About David
David is the Startup Advocate for the City of Seattle's Office of Economic Development where he supports tech startups through the StartupSeattle program. In his role, he also helps to lead the TechHire initiative for the Seattle region, which aims to connect women, people of color, and the formerly incarcerated with training and jobs in the tech industry, and was started by President Obama in 2015.
David’s passion is facilitating resource-constrained communities learning, creating, and sharing of knowledge, tools, and materials to create feasible, culturally relevant opportunities for upward economic mobility. Previously, David lead Technology Access Foundation's (TAF) efforts to engage students and teachers in interdisciplinary exploration of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in the context of today’s social and global issues. During David's time at TAF, he helped to launch a makerspace, create a tech startup accelerator for Middle School students, led students on immersive learning trips across the world to places like Costa Rica, Silicon Valley, and Japan, and many other project-based learning STEM education experiences. Microsoft News featured his work with TAF in their #DoMore campaign. In the past, he has worked as a Software Design Engineer in Test at Microsoft and a Mac Genius at Apple.
In 2016, David participated in the second cohort of Harvard Business School’s Young American Leaders Program, and was also given the first “Heroes In the Movement” Award by the National Urban League. In 2015, David received the “Making a Difference in Technology” Award from the University of Michigan Black Alumni. The same year, he was also a finalist for “Geek of the Year” at the Geekwire Awards, amongst other notable finalist like Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. David helped create Hack the Central District, or Hack the CD, an annual event that takes place in Seattle and showcases the latest in design, entrepreneurship, and technology from people of African descent around the world. Hack the CD won the 2015 “Best Tech Idea” from the Seattle Weekly. For his work with Hack the CD, David was also listed as “Seattle’s 51 Most Influential” by Seattle Magazine in 2014.
In addition to civic participation, David also is constantly working on personal and professional development. He is currently a graduate student in the University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering Master’s Program, and a 2013 alumni of Leadership Tomorrow.
David's Work
The Startup Advocate's charter is to support technology entrepreneurs through serving as a hub, both online at startupseattle.com and in person, helping triage obstacles to growth and connecting to resources. The role broadly serves the information technology sector including sub-sectors such as mobile, data, analytics, gaming/interactive technologies, consumer web, enterprise software, healthcare IT, internet of things, and beyond.