Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism, and supporting Black businesses. This podcast will feature edited versions of Entrepreneurial Appetite’s Black book discussions, including live conversations between a virtual audience, authors, and Black entrepreneurs. In this community, we do not limit what it means to be an intellectual or entrepreneur. We recognize that the sisters and brothers who own and work in beauty salons or barbershops are intellectuals just as much as sisters and brothers who teach and research at universities. This podcast is unique because, as part of this community, you have the opportunity to participate in our monthly book discussion, suggest the book to be discussed, or even lead the conversation between the author and our community of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. For more information about participating in our monthly discussions, please follow Entrepreneurial_ Appetite on Instagram and Twitter. Please consider supporting the show as one of our Founding 55 patrons. For five dollars a month, you can access our live monthly conversations. See the link below:https://www.patreon.com/EA_BookClub
Entrepreneurial Appetite
(Black Tech Founders) Investing in Tech's Diverse Future: Preston James and DivInc
Join us for an extraordinary dialogue with Preston James, founder of DivInc, a trailblazer in accelerating Black, minority, and women-owned businesses. We get an exclusive peek into his inspirational journey, exploring his commendable stint in the tech industry spanning a quarter-century and his transformative leadership as the co-founder and CEO of DivInc. Get swept away by Preston's fascinating narrative filled with compelling insights as he unveils how Divinc spawned 73 startups, created a platform for 100 founders, and churned out a whopping $4.8 million in revenue!
Tune in as we trace Preston’s extraordinary career transition from American Online, Dell, to DivInc, revealing his epiphanies about the lack of Black angel investors in the tech startup sphere and how this spurred him to become an investor himself.
We also tackle critical themes like entrepreneurship, equity, and racial wealth disparity. Join us as we dissect the crucial role of homeownership, equity assets, investments, and business ownership in wealth accumulation. We address the prospects and predicaments in broadening capital accessibility for Black-owned businesses and the urgent need for government and financial institutions to pave the way for innovative individuals. Get ready for a thought-provoking discussion as we explore emerging opportunities in tech companies.
What's good everyone. I'm Langston Clark, founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting black businesses. In this special episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite, we feature a conversation between Jason Bailey, co-founder of Entrepreneurial Appetite, and Preston James, founder of Div Inc, an accelerator for black minority and women-owned businesses. This episode is special because it is a live recording of Legends Lunch, an intergenerational gathering of black men who get together for the sake of building community. We got a good group of brothers in here. We got like 30 brothers here in the Moab Center. So really trying to do some good work to build community here and produce some capitalize on the black male excellence that we have here in San Antonio and also across the state of Texas, all right. So Legends Lunch is presented by Entrepreneurial Appetite, and Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting black businesses. I don't want Entrepreneurial Appetite to overshadow what Legends Lunch really is, though. Legends Lunch is really just a gathering of brothers myself, uchanaya Ogba, alex Bailey, james Cooper, josh Scott and Lee Roy Adams who all just decided to come together and eat lunch. Literally the first time I think we did this was the day everything got shut down. We were sitting in Tank's Pizza and you know we got that emergency notice everybody go home during COVID. And so now that things have opened back up, we continue to meet at Tank's Pizza the last Friday of every month just for some community and some fellowship, and once a quarter we hope to do a special event like this Legends Lunch, and so I want to invite you all to be in discussion with actually, the guy who's the co-founder of Entrepreneurial Appetite.
Speaker 1:Jason Bailey is a highly educated, astute brother here in San Antonio. I thought he would be the perfect guy to facilitate this conversation because his familiarity with Preston James, founder of Divink, a nonprofit incubator in support of Black minority and women owned businesses and I have to say this before we get into the conversation, that I've never really met Preston before, but I remember him speaking at the collegiate Black Mill Retreat, which is sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin, and when I thought about who could be the perfect person to be our first guest speaker, he came to mind because here is an older brother who took time to go meet with some younger brothers in the woods and talk about, you know, venture capital, angel investment, tech businesses, the economic gap and how entrepreneurship is key to closing that gap, closing that debt, and so I appreciate him being here with us today. I also want to add that my observations of this brother are that he transcends generations. So for someone like me, preston is probably like 15, 20 years older than I am, but I saw him speak at Houston Tilson University at Afro Tech, and he was moderating the conversation and one of the co-founders of Afro Tech. They just got $65 million right to invest in Black minority owned businesses and they're like my age, in their mid-30s, right early 30s.
