Growing up in East Oakland, now 20-year-old George Hofstetter believes it was inevitable that he would be focused on doing impactful work. “There is power in where I live and the people I grew up around between family and revolutionaries. I grew up spending time with Angela Davis. On Halloween, we’d go trick or treating and we’d religiously stop at her house first,” he remarked. “When you take someone from Oakland and put them in the Silicon Valley, there is no telling what influence they will have. It is another level of hunger and resourcefulness.”
In addition to meeting powerful people like Davis and Colin Kaepernick, Hofstetter has set his own course to make world-impacting change. At age 16, he founded his own company, George Hofstetter Technologies, Inc., whose mission is to change the world’s perspective on race through technology. “My dream is to see a society that creates equitable technologies and nearly a level playing field. I don’t think I’ll live to see it, but that is what I want to create,” he expressed.
It Began with Coding
When he was 13, Hofstetter’s best friend invited him to go to a Qeyno Labs Hackathon. “The only thing I knew was how to jailbreak an iPhone. I saw The Matrix and wanted to understand the code that took over the screen,” he said. “I didn’t really want to go. My stepdad (at the time) was pressing me to be mediocre and average, but my mom said I really needed to go to the hackathon. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I decided to go.”
That decision accelerated Hofstetter’s creative plans. “I had never been in a space tailored for Black people and technology. I had just done it on my own,” he explained. “I saw a whole space dedicated to cultivating Black creativity, which aligned with my life’s focus, which I believe is creating something bigger than me.”
He and his group created a social network called Connect the Dots. “It was spawned from our personal experiences as Black students in private white schools and the racist encounters we faced daily. It was important for us to create something people could actually use,” he described. “We determined that if this was something that bothered us, it had to bother more people. We wanted a solution.”
Often hackathons are for those who have already come up with an idea, but this one was different. “It was so well put together in terms of organization and what they were trying to manifest for young people,” Hofstetter recounted. “We worked with developers on how to create a platform for what we wanted to do. They were supportive and inclusive, and they showed us code.”
“We finished third at the Hackathon behind students from Berkeley and Stanford. After that experience, I got super into coding. It definitely made me push forward,” he recollected. “We must have made an impact because KQED News in Oakland did a story on me, following me around with a video camera in school.”
Coding also served as Hofstetter’s release from tension at home. “My stepdad was always yelling. I decided to get lost in code. I put on my headphones and poured myself into it,” he commented. “It was a solution. It wasn’t escapism, but escaping to create something better.”
New Opportunities with New Awakenings
The next hackathon he attended was sponsored by ESSENCE and Qeyno Labs in 2014 and was after the launch of YesWeCode, an initiative started by Prince and Van Jones after the murder of Trayvon Martin with the goal of helping 100,000 young women and men from underrepresented backgrounds to be successful in the tech sector.
“We wanted to develop a solution to a problem. Growing up in Oakland, I saw friends die young and be mistreated by the police. Tech was my way to improve my environment and use whatever resources are at my disposal,” Hofstetter expressed. “We came up with an app called CopStop. We didn’t place at the hackathon, but I won an internship to work in the Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf’s office for two years, which aligned perfectly with my graduation from The Hidden Genius Project (which trains and mentors young Black males in technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership). The internship opened a whole new world for me. I had to have that and experience that.
At age 15, he was the first to pilot a program, Shadow a Googler. “Everyone in Oakland is trying to get to Google, Square, Facebook, Twitter, or any tech headquarters as a way to create generational wealth and change. I got to be a developer for a few days, working in the department of data analytics,” he recounted. “I felt like it was serendipitous that I was there and that I felt accomplished.
“Instead, when I got there, I felt the same as I did while attending a PWI (predominantly white institution). There were only a few people you could talk to and share stories of discrimination. That was the issue with my thought process at 15. I kept waiting for a big corporation to create something to help me or create an environment that is empowering or change the dynamic further, but these corporations are for profit at the end of the day. This entity has never cared about people of color or marginalized communities.”
Founding His Company
When he founded his company, it came with a strong realization of what his focus needed to be. “If I was here, where is everyone else. I didn’t do anything super special. I did x, y, and z. Why isn’t everyone else doing a, b, and c? I saw that the disconnect was the digital divide,” he modulated. “We need more people of color on the inside of companies creating these technologies. Tech is not inherently racist, but is about what the engineers are making. If technology is specifically targeting communities of color, it is because an engineer designed it that way. Sometimes it is intentional.”
Hofstetter worked on a project for Capital One DevExchange, a free mobile online curriculum to close the gap of digital divide by pointing users in the right direction, using technology as a platform for socially equitable solutions in any environment. “There is an unconscious weight of white supremacy in products we use every day. It pushes people of color into an unconscious idea that we are less than,” he described.
He breaks his early years in technology into two phases of work. “From ages 13 to 15, I was focused on coding, learning, and practicing. I wanted to get those 10,000 hours in (a reference to author Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that 10,000 hours of practice makes one an expert in a given field),” he explained. “At age 16, I realized I needed to give back, to start teaching, leading design thinking workshops, and to tell all the folks who like me what’s possible.”
