great living. So even though it wasn't like a tech or you know, what we do now, it's certainly, she's certainly a business owner and I saw my parents making a living for themselves. So I knew that it was a possibility for me.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that's really interesting cause I think with people whose parents were entrepreneurs, you usually get a mixed reviews cause sometimes if they are doing well then maybe that can set you on the path and you think, wow, this is something great. You can envision yourself doing it really easily but simultaneously sometimes maybe your dad is always going off on one business after another and it's not going well. And that completely pushes you in
Dawn Dickson: I just saw success, so that was the I just saw entrepreneurial success, so I think like it was encouraging, but I will say in my generation, so I'm like a 80's baby. I was born in 1979, so in the eighties, like there was no such thing as like tech startups and entrepreneurship just meant you didn't have a job. Like nobody talked about entrepreneurship. Nobody said those things. There was no such thing as a class on entrepreneurship in college or, it wasn't popular. The messaging was to everyone that I know is like, graduate from high school, go to college, get a corporate job, get your benefits and then you retire. And that's the path because, you know, there was so many challenges in our history as black people in America where we didn't have opportunity to go to college. We didn't have the opportunity to own property, didn't have the opportunity to do so many things. So I think in my generation, my grandparents were in the civil rights movement. My mom was a part of like Black Panthers and they like wanting me to go to college.
So when I decided to start my first business, it wasn't celebrated because they really wanted me to go the corporate path, you know, that was what was appealing.
David Elikwu: That's a really interesting point. So what was that journey of starting your first business like knowing the background of, you know, it's not necessarily something that's being supported. You're venturing off, you're doing something new, and I think you had some challenges along the way as well.
Dawn Dickson: Well, my first business was a tech company. I went to school for I.T and tech, and so, I learned how to code, build websites and just do general information technology job functions, and I think that it really opened my mind to like what the worldwide web was and what technology was and how it can be used for so many things. It was like the very beginning. It reminds me of how things are today with blockchain technology, where people are like using it in all the different kinds of ways, and I think we haven't even really scratched the surface of how we can use blockchain and the internet was in that way. So back when I was younger, the only way to find out what was going on was to get a flyer or word of mouth, like a flyer like, paper in your hand.
So my very first business was just solution to a problem that I faced was like trying to find out what's going on, where to go out, where to hang out as a young person and my partner and I, Brandon, we decided we were gonna build a website. Now this is before Wix, this is before all these things. We hand coded this, we built this website and we said we're gonna build a website for people to go online and find out what's going on. And we're going to create like a database of events and entertainment and restaurants and parties and concerts and just all kinds of entertainment. It was the first of its kind, one of the first of its kind in the country. Definitely the first of its kind in, in the Midwest. And so it really took off because it became an information source and a new source, and it took off, you know? And so again, my very first entrepreneur experience, like official. It went well, it was successful. We made money, it grew, you know, and it really positioned me to be where I am today. It helped me to build my network because I was like the go-to person to know what's going on in our website. We always would get free tickets to events and we would be the ones where promoters call us to reach the community. Because we had the largest email list in the city. We built the email list by going out to events and collecting emails by hand, like literally writing them on a clipboard. I would have like five people on my street team go out and collect emails on a clipboard. Then we would go back and put it in Excel and then we would BCC and send emails in AOL because it was before any email system existed. There was no such thing. There was no MailChimp, no Klaviyo, no, none of that. Like if you wanna send a mass email, you're gonna be sending it in aol. And so that was like how we got our start and I was like, in email marketing and in online digital marketing before that was even called that.
David Elikwu: That's so interesting. So how does that pivot then to doing flat out of hills, which is then, you know, you're going from Super tech enabled to almost retail to physical goods. Like how did that come about?
Dawn Dickson: I mean, it doesn't pivot from that. There was a large gap between that business and flat out. The natural progress from me being like in online media and marketing was to then start a consulting company where I helped other businesses do the same thing. Establish a online presence, a digital media strategy, emails, how to monetize your website and building websites, convincing business owners that they needed a website. Back then, many businesses said they don't need a website. They thought that the internet was a fad. They didn't take it seriously and so that was like, I made really good career just consulting in that area. I did that for six, seven years. As a part of that, I started doing event coordinating and planning events because I had all the relationships with venues and people and sponsors and, so in the radio. It just was a natural thing for me to start doing events, and that's how Flat out came to be because of being out doing events and seeing women walk in bare foot after events.
