Emeka Anen is a 26-year-old who is passionate about taking your shoe collections into a digitized locker. Working alongside his co-founder and brother, Emeka has helped create what many consider to be the ultimate community for sneakers and streetwear through his tech company, THRONE. Here’s our interview with him people:
 

Growing up it was something that was a part of our household. My dad’s an entrepreneur as well, so he always wanted the latest computer or gadget for his own office. Which meant we always had more computers around the house than we needed!
 

So from very early on we were encouraged to get into it. I’m from an immigrant family [I don’t know if this is a fair generalization] but for us at least it meant my dad always insisting on us not just being consumers but also creators.
 

It’s funny because he used to give me a hard time about always buying shoes. He’d say ‘with all this money you are spending on these shoes, you could do all these other things like learning to code’ etc. So it’s the environment I grew up in. I’ve always been the first in school to geek out over new features from cool products. So I’ll just say my upbringing and DNA I guess.
 
 

I always knew I was going to do something entrepreneurial, for me the big debate was whether I was going to do it before school [school being an MBA program] or after school.
 

I say to my friends as well: if all your life you’ve been getting jobs or getting into good schools, it means you have good ideas. So why not pursue your own ideas. I decided to start now versus waiting until after I graduate. Then it was just a matter of identifying what was something I knew a lot about, and was passionate about. That was the easy part because my brother and I had always spoken about the state of the sneaker market. We had those wheels in motion long before applying to schools anyway. It was just a matter of time before we decided to double down on it and do it full time.
 
 

I think that’s a really good question. This is my first time doing this, so it’s hard for me to say whether or not any obstacle is typical for an entrepreneur or if it’s because I am a person of color.
 

It probably plays in our favour, as we have greater insights into the community, as it’s something that we grew up with.
 

The closest thing to an obstacle is probably when trying to convey the value proposition of what you’re building to someone who may not be familiar with the space/culture. To counteract it, we didn’t attempt to go and fundraise until we felt we had a great product and a critical mass of users.
 
 

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