Speaker 1:And then another woman, omi Bell, shout out to North Carolina A&T because we both went to A&T. She's up there and she's doing big things with Black and brown women, with Black girl ventures, and Preston said I'm going to learn from these people as much as they can learn from me, and so one of the things that I recognize here, one of the gaps that we've seen among Black communities here in San Antonio, is that for millennials and Gen Z, is that there's a feeling that there's not this intentional investment in pouring into and willingness to learn from each other intergenerationally that we've seen Preston do. So, preston, I appreciate you being here and being an archetype for that. Without further ado, I'm going to turn my mic off and I'm going to switch it to the brothers who are going to be in conversation today. Thank you all for joining us here. Jason Bailey, the floor is yours. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3:I think where I'd like to actually start a little bit is to say a little bit more about Preston. So Langston did a good job talking a little bit about how he came across you, what he knows about you, but I did a little research too and I feel like I should give you a little bit more of a shout out there. So Preston Elgin's the second has more than 25 years of tech sales and tech leadership experience and so many of us work in individual verticals where there might be government or education. When I did some research on Preston I saw that not only government, local, federal, education, medium-sized business, large business a variety of different verticals and a variety of different fields and I thought that it was really impressive over a 25 career to be able to have that breadth and span of work. And today Langston mentioned Preston serves as the co-founder and CEO of Divink, an accelerator and essentially accelerator organization and family or community that's focused on BIPOC businesses and opportunities to start-ups and so forth like that, and I wanted to say a little bit about some of the outcomes that have come out of that organization so far.
Speaker 3:Based on my research, I'm sure this is just some updates here. So 73 startups through the accelerator 100 founders, $14 million invested investment raised, 422 jobs created and $4.8 million in revenue generated, and so this is a real impact, right, this is not hypothetical, this is not potential. This is potential inaction, and want to give you those kudos before we start our conversation there and welcome here, thank you, thank you thank you, it's a pleasure to be here, so I'm ready.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm ready. When you are All right, let's do it All right. So I think what we can start is a little bit learn a little bit more about your superhero origin story. So where did you grow up? How did you grow up? And the final question on that one is how did that path take you to technology?
Speaker 4:So let me just start. So, first and foremost, thank you for being here. This is actually it's special, right. I mean I don't want to trivialize what you guys have accomplished here. And when I was told, yeah, we want you to come on down and understood what was taking place, I was like let's go ahead and hit that accelerator and get on down there, right. And I sent an email this morning and said this is going to be good for my soul this morning. This is going to be good for my soul, so I appreciate it.
Speaker 4:So, number one I'm a native New Yorker. I was born and raised in New York first, I guess from New York here You're going to get an L so in the Bronx for like the first 10 years and then raised out in the suburban area. My parents were actually high school sweethearts from a small city in North Carolina, so they did the migration from the south to the north for a better life, if you will, and so getting to the city, that was like the first stop. And then to make a better life, let's, you know, move to the suburbs, right. And so in the city. New Bronx was beautiful, man, and some people don't really appreciate it until later on. But on my block there were Puerto Ricans, italians, dominicans. In terms of religions, you had Jewish, catholic, you had five percenters Muslims on the block. That's where I grew up around the corner, you know, there was Polish and you know all that kind of thing. And growing up, man, I mean before we played together, we ate, you know, we slept over each other's homes and all of that. So I think that was sort of that was my normal right, and I don't know how many of us get that as the normal, but that was my sort of my foundation.
Speaker 4:I moved out to the suburbs. That was predominantly white neighborhood and but you know, but the schools that I had gone to, they were pulling pretty much from different areas but we had different pockets. So you had blacks, you had, you know, haitians that came in from Haiti, you had a lot of Puerto Ricans and you had a lot of white folks, right. But you mix all that in there. You definitely don't feel like you're like one of a few, right. So we were pretty blended in there For me. So let me just fast forward a little bit and this might not be overly unique.
