Sherrell Dorsey is an award-winning journalist, entrepreneur, and speaker shaping how climate, capital, and culture converge to redefine modern markets and power structures.
She is the host of the TED Tech podcast, where she examines the technologies and systems transforming society—and the narratives that determine who gets access to opportunity within them. Through her work, Sherrell has become a leading translator between climate innovation, investment capital, and cultural adoption.
She is the founder of The Plug, the first Black data-driven tech news publication to syndicate on the Bloomberg Terminal, which was acquired by ImpactAlpha in 2023. Her reporting and analysis have helped investors, policymakers, and industry leaders understand emerging markets before they fully enter the mainstream.
Sherrell’s writing has appeared in Inc. Magazine, where her column Power Up spotlighted women shaping the future of climate tech, sustainability, and innovation. She is also the author of Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us (Wiley), a practical guide to navigating economic transformation in the digital age.
A sought-after keynote speaker and moderator, Sherrell has appeared on stages for organizations including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, Cisco, and global climate and finance forums. Her insights on finance, technology, and systems change have been featured in The Washington Post, Vice, The Information, and Columbia Journalism Review.
Sherrell holds a Master’s degree in data journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in international trade and marketing from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was named to Black Enterprise’s 40 Under 40 and is an Aspen Institute Fellow.
Journalism, at its core, is public service, and that's always been my north star. I grew up in a world shaped by technology, thanks to my grandfather gifting me my first computer at eight years old and a formative high school program where I learned to code, set up servers, and work at a big tech company. Technology felt boundless to me from the start. The idea that you could build something from nothing, that access and hard work could level any playing field. That was magnetic.
Writing, researching, and eventually building data-driven coverage became my way of sparking new thinking and opening doors for people who weren't always in the room where these conversations happened. That mission hasn't changed. It's just expanded.
Delay. Full stop. Too many leaders are waiting for perfect clarity before they act, and in the meantime, their teams are left without the training, frameworks, or direction they need. The organizations currently winning got specific early. Specific about use cases, specific about outcomes, specific about how AI actually fits into the day-to-day work their people are already doing.
I come back to values and purpose every single time. When the noise gets loud, those two things act as a filter and grounding force for me. If something doesn't align with what I'm actually building or who I'm serving, it goes in the "not right now" pile no matter how shiny it looks. Rapid change has a way of manufacturing urgency around things that don't actually matter. Knowing your "why" keeps you from chasing every fire.
Show up consistently and repeatedly. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room or the most credentialed. But you have to do the reps. Every great opportunity I've had has been traceable back to some form of consistent presence: a newsletter I kept writing, a conversation I kept producing and showing up for, a skill I kept developing even when no one was watching. Consistency is deeply unsexy and wildly underrated.
Sevetri Wilson, without hesitation. She is the consummate businesswoman. A room mover, a community builder, and a true icon born out of New Orleans. Becoming the first Black woman to raise multiple rounds of venture capital for her company is a landmark achievement, but what moves me most is how she carries it. With groundedness, with community, with the kind of grace that makes her success feel expansive rather than exclusive. For young Black women in business, and honestly, for all of us, Sevetri is proof that where you come from is never a ceiling.
My Apple Watch. It holds me accountable in ways I didn't know I needed. I’m adamant about hitting 10,000 steps daily, staying active, and not-so-secretly competing against my girlfriends in workout challenges. It's become less of a gadget and more of a daily accountability partner. Movement keeps me sharp, and apparently a little competitive energy doesn't hurt either.
I’m enthusiastic about this growing curiosity about how we build things and what we consume in the process. People are asking harder questions about important things like data centers, their power draw, their water usage, and the true cost of the infrastructure behind our digital lives. And that same scrutiny is showing up in consumer behavior: there's a real movement away from synthetics toward natural fibers and materials. What I find exciting isn't any single shift, but the underlying pattern of people waking up to the relationship between what we make, what we use, and what we leave behind. That kind of consciousness is where real change begins.
Two books have shaped me more than I can fully articulate. I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi gave me a framework for thinking about money without shame. It’s a practical, direct, and genuinely liberating guide to managing money I first read in college. And Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, which I'm actually revisiting again this year, which goes deeper into the architecture of self-image and how we unconsciously set the limits of what we believe is possible for ourselves. I believe together that they cover some of the greatest outer and inner work I’ve done for myself.
