Forbes has called Angel Rich “the next Steve Jobs.” Rich herself believes that she will have to work a lot harder to create her own legacy.

       

Rich is most well-known in the business world as the founder of The Wealth Factory Inc., a company that develops games revolving around entrepreneurial education. Most recently, she has found major success in the development of her app, Credit Stacker. Users play a series of engaging games to learn about all aspects of finance, from the time they are born to the time they retire. The topics include everything from paying student loans to investments to FICO scores.

       

This app allows for financial education to reach demographics that may not usually have sought out or had access to such knowledge, such as urban communities.

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“Our mission is to provide equal access to quality financial education all across the world,” Rich said. “We feel as though anyone who has a dime in their pockets should also have the financial literacy to go along with it.”

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Rich first became interested in finance at the age of 10 and knew that it would influence the rest of her life. She attended Hampton University and started The Wealth Factory during her senior year. After working for a time as a Global Market Research Analyst at Prudential, she felt that her talents were underappreciated and ventured out to keep growing her own business.

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When the Credit Stacker app reached worldwide success with over 200,000 downloads, the business world began describing her as the next Steve Jobs. But Rich is all too aware that she faces a set of obstacles that Steve Jobs never had to face: namely, he was a white man, while she is a black woman.

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Black women are currently the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs, and yet founders of companies who are black women are receiving less than 1 percent of venture capital funding. Rich herself has written a book, History of the Black Dollar, detailing the difficulties and financial differences between black and white Americans.

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“[Being] a Black female founder has enough hardships of its own, from being overlooked, underrepresented, and underestimated,” she stated. “Raising capital, in general, is quite challenging; as an African American woman, it’s magnified.”

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Rich has decided to use her success to help bring about the change she wants to see in the tech industry. She makes sure to hire black women within her company, and she has used her platform to create entrepreneurial communities for black women. These include “Chocolate Innovators,” a program to help educate black entrepreneurs start up their own businesses,  EdTech DC, an education meetup and conference held in The Wealth Factory’s base city of Washington, D.C., and Black Female Founders, or #BFF, a support group for black women entrepreneurs as they attempt to start their own businesses.

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Rich plans to continue working to grow her business. Credit Stacker has already reached 40 countries, and Rich wants to continue spreading the app to everyone she can. Her company will continue developing other games as well.

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Rich has only allowed her setbacks to let herself and her business grow stronger.

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“These challenges have enabled me to build a lean company on limited resources, which makes us more sustainable for the future, and a great investment,” she said when noting her lack of funding and support from the tech industry. “We work harder and smarter.”