Speaker 4:My father passed away when I was 13 during Christmas holiday and took me a while to understand that right. And then my mother passed about 10 years later, so I was roughly about 22, 23. It was myself, my sister, my younger sister she's eight years younger than me. After my father passed, I went through a pretty interesting period. I think I was just angry, you know, I think I was just angry and this I'm stupid got busted for shoplifting when I was out with my boys at the mall and that feeling of being handcuffed sitting in the back of a police car. I was like I don't want to have this again. And my mom got me out. She fought for me. You know, I don't know what she did, but no charges whatever. And then she's like you really need to get you right. And she needed to get right too, because she just lost her husband. She lost her high school sweetheart, you know what I mean. And so she had to do what she had to do.
Speaker 4:I was talking to Alex a little bit earlier. I went to summer camp that summer with some white family friends of ours. They had like five children and they used to go to this summer camp and I went there that summer and I will tell you that that was a game changer for me. It just took me out of the day to day element of being in the house where you live with your father and just gave me a whole different element and set me on a, on a, on a, on a right path, if you will. So that was that. I went to school, college Howard.
Speaker 3:University in DC. Wait for those applause right.
Speaker 4:So at least I got in New York Right. So I went to Howard. It was really interesting. You know, most of my family is from the South right, so back in that day most of them went to HBCUs. So I had Elizabeth City, I had North kind of central in the family. I had Norfolk State in the family and my uncle had, by chance, gone to Howard for grad school. He went to NCCU for undergrad, he went to Howard for grad and when that time came my mother had gone to Hampton as well as my aunt. When that time came it was Howard Hampton, howard Hampton, howard, hampton. And my uncle pulled me up one day. He's like you need to go to Howard and I was. I said you know what's up, what's special, what's special? He said everything. So I said okay, all right, okay.
Speaker 4:So I was blessed to get accepted to both Howard and Hampton with Donnie on a bus trip with the school and it was funny, but it was sad at the same time because it was all black students in the African American group, whatever, I don't know what was called the time. But we all went down here in a bus trip to DC. We got, we got there. I think it was like March, it was warm, the campus was lit up, right, and I know we look like a special education bus because everybody was at the bus window like this Looking, the girls were looking at the brothers, the brothers were looking at the sisters and like I'm going here, I'm going here. And I was the only one on the bus who had been accepted at that time. Everybody else like, oh, I'm going here, yeah, look. I said you've been acting a fool for the last four years. You ain't got no path to college right now. You should've done what you're supposed to do. But I ended up going to Howard based on that trip. I wasn't up on the window because I knew I was gonna be there anyway. You know dude's coming back talking about I got so and so's number, whatever. I said, man, I'm gonna be here for four years. So I got to be.
Speaker 4:So I went in major in mechanical engineering. And here's the crazy thing. Right, you know this might be a lot of us too. You know I played hoops and football or whatever, and I wanted to play hoops in college. So I thought I may have a chance at Howard. That didn't work out.
Speaker 4:Math and science is what I was strong in and at that time they didn't. They weren't a whole lot of flexibility. You know, you do you couldn't math and science, you do engineering. So I did that, didn't really like it and started taking some classes in school to be, and all of that. So, anyway, graduated from Howard, but my mom had died my last year and so I didn't take care of what I was supposed to take care of in terms of, you know, getting your applications in and applying for jobs and doing interviews. So I graduated mechanical engineering with no daggle and job, and so I was like dag, this is crazy, right? So anyway, long story short man, I meant to start working my way through odd jobs or whatever for four, five, six years, whatever it was.
