Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown met during orientation on their first day working at Twitter. They didn’t know that just a few years later they’d be building a social media platform of their own.
“We were the only two Black guys in there, and we were like, ‘Hey, we’ll be friends!’” said Terrell, who served as the platform’s global head of Social & Editorial until last month, when he was one of thousands of employees laid off upon Elon Musk’s takeover. Brown was a product manager lead at Twitter working on machine learning, but left Twitter in 2020 to found Meroxa, a Series A startup that makes it easier for companies to build their data pipelines.
Today, …