So it kind of just flowed one to the other from being an information source and then doing my own events and then, you know, meeting the need of people who are at the events and who are going out with when their feet hurt after wearing heels, they need some relief so that's kind of how that flowed. And then Pop com flowed from flat out because I wanted to sell the flat outs in Vending machines and couldn't find a vending machine supplier that would work with me. So I started my own vending machine company. And so that's kind of how that flowed. So everything just kind of, it's me, my way of like supply and demand and like identifying an area that I can solve a problem that I experience and that other people experience as well. So it's all about problem solving.
David Elikwu: That makes a ton of sense, and it's incredible how you're able to pivot each thing into the next thing and kind of build that path for yourself.
I'm really interested to know from all of these different experiences that you had, each is almost a different type of business in a sense. You have the tech business, which is online obviously, you're having to do a lot of stuff in person to get things online, but that's online and then you're consulting, which is a different type of business. Then you are doing the retail where you own something directly that you're selling, and then you're with pop com, I guess you have both the software and the physical product, but then you are stocking other physical products, and so each one of those has a slightly different relationship with the customer.
So I'm interested to know maybe what you've learnt and unlearn as you've pivoted between some of these kinds of business personalities.
Dawn Dickson: Well, again, I don't pivot because a pivot is a change. All of these businesses are still you know, the only business that I started that's not in business anymore is my first business, The Urban Star. And that's just because I didn't know how to exit it. I didn't know anything about exits or acquisitions or I just didn't know what to do. So I just closed it because I was ready to do something else in my career. The learning for me as an entrepreneur overall is just, what makes a business is if you can make money, if there's customers willing to pay for your services or your product. And I thrive in spaces where like, I'm usually like very early to do things, first to market. Like it's same with vending, same with, you know, the urban star. So being able to identify a problem that you can solve and that you can get people to pay for. And that's really like the whole journey. As you see, none of my businesses really actually correlate. They relate, but they're very different in their functionality. I guess a problem that I realised that I could solve. So the main thing is like, don't start anything you don't know anything about. Don't start a business until you know that there's a customer willing to pay for it. Definitely do your market research and understand how far you can go with that business.
And I do all of these analysis before I start anything. I don't just like start businesses. That's why my businesses have been around for so long. My D one consulting business has been around for now 16 years, and every single year in those years I've made money because I'm just adapting to the market.
And flat out will be 12 years old a product I founded you know, women need them and every day a woman, a young woman, is wearing heels for the first time and heels hurt no matter what. Nothing you can do to change that. And so it's just like finding a place where you can be longevity. Finding a sweet spot where like there's a product differentiation and what makes you your product and being able to communicate what makes what you're doing your product or your service unique and better. You know, what's your value proposition?
So I think that's just like, I hope that answers your question, but that's just like my lesson. I don't really pivot. I just respond to the demand.
David Elikwu: So how did you validate the demand for pop com as an example? Because I think you mentioned, you know, you were already working in the event space, so it made a lot of sense. You could easily see the number of people that had the exact same pain point. All of these women that they're wearing heels, their feet are hurting. It makes a lot of sense just to be able to get flats instantly. You're in club live, you're wherever, you can just get flats straight out of a vending machine. You can walk with them. And I know that part of it was solving your own problem, but I'm interested to know like, what would the challenges in then going to you are building and first of all, manufacturing machines, but then also building the software to power those machines as well.
Dawn Dickson: Yes, I mean, we partner with manufacturers, so we're not an actual manufacturer, but I did invent that machine. I came up with a design, I worked with different engineers to really perfect it, but it is my original design. So that was a very, very long and tedious process for sure. But I really like doubled down on the software side of things because there was not a lack of hardware. I mean, there's vending machines everywhere, but what I realised was there was no data being collected and there was really no way to scale your business. Like you can easily scale e-commerce. And I really wanted to bring that e-commerce experience to vending machines.
So that's what made me focus on the software. Plus, with my background in tech, I'm always looking for ways to, for something to be tech enabled. And I knew that, that would be a key differentiator if we had software because all the other machines are just pretty basic.
David Elikwu: And one of the things that you just touched on I think is also gonna be important as well. This idea of focusing on the tech element as something that is important. What I found really interesting about what you just mentioned is the fact that I think in the broader entrepreneurship space, or the broader founder space in general, there's been a lot of people trying to find a tech element to what they're doing to try and get venture capital or to try and make themselves more investible.
And I know you've had a really interesting journey with investments. First of all, I think you are the one of, if not the first black woman founder to raise a million dollars in
Dawn Dickson: I'm the first female founder to raise over a million dollars in crowd funding, and I'm one of the first 25, or I'm in the like 20 to 25. Who knows, like the day who raised it faster but, I'm in the first 25 black women to ever raise a million dollars from venture and institutional capital. So, now that number is in the hundreds, so that's definitely a great thing to see.