College and Teaching
Hofstetter planned to continue pursuing his technological goals without attending university. “I wasn’t going to go to college if I had to pay. Then Menlo (College in Atherton) came out the woodwork with a full ride. I had been working to get into the Silicon Valley bubble in high school, but I never explicitly said I wanted to live there. Menlo is in the heart of it,” he explained. “Being from East Oakland, my presence alone shook things up. They took a minute to become accustomed to me, to change how they approached Black creatives, radical thought processes, and critical thinking around curriculum. They may not have been ready for all those concepts, but they were open to it. They saw the trajectory.”
Making his mark immediately, Hofstetter started the school’s first social justice club, which became the largest club on campus. The club received funding from the administration to see The Hate You Give, a movie centered around police brutality.
In September of his freshman year, Hofstetter received a call from Hidden Genius. “they wanted to fly me to Miami to lead a workshop. I asked them what it was and they said ‘Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp.’ I couldn’t believe it as I had always wanted to meet him,” he divulged. “Colin introduced me to Professor Ameer (Hasan Loggins) and he put me on GAME!. He told me, ‘You have to stop educating the folks who aren’t your people. You will have way more influence with your own people.’ We can always get caught up in Atherton, but we should be getting younger folks to believe in themselves.”
The same weekend, he met Trayvon Martin’s mother. “That changed my life. She gave me several bracelets that said ‘I am Trayvon Martin, you are Trayvon Martin.’ This was as close as I could ever get to him,” he remarked. “She told me to keep telling my story, to never stop. Young people of color have the whole universe within them to create. That was all the motivation I needed.”
He jokes that he missed the college’s biggest party of the year to attend Kaepernick’s event. It turned out he missed it again last fall when he traveled to Africa and London to teach code and design thinking.
In February of his freshman year at Menlo, he was selected to be part of the Google Pay it Forward Challenge for Black History Month. He was featured on the Hidden Genius Project’s website.
In the post, he brings up one of the ideas that pushes him forward, AfroFuturism, which explores the intersection of African diaspora and technology:
“The concept of Afro-Futurism has been on my mind as of recently. It’s a complex term that some have trouble defining but I explain Afro-Futurism as a mentality — looking into the future with a focus on Black inclusion, technology, and the heights we as a community can reach. I describe the afro-futurist mentality as understanding that to truly pay homage to your ancestors you need to be a disruptive innovator of the future and abandon to try finding comfort in the past. Afro-Futurism is designing your future with the absence of discrimination and society’s stereotypes. That’s a future worth working towards.”
In October of his sophomore year, Hofstetter spoke at a TedxYouth conference in Seattle in a speech entitled, “How technology redefined can be a social justice super power.”
“Menlo was an amazing experience that gave me great connections and networking,” communicated Hofstetter, who is in the process of finalizing his transfer to Stanford University. “When I read about the Science, Technology, and Society program at Stanford and the capstone projects to choose from for the program, it was as if it was written for me.”
Taking Oakland Everywhere He Goes
For all his success at such a young age, Hofstetter credits his mother Gerri with being his number one influence. “My mom’s support is almost solely how I got here. She has always taken on the roles in my life where there were gaps. She has been my mom and dad my whole life,” he expressed. “Growing up with a therapist as a mom (she earned a master’s degree in counseling from California State University, Fullerton) was a great buffer. She always knew what I was thinking.
“She was the first person to tell me I could be paid to speak. I was thinking no way anyone wants to hear this 14-year-old East Oakland kid speak. She told me they would pay me for the things I wanted to share.”
Hofstetter’s mother encouraged him to become a student in another way, that of being mentored by a Black man, her father George McDaniel. “My mother and I felt like it was us against the world. My stepfather was white and that was a real conflict for me growing up. I didn’t have a Black man in the household to look up to and learn how to be a Black man in America.”
Fortunately, his grandfather helped fill that role. “Although he claims to just be an eastern farm boy from North Carolina, he has carried our family on his back. He is retired investment banker in Oakland who supports small businesses and connects people, helping them to build generational wealth and create success,” Hofstetter explained. “He seems to know everybody in Oakland and has helped so many people in one way, shape, or form. I am seeing his legacy first-hand.”
His grandmother, Diana McDaniel, has played an equally important role in his life. “She saw me jailbreaking iPhones and suggested I become the sound technician at her church, the Unity Church of San Leandro (where she serves as senior minister). I learned everything I could and made $20 every weekend,” he described. “It helped me build confidence working with other people, particularly since I was the youngest person there. I learned a lot about opportunity and preparation.”
Hofstetter learned multiple lessons from his mother and grandmother about feminism and empowerment. “I learned a lot about ideas of manifestation, consciousness, and putting out good energy. I was taught that we need to follow our own compass or as we call it, our inner voice,” he explained. “If you are in the flow, there is no voice to hear. It is when you are doing something funky that you hear that voice speaking up.”
