#24: Ibraheem Alinur (Northwestern) & Irewole Akande - On the challenges of being minority founders

Founders Couch

As COVID-19 continues to rampage the world, what my guests today are building could not be more relevant, timely, and pressing. We welcome Ibraheem Alinur and Irewole Akande to the couch! Ibraheem is a recent 2020 grad from Northwestern and hails from Florida. Irewole is an incoming MBA student at SMU Cox Business School and hails from Nigeria. The two are the cofounders of City Health Tech (https://www.cityhealth.tech/), a public health startup committed to using technology to build healthier communities and mitigate the global spread of infectious diseases. So far, they’ve partnered and piloted with over 10 organizations and schools and have deployed and iterated on over 100 prototypes to arrive at their first product — Opal. And, they have raised over $25,000 from a multitude of pitch competitions such as: Northwestern's Wildfire Pre-Accelerator Program, University of Chicago NSF I-Corps Grant, Foxconn Smart Cities—Smart Futures Challenge, and Northwestern VentureCat. How did Ibraheem and Irewole meet and get the product to where it is today? How did they make use of Northwestern's entrepreneurial resources? And most importantly, what are the challenges of being minority and international founders? It’s a perspective that I think is so important for many people to hear. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/founderscouch/support