David Elikwu: Yeah, it's incredible and I'm sure you and the people that came up with and around you had a big impact on that. So I'd love to know maybe more about, okay, what was it like your first time raising venture capital and how did that go and how did that lead to you then deciding in the future to go through the crowdfunding road?
Dawn Dickson: The first time I raised venture capital for Pop com, it was pretty smooth. It was in 2017 after I finished the Techstars program. And so that gave me a lot of momentum. I raised the money pretty much right after demo day, and that was like the first million. But getting the money was pretty, I don't say easy because it's never easy raising money, but getting the money, it was pretty smooth. You know, it was pretty smooth. I had a good network, I had a good momentum, but I felt like I just really was like the token black, you know, the token black investment in a portfolio. At the time into 2017, again, there wasn't a lot of black people getting money, and so there was a lot of pressure on the VCs to be more diverse. They were saying, you know, it's not a pipeline problem. There a lot of black people out here raised, I mean a lot of black people building businesses, but you're not giving them a chance. So this was like where you see the first surge of black founders getting money, but they weren't giving me the help I needed. They would give me money, but they didn't give me support, resources, customers, connections, helped me build my team. And so I kind of just was like out on my own.
When we ran outta money, like all startups do, they didn't follow one and they didn't really support me. And that's when I said "I'm gonna try a different path", because what happens is you keep raising vc, keep raising vc, you keep on diluting yourself down, you know, giving up your equity. They ended up really having control of your business. And at the end of the day, I didn't wanna do that if they weren't gonna really help me contribute to my growth. So I decided to try crowdfunding because it was a new way of raising money. Not many companies had did it before and I have a really big network. And I was, you know, for my years of being like doing events and I have a media outlet, I had a lot of followers on Facebook back then, you know, this is before like Instagram, you know, I've been on in the online space since pretty much the beginning.
And so I built a great community and I felt like it was a great opportunity for me to be able to leverage that network and that community that I had. And that's why it worked out, because of my network and my background and my history as an entrepreneur and after I raised my crowdfunding round, my first round in 2019, it really opened the doors for a lot more entrepreneurs do the same. So now, I don't even know how many people have raised money through crowdfunding because they just, the gates kind of, the floodgates kind of opened up after that.
David Elikwu: How important do you think it is maybe in general for people to build community alongside what they're building? Because I think you're seeing that a lot more now where even venture capital funds are trying to become like media companies. You have a lot of people that are building businesses, but also realising they need to build a Twitter profile, they need to build an Instagram presence, they need to do a lot of these other things that previously, I don't think people focused on or thought were necessary to just purely focusing on building a business.
Dawn Dickson: I mean, yeah, because I don't know, it's two sides of it. A lot of times I felt like I wish I could just be heads down and not so visible as a founder and just actually go work. And there are a lot of founders doing amazing work and doing things that you never heard of. You don't know their name, they're not, they're not active on Twitter, they're not on Instagram. They're just out here really building the business. For me, it was helpful because I already had kind of a high profile, but there's pros and cons because I'm under a microscope as well. Like I have all these people to answer to all of my struggles, all of my successes, everything is public and I always have to communicating about what I'm doing all the time. And I don't really get a chance to like work in stealth.
So it depends on the kind of business that you have and the kind of entrepreneur that you have. But I don't believe that everybody has to be that way. It looks like that, because like a lot of them, the VCs are on Twitter you know, they have this like persona and these, but some of the best entrepreneurs that I know and some of the people that are raising the most, making the most, they are not out there tweeting and posting. They're head down, locked in. And if I could do it all over again, you know, then I wouldn't have raised crowdfunding money. So I was like, if I could do it all over again, I feel like I would like to be more out of the spotlight. But then how would I have raised 6 million dollars if I wasn't. So there's pros and cons to both of those things, but like my financials are out there, like everything I do is out there. You open up yourself to a lot of criticism when you're not doing something, but then also you get a lot of praise. But as we know, people are very fickle. So like, they loved you one day, they hate you the next day. That's kind of the culture.
And so it's like, it's hard as a startup when you're growing and you're learning every day and so many things change and things happen and things don't go as planned. It's hard when you have to constantly explain to like thousands of people what's going on.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I think that's the other side of the coin, and that's the big balance, right as well. So even though with the funding, you are not having to give up as much equity just to one big VC or to one big fund, but then now you have thousands of stakeholders and shareholders that you actually have to respond to or keep them updated and let them know what's going on, not just from a public relations perspective, but now actually from a legal perspective as well, because they have shares in the business.
Have you found that easy? I guess because of the background that you have, or has it still been equally difficult now dealing with the volume of people that have bought into your different businesses?
