“Competition is for losers,” said Earn Your Leisure host Rashad Bilal at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.
Bilal joined his business partner and co-host, Troy Millings, on the main stage for a live recording of the “State of Black Business,” featuring Blavity founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun, to discuss the importance of collaboration in the Black community. He argued that not embracing that mindset can stem from ego and encouraged people to become more selfless.
“Collaboration is the only way. … You don’t want to partner with somebody because you want your name on it. [You’re] about to lose $100 million…,” Bilal explained. He later added, “My goal every single day is to see how I can make other people money … Because if you make money, then if I made you money, you’re gonna make sure that I make money.”
Millings followed up, reflecting on sit-down interviews with various high-net-worth guests, and acknowledged that he has “never seen them actually do business.”
“They all are trying to get to a place where it’s like, ‘Oh, I made this, I made this, I’m a billionaire.’ But then when you look back at what they’ve left behind they’ve created something for themselves and they’ve never worked together. … I think we’re at the forefront of the change,” Millings said.
“…It’s the reason why you see us at AFROTECH™,” he continued. “It’s important to us. It’s important to the community. And we want them to say, ‘All right, we watched a generation build, and they accumulated great wealth, but they never combined.’ But what if we show the new generation of wealth is actually doing the opposite? They’re creating the wealth, they’re building wealth, they’re building community, and now they’re combining it. And I think, you know, we stand at the crossroads of that. So we got an important role.”
One example of the duo’s collaborative approach to building community is the Sanbra City Project in Accra, Ghana. According to a Facebook post, the 400-acre residential development will include at least 600 residential units, commercial spaces, recreation centers and a farm. The project, with a name that means “welcome home,” is a partnership with local Ghanaian entrepreneurs who share the same vision. The development welcomes people from both Africa and the U.S.
“We love the party, we love the jollof rice, but we gotta just be a little bit more serious about things and real estate is something that’s the cornerstone to really developing a real pipeline,” Bilal told the audience. “There was people on the other side of the continent, on the other side of the world, in Africa, in Accra, that had the same vision. Real estate developers, they thought the same thing, and they own the biggest club and they like, ‘Yo, y’all come here all the time, but we wanted y’all to stay here. We want to really develop something.’ So when we met, it was divine intervention because it’s like we had an idea, they had an idea, and they actually already owned the real estate.”
He added, “They were showing us their factories. They own media companies…they own everything. And we sat down in a hotel lobby and we just talked for like two hours. In one day we worked the deal out. We’ve been partners ever since. So that to us is very important because it’s done with the spirit of collaboration, not colonizers, not going in exporting our way of life in Africa. … We were made in different tribes to learn from each other, not to fight each other. Diaspora Wars, it has no purpose.”