Will.i.am: Raising money for tech is hard
DAVOS, Switzerland — Raising money is hard and the technology world can be lonely for a musician.
The frontman and founder of The Black Eyed Peas will.i.am — born William Adams — wants to use his influence to inspire kids to stay in school and learn technology skills, but getting the money to expand his dream has proved challenging in the year since Paste BN last spoke to him at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"In case I don't raise enough money, I still see it through to keep the mission going," he said Thursday to Paste BN at a Salesforce event in Davos. The San Francisco-based cloud-computing company was hosting about two dozen children aged 9-18 for a coding workshop.
Adams funds a school in East Los Angeles, where kids are taught coding and robotics. He also pays for scholarships for promising young technologists. He supports a number of foundations, including I am Angel.
"With our foundation, we've been doing great work this year with the kids," he said.
As he was speaking, young coding enthusiasts busied themselves at large Apple desktops.
"I think Davos is really cool so far," said Niamh Scanlon, the European Union's "Digital Girl of the Year," who is 13 and has already created a few apps. "I'm helping to mentor some of the kids here who have never coded before. I like coding because of the fact that you can create whatever you like. Your imagination is the limit," she said.
Scanlon is from Dublin. Like others in the room, she seemed star-struck by Adams. He was polite and supportive of Scanlon's ambitions to work in the technology industry.
"This year is our first graduating year," he said, speaking about his educational projects. "One of our kids is going Harvard, another is going to MIT. I started with 60 kids five years ago and now I have 322 of them," he said.
"But a lot of times you can feel like an alien because in my field, music, not a lot of people are doing this type of work," he said.