Dawn Dickson: It's not hard, because that's kind of my personality, my first degrees in journalism and media, so I wanted to be a reporter. So I'm like comfortable speaking, I'm comfortable being in front of people, I'm very comfortable communicating. I feel like I'm a strong communicator, so it's my calling, but again, sometimes I just don't feel like being bothered, like I'm a human being as well. So like every day I get some kind of a message from an investor asking a question that I know I told them the answer to already. And so that's kind of, it's just like, okay. But at the same time, it's my responsibility. So like I don't take it lightly. I always answer every email. I'll repeat the same thing over and over and over again if that's what I need to do because it's my job. And I take it very seriously and I update my investors at least every other month. But we have a Facebook group, I'm very active and engaged in there, I have a community manager, so I just make sure that they're informed. I think a lot of companies who crowdfunded do a very terrible job of updating their investors, and that is actually the. key to your growth it's like, inviting them as a part of the process and letting them see the journey, that's your responsibility. And I think that people can do a lot better.
I've invested in about 20 startups I think, about 20 and a lot of them through crowdfunding, you know, between $500 and $10,000 basically. And I never get updates from any other companies that I invested in. They just don't send updates. So people listening to this like, updates make such a big difference for you. Even if good things, bad things, it doesn't matter. Just let them know what's going on. It'll be a lot easier for you to do that. And that's the key to even when I, I mean a lot of things happen that are not ideal, but I'm always honest, I'm always transparent and I always come forth with a plan and I don't really have any issues you know, my investors are supportive.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that's one big thing I think a lot of founders deal with. I've personally dealt with as I've run businesses in the past, not so much fully out in public in the same way as I would have if I had raised money from Crowdfunders, but definitely I think one of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with is the being open and honest about the fact that it's really difficult, and I think it's so easy to buy into this narrative of you have some of these like superstar founders, you have these tech entrepreneurs, people that make it look really easy on the outside, and you just see success after success, after success.
But really behind the scenes, there are so many different things that people actually struggle with. It's not always easy, things don't always go your way. You get rejected for whether it's for funding or whether it's for like, some kind of government related permissions, loads of things, wrinkles come up behind the scenes and I think it's hard to remember to kind of get in front of those things.
I think we've seen a few examples of this in the crypto world, for example, with Sam Bankman-Fried with FTX and a few other, I think with Luna, there's been a few other crypto crashes recently where a lot of the fault of the crash comes from a lack of communication. There might have been an aspect of it where there was something fundamentally wrong, whether you call it fraud, whether you call it whatever. But I do think a big part of the impact that happened is because people didn't get out ahead of things, they didn't communicate openly, they waited until things have already started to fall apart, the cracks are already showing and then now they're on defense and they're trying to say, oh, but it will be okay and by then people have already lost confidence.
Dawn Dickson: Exactly. I mean, we see that unfolding in before our eyes, right? And I like it. Because I feel like it's time for this to stop where people just are investing in off of fomo given these big, huge, multimillion dollar investments to people that are not really qualified. There's no checks and balances there. And then, I mean, founders they don't feel like they have to tell investors what's going on, and they actually just live and they get away with it. So I'm loving to see, I can't wait to see what they, what they give Elizabeth Holmes with her lying self.
All of these entrepreneurs that are raising investor money and, not being responsible. Meanwhile, all these black founders doing real good work. We're not hardly getting any money while we just watch the other kind of founders just squander away the money and get a pass. So, you know, I think it's a new day and you know, I love to see it. I love to see it unfold. But Elizabeth Holmes faces 20 years for wire fraud and is supposed to come down to, you know, that's gonna be a big whatever they do. It's gonna set a precedent and I hope they send her to jail.
David Elikwu: I think what's also tough is. Okay, so we've got the thing with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried as well, and I just heard today that someone is predicting that he might get sentenced for life as well for everything that's happened with with that business. And what I find so interesting, just what you were touching on, is this idea of we have all the statistics every year people release new statistics and all of these reports about black founders aren't getting any funding and black women aren't getting any funding, I think at this point. I'm almost getting tired of it because after releasing the report, people don't actually release the money. And so, just keep telling you the same
Dawn Dickson: thing.
We had a little, a little pocket of time after they, you know, murdered George Floyd in front of our eyes and then everybody felt like, oh, we're gonna rule black people. That lasted a hot 10 months and then they went right back to the same BS and when the so-called, you know, crash or recession's coming, they're not running to give us money, but they're running to keep their systems in place and fund whatever they need to do to keep their control.