Speaker 4:I'll tell you a funny story. One of my jobs that I had taken was a small company that had like two floors in a building and I was offered a job 16 grand, I think I'm kind of an engineering degree and I'm making 16 grand. My mother would be slapping the hell out of me if she knew that, right. But you know, let me just get something going. And another company I was getting recruited for something whatever. I took this other job and applied and I got it and it was basically offering $10,000 more. So I go over here, yeah, I'm gonna take the $10,000 raise. But the company I was with was offering this white piece of paper, right, that says you sign this and you get you know stock options or whatever. And I was like, well, I don't just stock options, you know, just that paid the bills. So I'm like now I'm gonna take this $10,000 raise and I left the company Three years later. That company and some of the old hairs might know this, the younger folks who became America Online- Well, wow.
Speaker 3:Y'all are feeling me. Yeah, yeah, glad to say it again.
Speaker 4:Okay, so that was America Online. Yeah, the guy who ended up being the CEO was the senior vice president of marketing when I was there and I was able to just walk by highlight him at the office. You know Steve was happy. Yeah, he was good. You know whatever, I laughed. And that became America Online. So it had a pause. I always have to pause to tell a nice story because it can be pained. Yeah, yeah, oh.
Speaker 4:So some years later I joined another organization you know did well, there got some certifications of what have you in the tech side doing federal sales. So I had to end up joining a company that became the largest federal tech reseller and as a result of that, you know, eyeballs are on you on the federal side. And so some guys that I was working with had left and gone to Dell Technologies what is known now is Dell Technologies. So they went to Dell. I went somewhere else, ran into each other one day at a federal agency. They're like yo, press, yo, what's that? We don't want to happen. So, go man, we got a. You know, are you thinking what I'm thinking about? Press then, and these two are like freaking frat man. They were just like. These two together are like I'm like no man. Y'all about to get in some mess, what are you talking about? And those two basically recruited me to Dell and I joined Dell in 1993 out of Washington DC, and when they shared the white paper with stock options, I still wasn't sure what it was, but I'm damn sure I'm going to sign this one. So I signed that one, and so my journey with Dell was from 1993 to 2014.
Speaker 4:So, and that did a lot of technology sales, as you mentioned, a lot of different sectors. The beautiful thing about joining Dell at that time was that it was such a fast-growing company it was a startup for practical purposes and so the opportunity to do so many things because different opportunities were popping up. You know, I just kind of and I'm the type of person I might get bored in about two years in the same role. I need to be doing something different, and so that's how I got a lot of different experiences across different segments Really provided a really interesting foundation for me in the tech space. That we can talk about a little bit later, but that's kind of my career. I'm married been married to my wife since 96. And we have four children. So, yes, I was insane for leaving America online, what I did. I was insane to have four children too, but I have three girls and a boy 22, 19, 16, and 13. And so we've been in office since 1997.
Speaker 3:So I'll stop there. That's good, thank you. So I also saw that you had an opportunity to take an early retirement from Dell. I did, and so, at a time where most of us might think that with early retirement we'd be children somewhere just relaxing and enjoying ourselves, you decided to co-found Divink and, if I have it correctly here, the mission is to essentially facilitate social and economic equity through entrepreneurship. Can you talk about kind of what problem is Divink designed to solve?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I'm going to go back just a little bit. My last role at Dell in 2012, 2013,. I became a managing director for the Global Center for Entrepreneurship, which was this sort of this initiative for Dell to get small businesses and take startups to use Dell technologies to help them scale and grow. And, long story short, I mean I got pulled in by the person who was like charged with that. They were outside resource. And that person came and found me and said I need you to help run this and build this and they had done that. But it blew my mind open.
Speaker 4:So I started working with these tech startups and going to all these various different events and hearing all these conversations and I was like this is insane. This is like real innovation going on here. I mean just mind blowing stuff. That you were like what? And they're getting money to do this and they're building teams from the scratch total chaos. And I'm like, yeah, I'm loving this. And because I had been at Dell for 20 years, so Dell had become sort of corporate red taping a little bit more, and I was like I need this.
Speaker 4:But in the journey I was like, damn, isn't that a whole lot of us up in here We'll go to these events. I would be like the only one. And people are like so what do you do? What's your company? I work for a big fellow over here at Dell and they go okay. Conversations will be real short because startup folks ain't got a whole lot of time to be spending and so, but it was a lot of learning. Didn't see a lot of women either, and so I'm like this is interesting, but it was really nothing I thought I could do about that at Dell and so. But Dell was starting to focus on the women and I got focusing on women, but I still don't have sisters up in here. So I was like all right, okay.
