Meet Stephanie Lampkin. She’s smart, she’s innovative and she’s also black. She’s the genius behind what might be the next big thing in the app industry. Her app Blendoor, which is being described ad Tinder for the career market, is already being considered by big companies, such as Google, Twitter, AirBnb and LinkedIn.
Stephanie Lampkin she has a photo of Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox, up in her office.
Oprah, Maya Angelou and Melanie Hobson have a special place in her office too, but Lampkin says she draws a lot of inspiration from Burns’ corporate career path.
“It takes a lot of patience and grace and delayed gratification for a black woman to go up in the ranks of a company like that,” Lampkin says. “We need to see more examples of that.”
Delayed gratification and grace have been key for Lampkin, 31, as she prepares to launch her app, Blendoor, into public beta testing during SXSW interactive festival Sunday. The app comes two years after being told during an interview with a well-known tech company that she didn’t have enough technical skills.
This was news to Lampkin, a D.C.-native who had been coding since she 13, was a Stanford engineering and MIT graduate and an alumna of companies like Microsoft, Deloitte and TripAdvisor.
“It was almost funny to me because I felt like if I were a white or Asian person with those exact same credentials there would be no question about how technical I was,” Lampkin says.
Continue reading more about Lampkin and her app at NBC BLK.