Dumebi Egbuna is the Co-founder and CMO of Chezie, an East Coast-based startup that provides an all-in-one solution for building, tracking, and managing employee resource groups (ERGs). Before starting Chezie, Dumebi worked at IBM within their sales organization where she was responsible for driving the company’s strategic initiatives for data and AI brand. 
 
Trained in business administration at Emory University, Dumebi has always wanted to help minorities break barriers and succeed that eventually led to co-foundering Chezie with her brother with an ambition to help companies retain their diverse talent by building impactful employee resource groups. 

In this fascinating conversation with Shoaib Ahamed, conducted online, Dumebi Egbuna talks about building Chezie, all things ERGs, the ups and downs of a founder’s journey, entrepreneurship, and much more. 

Future Startup: Please briefly introduce yourself and tell us how you would explain your work to someone outside of tech and startup. 

Dumebi Egbuna: My name is Dumebi Egbuna and I am the Co-founder and CMO of Chezie. Chezie is an all-in-one solution for building, tracking, and managing employee resource groups (ERGs). 
For those unfamiliar with ERGs, they are employee-led communities based on shared identities (ex: Black@Facebook, Women@Amazon, etc.) that are meant to foster inclusion, boost employee engagement, and support professional development. 

ERGs can be an integral part of an organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts, but they are often disjointed, and as a result, under-utilized. We want to change that.

Future Startup: How did you come up with the idea and get started? What went into building the initial operation/first version of the platform — how did you put together initial investment and other resources to get started? 

Dumebi Egbuna: My brother, Toby, and I started Chezie in June 2020. We actually started with a completely different idea, which was essentially a Glassdoor for minorities. We did that for about a year but found that it was really hard to scale. 

We pivoted in the Summer of 2021 to focus on ERGs after being approached by a potential customer who asked if we could create a platform to help them track and manage the groups at their organization.