Inside Shopify’s commitment to help build 1 million Black businesses

1 Million Black Businesses, from Shopify and Operation Hope, is one of the winners of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards. Explore the full list of projects we’re honoring for making the world more equitable, accessible, and sustainable.



After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Tobias Lütke told the entrepreneur John Hope Bryant that he wanted to help America’s Black community, but as CEO of Shopify in Canada, wasn’t sure how. “I said, ‘I don’t know, maybe you can help me create a million Black businesses?’” Bryant recalls prodding him.



Six months later, Shopify had committed $130 million in resources, and Bryant’s financial literacy nonprofit, Operation Hope, launched its ambitious 1 Million Black Businesses initiative to eliminate systemic barriers to Black entrepreneurship. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award in the Enduring Impact category.



Bryant founded Operation Hope after the 1992 Rodney King riots. In the decades since, it’s invested $3.5 billion in educating underrepresented communities worldwide. To him, this moment promised to be similarly transformational. 1MBB’s goal is to hit a million new businesses by 2030. Operation Hope says the initiative had already stood up 155,000 by the end of 2022, accounting for about 1 in every 20 Black-owned businesses in America.



Its orbit has continued expanding, to encompass a wide-ranging network of some 60 corporate, nonprofit, and government partners that provide a service, training, or other support to entrepreneurs—everything from the NFL, Wells Fargo, and Delta to churches and colleges to the U.S. Small Business Administration and cities like Memphis, Los Angeles, and Charlotte, North Carolina.



Entrepreneurs can draw from a network of volunteer lawyers, financial experts, accountants, and marketing professionals. They receive Shopify accounts where they can leverage the e-commerce platform’s suite of customer-engagement tools, and they’re eligible to access what Bryant argues may be Shopify’s key contribution: its internal line of credit, which can provide capital to Black entrepreneurs whose credit scores might not qualify for traditional business loans. (Shopify has internal data on partner stores, which can help it make these assessments and bypass credit scores.)



The 1MBB plan is to equip every interested party—from the fiftysomething looking to change careers to the couple with a bold business idea to the hobbyist eager to open an online store—with the skills and resources they need to scale a successful business, become role models and mentors, and build generational wealth.



“Why am I an entrepreneur?” asks Bryant. “Because my daddy was a businessman, and before him, his dad was a sharecropper and a slave. If we inspire a million Black business owners, we’ve just turned those households into a laboratory for cultural transformation in the Black community.”