Wherever he goes, he takes his love of Oakland and his experiences there as part of his mindset. “I have heard Oakland described as revolutionary, creative, and dangerous. Unfortunately, it is a trendsetter in policing, crowd control, and dealing with protestors,” he remarked. “The way they cornered people during the Occupy Movement in 2008 and 2009 was later used in cornering protestors in Ferguson after Michael Brown was murdered. We are literally the blueprint for mistreating a marginalized community.”
That has led to people of color and others to constantly strive against the system. “We are taught to question everything. That is the level of air that we breathe. That is the standard in Oakland,” he communicated.
He sees one of the most important lessons of living in Oakland to be able to express your feelings in a healthy way. “If you can’t compartmentalize your life, you are lost. If you are not taught how to deal with emotions while living in Oakland, you are left to wayside. We need mental health resources, which are so lacking, for the community to rehabilitate,” Hofstetter proclaimed. “Folks are really struggling right now. When you have a friend get killed, a cousin get killed, and an uncle go to prison all in the same month, you are left to rot if no one helps you deal with that. I am fortunate that I have a really supportive family that shows me how to express my feelings. Coding has also done that for me.”
Future for Him and Youth
Hofstetter decided in December 2019 that he would take this fall off from his academic career. “I was planning to speak and teach a lot. That’s where my main stream of income was going to come from. Fortunately, Bitwise (a technology company out of Fresno which added its first office in Oakland this summer) has been very helpful. I have a contract with them for six months that allows me to pour myself into programming during quarantine,” he shared. “I am able to work for the company creating inclusive tech and socially equitable products for the masses. There’s a revolution outside and it’s overwhelming with everything going on. Some folks are indulging so much in it that they can’t focus on anything else.
“I want to use this time to see how far I can take this entrepreneurship. I have always been a part-time entrepreneur, mentor, and computer science engineer. I have always been a full-time student. I wanted to put all my time into being an entrepreneur for the first time.”
He believes in the power of people even younger than him and has seen a lot of that already in his 13-year-old sister Joelle (@jbrroklynart). “She has seen me do what I do and it has just become an expectation to do big things. Even though she won a hackathon when she was nine years old, tech is not her calling,” he stated. “She is a creative artist for the revolution. She empowers herself and others through her painting and sculpting. She did a portrait of Steven Taylor, who was murdered by San Leandro police. His grandmother was holding that portrait during a protest in front of the San Leandro Police Department.”
Hofstetter cites a critical piece of advice for young people of color: believe in what is inside you. “There was a key moment for me. I was 15 and a sophomore in high school and I got suspended for a day,” he recollected. “My mom picked me up and she was mad. She said, ‘Why do you keep fighting it? Why are you fighting who you are?’ I didn’t know why. I decided at that point to let it go and let it flow. At that point, I accepted to stay on the path for which I was called.”
He has never looked back since that moment. “You have to build your inner confidence and juice yourself up in a good way any chance you get. When you are in school, a system literally designed for you to fail and to feed you into mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, remember it was not meant for you to pass that test,” he communicated. “You can create something for yourself and for everybody who looks like you to succeed. Decide to fully empower yourself. A lot of Chakra and energy will open up and expand. Folks of color were meant to create, to have power and influence. Don’t be distracted by stuff that was made to keep you from creating a generational wealth of knowledge and success. The moment you believe in yourself, things change.”
Expressing True Self
Hofstetter believes in physical manifestations of belief in self as well as evidenced in his own life experiences along with his hair and tattoos.
“I was pretty clean cut in high school. There is this inner obligation you feel that you have to look a certain way and look the part until you get a position to be taken seriously and not get categorized. Most of my time in high school, I wasn’t at the point yet where I was able to wear my hair how I wanted to,” he revealed. “By my senior year, I knew I was going to Atherton and I just couldn’t be that restricted person anymore. I grew out my dreadlocks and that took a lot of courage. They came in so small and thin and I was embarrassed at first. Then I realized it was a journey I could appreciate.
“As my dreadlocks grew, I associated my experience and emotion with growth and maturity. They kept getting longer and I was excited when they were so long, I saw myself in a ponytail. Now I am 2 ½ years into it and I have combined skinny locks together into thicker ones. I like the thicker lock look and I also didn’t want to spend quarantine figuring out how to get them re-twisted so I put them together. The low-cut look is an assimilation to the mass. I am now at a level of consciousness that won’t allow me to do that.”
His room, or his lab as he calls it, has a large poster of the universe in it, a physical reminder of how much can be understood in a limitless galaxy. He has three universe tattoos on the inside of one arm to honor his family and remember that there is a whole universe out there that we don’t yet understand. “One is a blue planet for my sister, another is green for our younger brother, and the third is red like Saturn for my mom. The other arm has a tattoo of Oakland with a red bleeding heart is. A lot of folks have died to create the Oakland that I love through social justice. Home is where the heart is,” Hofstetter described.
He believes in making the most of opportunities. “Malcolm Gladwell writes about those who have been given opportunities, who are cherry-picked like Bill Gates. Once you are there, whole new doors open for you,” he said. “Some people keep fighting the legacy inside of them, the same way I used to do. Believe in your own genius and watch what unfolds.”