I've been an entrepreneur for so long that I've seen a lot, you know, all of the ebbs and flows of like the market. And I've worked through a recession in 2007, 2008, I'm kind of like numb to it at this point of how things go, but I'm just ready personally, which is why I'm currently in Africa, is like looking for new places to expand and grow my, you know, my businesses, my legacy, my family, where things are more welcoming for me as a black woman and as a female and where I'm treated better. So I think instead of us trying to continue to keep fighting for money that they don't want us to have, we can go to the many other countries on this planet that will be more accepting of us. Because when I travel the world, they don't be like, black woman, black entrepreneur, I'm just an entrepreneur. Or they may say an American entrepreneur, but it's not about black and white when you're, unless you're in America, you know? That's the main place that I've seen it'd be that way. Now, I've never been everywhere in the world, but I've been to 30 countries and still counting, and I still believe like America is just not welcoming for black people and black businesses. And we have a chance now with global business, with a lot more, you know, VCs popping up around the world that we need to tap in other resources.
David Elikwu: Yeah. I love that. And I know you are in Kenya right now. I'd love to know your thoughts on this idea of you know, African Americans and Africans collaborating, doing business together. I know, I think it was in 2018, Ghana signed some kind of law that allowed African Americans to come and buy land and to invest in local communities, and I'm seeing some really interesting things like that.
But then I also wondered the extent to which it might just be a moment in time where, right now it might be really interesting and then people forget, or people lose the impetus and the drive to continue doing things like that. So how have you found that and what are you finding it like?
Dawn Dickson: I've definitely seen a peak of entrepreneurs looking outside for other opportunities. Definitely Ghana, I'm gonna be in Ghana in December and I spent 2019 December in Ghana and really built my network there and it's, a lot of opportunities there for sure. Not as easy as it sounds to go over there and just get established, but there's a lot of opportunities.
The country that I'm really focused on is Rwanda. It has a lot of opportunity there. And 56% of all the CEOs in the country are black women, which is strong because in America, only 7% of CEOs are female, and that's of all races. So to have a country that is really, you know, a lot of, I mean 56%, that's more women and men in positions of leadership in corporations that says a lot. President Kagame in Rwanda is doing so much to make the country smart. Kigali is a smart city. So I think it's just a lot of opportunities we just need to tap into in general. And I've seen it happen. It's happening slowly because I feel like Black Americans, people who are like born in America, we are programmed to feel like America's all we have and it's the best. When I meet black people who are born in Africa or Europe, they have a different worldview. They're very well traveled. They know multiple languages. They're very worldly. But black Americans are always like, seem to be scared to leave their family or to go abroad, or they have like a terrible, you know, misconception about what it's like to do business or to live or work abroad.
So I just think that people just should continue to open their mind. But it's also helpful that countries like Ghana, Rwanda and others are saying, Hey, come here, come, we'll give you opportunities. Come bring your talents to our, you know, country, and we'll reward you for that instead of giving you the short end of the stick all the time. Now we can really actually get respect. And so, you know, it's up to me. If it's up to me, I would never step foot back in the United States. But I have to for now, but eventually I, you know, I know I won't spend the rest of my life, you know, end of my life there for sure.
David Elikwu: Really, that's so interesting. Running your business means that you still get to, like, travel around and be a bit nomadic and you're not tied into one place. I think, a large part of that was due to the pandemic across industries in general, but do you feel like for you as a business owner, you are seeing the same transition where the world is becoming a lot more global versus this necessity of being at one place? People talk about Silicon Valley, people talk about, you know, within like black businesses like Atlanta, there's a few hotspots of businesses. And sometimes there's benefits of that, there's benefits of having community, there's benefits of having people around you. You can go, you can network, you go around the corner, you're meeting people everywhere. I know New York is a lot like that from the times that I've been, but then simultaneously, it's so interesting now being in a world that because you can be anywhere, you can be much more global. You could be physically in another country like you are right now and and still be networking and still able to connect with people in the US, people in the UK, people from around the world. So how are you thinking about that part as well?
Dawn Dickson: I mean, I've considered myself to be a global citizen, so I mean, I definitely do tourism and things, but I'm always looking to tap in and see the opportunities for me. And so the way I think of it is I don't limit myself, I don't limit myself to anywhere on this planet. I believe that this is a huge, you know, planet with many opportunities and we just have to stop putting ourself in boxes. The only limitations of those we set up in our own mind.
And so I told myself, you know what? I have no limits. I can do, I can be anywhere in the world and I wanna be in Africa. I wanna take my talents to Africa. You know, I could go a lot of other places where we see black people going and doing business, but I think that we all should be focusing on the continent and we're, you know, reclaiming what where our ancestors we're stripped of.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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