The Vision of TEN X Lab
The vision of TEN X Lab started in November 2020 at the Pariveda Solutions’ Hackathon for Social Good. I spent months leading to the hackathon researching and analyzing data related to wealth inequality, systemic racism, and the economics underlying these challenges. When the George Floyd protests began last year, I had a moment of clarity. I set out to understand how and why these situations continue to repeat over and over again. The easy answer is systemic racism, but I believe the challenge is a combination of the economic roots of racism in the U.S. and the ongoing (and current) financial challenges faced by African American individuals, families, and communities. These issues result 1) lack of autonomy in economic and financial stability, and 2) decreased ability to participate fully in the “public square” in areas of public policy, education, healthcare, and defense in our communities.
Moreover, because economics is at the heart of American society and culture, the solutions to the complex problem of wealth and power inequality in America must focus on two areas. 1) Evolving its financial culture and 2) reengineering the “economic machine” to work for all Americans.
In researching Wealth and Power in the U.S., I discovered decades of valuable data and knowledge in this area. Researchers in the public sector, academia, and think tanks have published ground-breaking findings on racial inequality in income, wealth, education, housing, and criminal justice. For example, despite the social advances and promises of equity that emerged from the Civil Rights Era, the median household wealth gap has remained unchanged, at roughly 9%, since the 1960s. As our team at TEN X Lab continued to look at the data, we found that policymakers rarely discussed business ownership as a solution to building wealth in black communities.
We found a few data points that outline the problem and our approach to addressing it:
- These numbers translate to about 200K profitable black-owned companies out of the 31 million businesses in the U.S.
- If we increase the number of profitable businesses and revenue by 10X to 2 million, we can unlock over $1 trillion in annual revenue and over $5 trillion in equity for black-business owners
To fully understand the problem and develop a solution, we needed a unified framework to visualize the circumstances that enable, create and sustain inequality and the underlying factors that drive wealth and power.
We have defined these factors as the TEN X Framework:
Figure 1 — TEN X Framework
Each of these factors are interconnected and are necessary to address the challenges of building wealth for black and brown businesses and communities.
As I and the excellent TEN X Lab team build our vision, we are working with a select number of cohort companies to advise them on strategy, digital transformation, and what we call value discovery. We will continue to post here in long form and on other channels in short and medium form.
If you would like to join or contribute to our vision, feel free to reach out to me directly.
Daniel is a principal with Pariveda Solutions, specializing in digital and cloud transformation, value discovery, and monetization. He has helped clients across the public, and private sectors achieve strategic and technology vision. Daniel is also co-founder of TEN X Lab, an accelerator investing in the growth of black-owned businesses by 10X over the next ten years. He also serves on several advisory boards for startups, colleges, and nonprofits.
