Noelle Adams is the founder of the Culpability App, a mobile application that allows people to capture non-emergency incidents such as police harassment and gang intimidation and store the footage in a secured database.
Driven by her brother’s wrongful conviction in 2005 and the tampered police video and audio that helped convict him, Noelle has been on a 13-year journey to develop a solution that provides more accountability and helps communities feel safer. Noelle’s dad is also a retired police officer. “I know what it feels like to be worried about him coming home safely. At the same time, I know what it feels like to see someone be wrongfully convicted. One thing I think the majority of folks want is for everyone to be able to go home safely at the end of the day”.
Noelle started building her business by joining startup community leaders like Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), where she learned about customer discovery. But mentors she was working with were “older white tech guys, and did not understand the problem I was describing. I knew that I was in front of the wrong audience”.
Noelle said her greatest challenge was “getting rid of all that crap I’ve picked up, those things that cause me to doubt myself. Or those things that have made me feel like, ‘Can I really do this? Are you sure you can do it?’”
Being a part of a tech incubator for Black and Latinx women provided the training, but also the encouragement and “tough love” that Noelle needed to build her startup. Noelle recalls her mentors telling her, “Noelle, you can do this”. She would reflect for a while, then realize that they were right: she could do it.