Black Houston entrepreneurs leverage tech to build wealth

At a recent conference titled “Code to Capital”, hosted by the Greater Houston Black Chamber for its second Annual Wealth Forum, entrepreneurs assembled at Rice University to discuss wealth-building using technology.

Black business owners and AI experts sought a solution to building generational wealth when systems are not designed with regular Houstonians in mind. 

The forum, which moved to April in recognition of Financial Literacy Month, was designed to offer a Lender Matchmaker Lounge for direct access to financial decision-makers, as well as an AI Implementation Lab with hands-on training across three sessions.

Hard conversations

Dr. DeForest Soaries Jr., a pastor and former New Jersey Secretary of State, who also authored the book Say Yes to No Debt, said Black communities have celebrated political victories while their economic realities have not caught up.

“What I realized is that we know how to protest, and we’ll always need to know how to protest,” he said. “Given our history and our reality, protest has got to be in our bones…We’ve elected people from the county all the way up to the president. But our economic status has not grown commensurate with our political successes.”

When asked about capital access, Soaries expressed skepticism about venture capital and the myth of bank loans. He argued that many entrepreneurs seek outside funding before addressing the foundational problems in their personal finances, such as debt 

Regarding capital access, Soaries was skeptical of both venture capital and the mythology of bank loans. He argued that many entrepreneurs seek outside funding before addressing the foundational problems in their personal finances, such as debt and the use of credit lines to sustain lifestyles they cannot afford.

He instead suggested using banks as a last resort.

“I hear people all the time talking about the small percentage of Black companies that get venture capital,” he said. “I don’t want venture capital. I don’t want people writing me a check for a million dollars. They’re forcing me into an activity so that in three years they can sell me my business back and make 20-40% profit off of me. We have to stop buying into slogans and rhetoric.

Soaries’ own businesses, he noted, are debt-free and funded by customers rather than investors, including one consulting client who wires payment for the entire year on January 1st.

His advice on generational wealth centered on managing time as rigorously as money and on avoiding being around “broke people,” while seeking advice from financial mentors rather than social media.

Access to information

Kierra Bonner, founder and CEO of Life of the Party Bus, and the founder of Run of Show Collective, a consulting firm, said that when she launched her party bus business, she needed a personal network in the industry but did not have one to call on.

Then, she turned to AI for help. For her, it soon proved to be a research assistant.

“I used it to research funding options, find grants, loans,” Bonner said. “I even had to do financial projections…AI was very important when I first started because it gave me all the funding options that were just out there that I didn’t even know about.”

Ikechi Ukazu and Ezra Pryor, financial advisors with Strategic Financial Group, offered a counterweight to the optimism surrounding AI.

“Information is not the problem,” Pryor said. “If it was just the information we needed, all of us will be wealthy, healthy, rich, spiritually alive…It’s how we navigate and how we orient ourselves to the information to then act on it. AI can’t do that for you.”

He suggested using AI as a tool and consulting professionals to fill in knowledge gaps.

Both Pryor and Ukazu identified a lack of early financial education as a structural deficit in making data-driven decisions.

Coaches weigh in

Olamide Kayode, whose Nigerian name means “my wealth has come,” said she transitioned from being a financial analyst to a chief financial officer at a public company, managing up to $1 billion in assets.

She now calls ChatGPT one of her “closest friends.”

Kayode added that Black business owners can leverage AI tools to gain analytical insights.

“If you give vanilla inputs, you’re going to get vanilla responses,” she said, adding that an overreliance on AI could have an adverse effect on businesses. “You need to use AI not to replace you, but to enhance what you already have.”

Her core message to Black business owners is a disciplined approach, as she believes many make decisions “based on feelings rather than data.”

Delilah Bardlette, founder of Delilah Bardlette Leadership Solutions, brought a similar blend of practicality and technological fluency. 

After working at United Airlines and rising through the ranks, she launched a firm of her own focused on leadership development and organizational efficiency.

She also launched a diagnostic app using the AI platform Lovable, which she says helps her clients identify gaps in their business operations in under three minutes.

Bardlette calls herself a “lightweight AI geek.”

“As much as I love leadership, I’m loving AI as an efficiency tool to help me do what I do better,” she added.

She tries to instill a sense of wealth accumulation in her children by building wealth alongside them rather than simply handing it down. One son, a former coder, has pivoted to “vibe coding”, using AI tools to build websites and chatbots for small businesses like mechanics and dry cleaners who do not have the technical know-how themselves. 

Bardlette’s other son uses AI tools, including Claude for project management, she said.

“It’s not just me building wealth so that they can then come up,” she said. “We’re building it in parallel.”

The long game

Aiden Smith, a real estate developer focused on affordable workforce housing and student dormitories for HBCUs, offered a vision of what community-centered wealth building can look like in practice. His current flagship project is a 919-bed, five-story housing development near Prairie View A&M University, designed to serve the HBCU student housing market and explore mass timber construction.

Smith says his office uses AI to support communication chains, meeting recaps, budget tracking, documentation, and weekly reporting.

“Use AI to supplement the other admin work you can do to truly build generational wealth,” Smith said. “If you’re in a position of power or influence, you need to focus on what your forward-focusing initiative is.”

His company has structured its projects to allow landowners involved in current Houston projects to roll equity into larger future developments through a syndication model.

“We’re not just building a real estate company; we’re building a community development platform that helps others elevate with us,” Smith said. “Through the syndication model we’ve built, we’re creating pathways for people to roll equity into larger projects and participate in the generational wealth created through our development pipeline.”

The next generation

The forum’s College Track, offering workshops on brand protection, building a TikTok business presence, and using fintech tools like Cash App strategically, aimed to address the wealth gap by reaching the next generation to hone better financial habits. 

Ukazu and Pryor, both of whom work with young professionals, identified early financial conversation as perhaps the most underrated factor in capital access.

“It’s very unique to the Black community because other communities don’t have to think about where the capital is coming from,” Pyror said. “Because they’re typically having these conversations at a very young age. We don’t have these conversations either young enough or often enough.”