Avenger of the Week | Irma Olguin Jr.

Tech entrepreneur Irma Olguin Jr. describes her background as uncommon in the industry. She is queer, Latinx, and an engineer, and she grew up in a family of farmer laborers outside of Fresno, California.

‘When you pile all of these things on top of one another, you think, How did that happen?” she said. “But the crying shame is that it doesn’t happen that often,” she added.

Olguin originally founded Bitwise in 2013 to provide technology training through paid apprenticeships to non-traditional populations, women and minorities in underserved areas, to meet local and regional tech needs. She spent a year and collected many rejections before raising $27 million in venture capital to expand tech opportunities as a means to reduce the wealth gap, meet tech needs, and stimulate the economy. Recently, the now co-CEO of the three-division Bitwise Industries, which Forbes described as “a tech ecosystem” company, raised another $50 million to take their model national, initially in Toledo, Ohio.

Olguin grew up outside of Fresno and never thought about college until she scored high on a scholastic aptitude test and began getting college scholarship offers in the mail. She took the best offer and went to the University of Toledo, where she initially chose engineering and technology majors because they were housed in a brand new building, and she thought “I can picture myself studying in that building”. She loved her studies and put them to good use!

Returning to Fresno after college, she taught programming and helped tech startups, which is what made her realize that there was a need to develop a diverse trained tech workforce from marginalized communities to access opportunities in the tech industry.

She partnered with lawyer Jacob Soberal to open Geekwise Academy with the slogan “No one belongs here more than you”, and Geekwise has already trained more than 5,000 programmers for area companies. Expanding to become Bitwise industries, it now has a software development division, Shift 3 Technologies, which has 50% women and 50% minority employees, and it also has a real estate division that has renovated a 250,000 square foot building in downtown Fresno for more than 200 tech companies as tenants. Olguin manages the Academy and Shift3 Technologies day to day, while Soberal focuses on the real estate development. Along the way, Olguin also created 59DaysofCode, an annual, non-profit competition that has launched several tech enterprises.

“I want to acknowledge that in my mind ‘women in tech’ is really ‘marginalized people in tech’”, she said. “As a culture, as a nation, we still have not quite included everyone and I’d like to see that change. And that starts with me… we get better the more we include.”

For her commitment to providing tech opportunities for diverse, underserved communities through her entrepreneurial spirit and tech expertise, Irma Olguin Jr. is our Avenger of the Week.

For her commitment to providing tech opportunities for diverse, underserved communities, @irms is the @GenderAvenger #AvengerOfTheWeek! "As a culture, as a nation, we still have not quite included everyone and I’d like to see that change." #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avenger-of-the-week-irma-olguin-jr