Joah Spearman is one of the only Black tech founder-CEOs in history to have raised more than $5 million in startup funding without Silicon Valley VCs, and he did it by building a community of more than 100 angel investors. His platform, Localeur, helps travelers access authentic recommendations from locals in 200 cities around the world to discover the best local places to eat, drink and play. Localeur has been named a “must-have” by Travel & Leisure, Fortune, TIME, and The TODAY Show, and has partnered with Nike, Lyft, JetBlue Airways and Match.com, among others. Joah has served on several major Texas-based nonprofit organizations including the March of Dimes and Austin PBS, and has advised the Mayor of Austin, ESPN X Games, South by Southwest Festival, the Beijing Olympics and FedEx on various issues. 
 
Joah, in other words, gets scale. He delights audiences all over the country with his compelling tales of how he went from a childhood of food stamps and an absent father to gracing the TED stage and rubbing elbows with the CEO of Apple, and what it will take for more people like him—people of color, women, folks from low-income backgrounds–to get their careers and brightest business ideas off of the back of napkins to building companies with global scale.