How a girl's drawing brought tech entrepreneur Angela Benton to Knoxville

Technologist and successful entrepreneur Angela Benton was taken aback when she spotted her portrait online thanks to a Google alert. Fourth grader and Middlebrook Boys & Girls Club member Livvy Mount was the artist and entered it into the UScellular Black History Month art contest in East Tennessee.

Benton reached out and offered to travel to Knoxville and meet other members of the Middlebrook Boys & Girls Club and Regal Teen Center on Feb. 28.

The Boys & Girls Club members created original portraits representing influential Black icons of science, technology, engineering and math. The finalists were chosen for their creativity, quality, clarity of theme and overall impression. Voting for the $250 prize winner continued through March 1.

Benton, who was born in 1981, was surprised to be considered an icon, despite being a pioneer of diversity and one of the most important African Americans in the technology industry.

“It is so heartwarming and satisfying speaking with children,” she said. “When I was in Atlanta yesterday the kids did a wax museum and someone was portraying me. It was weird in a good way.

“As an entrepreneur, you start something, it is just an idea; you don’t think beyond the business operation. Then in moments like these you know you have created something special. And that is all you can hope for. It is very humbling.

“I knew I had a passion for technology,” said Benton, during an informal Q&A session with the Boys and Girls club members. “It is one of those things you have a gut feeling for. Many of the things I started in my career, even if I didn’t know how it would work out, I just had that intuition to figure it out later.”

Benton reminisced about attending Oak Ridge Elementary in Arlington, Virginia, and applying to attend the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

“I didn’t get in, but I have made my own way,” she told the preteens. “I didn’t give up; I kept trying to make my dreams come true.”

The students were particularly interested in hearing about Benton’s travels, including a trip to Malawi. She established a micro-fund to help provide solar electricity to 10 villages in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. The DIY kits were distributed along with instructions on how to install and repair them.

The innovative entrepreneur also shared that she traveled to Paris to photograph artwork for her book, and in addition to visiting places like Tokyo, she has spent time in the Silicon Valley of China, Shenzhen.

Livvy Mount was sitting next to her after-school best friend, Bailey Helms, when she learned that Benton had seen her portrait and that she was a finalist in the contest.

“I felt really excited, surprised and nervous,” said the young artist, who spent two days trying to get the nose and eyes right in the picture. “I chose to draw her because she is an entrepreneur that provides opportunities for other people. I loved that she went to Africa; my friend Zeke just moved to South Africa. I was really nervous to meet her, but she is really nice.”

In 2011, Benton founded NewMe, a startup accelerator that helped hundreds of minority entrepreneurs raise over $47 million in venture capital funding.

Prior to that, at 26, she was frustrated in her efforts to find information on what Black people were doing in technology and launched Black Web 2.0. The platform featured and discussed Black culture and technology and became a space for leading experts.

Benton is in demand as both a technology expert and a conversation-starter about diversity for both ethnic minorities and women in the industry.

“I look at everything in terms of impact,” said Benton of her decision to sell NewME in December 2018. “With all of the businesses I have started, when I know it is time to move on and hand it off, I have to be happy with the impact I have made and to be happy with someone else taking it further than I can.”

After spending a year fighting cancer and intensely focusing on her health, the mother of three has launched another company, Streamlytics.

Aware of how fast technology changes, Benton is tackling data ownership and transforming how enterprises access and leverage cookie-less first-party consumer data, ultimately helping consumers control the data that the tech industry collects.

“My children know that they have data, but if you grew up with the dawn of the internet, we didn’t know that,” said Benton. “There has been a societal shift. The younger generations know we need to own our own data.”

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: How a girl's drawing brought tech entrepreneur to Knoxville