Speaker 4:And so after that early, I took that early retirement and I got invited to become a startup mentor at Capital Factory, which is sort of like the hub of innovation up in Austin, and it was cool. They were like had me in there and I looked on the list 100 mentors at the time. Now it's the only black one. So I was like here we go again. No right, it's a great story. And then a friend of mine was like yo, you should become an angel investor. And I was like, all right, I'll look at it. I'm like, no man, you need to become an angel investor. That's okay, I'll check it out. And that's like you're not hearing me. You need to become an angel investor. And I was like thinking to myself you don't know me like that, how do?
Speaker 2:you know? How do you know what I got in my back? You know?
Speaker 4:what's up? So when I asked, they said I've been doing this a long time and I can't recall meeting a black angel investor. So I was like, oh, that's some bullsh**.
Speaker 4:So I said let me go home and let me do some research and, honest to goodness, I did the research on and I came up with about 10 publicly known black angel investors, people who actually invest in tech startup companies. I was like 10, I was like damn. So that's all right, let me set aside a little money and try this out. Right, and I made the mistake, or I made an interesting. I did the interesting thing I put angel investor on my LinkedIn profile.
Speaker 3:And Priscilla, can I ask you to find angel investor?
Speaker 4:I can't. So an angel investor is an individual who invests in tech startup companies. So, traditionally tech startup companies, they tend to start with basically nothing. They get a little bit of money where there's their savings mom and daddy help them out. They get a little bit of money, but as they grow they need more money to invest in the company. The angel investors would be the folks that will invest individually into that company or a equity stake, an equity share in that company, and so you can continue to make those investments. And then sometimes angel investors will come together as a group and put their money together and invest in companies through that angel network group and take an equity stake in that company.
Speaker 4:Now, traditionally, angel investors, as defined by the security exchange commission, had to be accredited. Okay, the accreditation specifications I can't remember the specific, but it was like you had to have a million dollars, but basically liquid right, be able to liquidate a million dollars net worth by excluding your home. So you think about, okay, how many folks could be in that bucket. And so that's for the angel. Now, since I think it was 20, I wanna say 2017, 2018, that accredited investor category it still exists, but crowdfunding and other platforms have come become available where it's not required that you meet that specification. So basically, anybody can be an angel investor, right, depending on how much the company is saying is the minimum to invest in a company. But now there's platforms, you can invest $1,000 into a company and get a small stake in that company. So that's what you're gonna do. So that's what that is. Hopefully that, if you guys have questions, I'll be more than answered.
Speaker 4:So I became an angel investor. I got a lot of calls from all over the country, mostly black folks, white folks too. They were like have no shame, you got money, I'm calling you, but me as a black angel investor, clearly it was like go talk to president. And so I got a flood of people coming to me. The other thing that happened to us the angel network in Austin came and asked me to become an angel investor in their club. In their angel network. They had 125 members. I joined. Of course, once again, I'm the only black person in that angel network group.
Speaker 4:But here was the beauty of it. There's a couple of things. One, to be honest, I didn't know how it all worked, so I just went up in the air and I just watched and listened. Let me learn the questions that are being asked, the processes, how they do due diligence, how do they make a decision, right. So I was just basically listening and learning, and what I thought was interesting was that my background allowed me to be able to say that's a damn good company, because I had been in all those different sectors and I can say, oh, that's definitely needed, right. Oh, yeah, I have three girls. Yeah, that's definitely your product or something. So that natural know-how came into play. Plus, I'm learning from this group, right, and how this process works.
Speaker 4:The other thing I learned, too, was the companies that were coming to pitch to them. Because it's open, anybody can come and pitch. But the folks that were coming to pitch didn't look like us, and if they did apply, they never made it to the round where they actually got in the room. And I was like this is crazy, right. And so I'm like, okay, we gotta fix this. So I said, okay, why don't I get an angel group for black and brown founders? Let's do that.
Speaker 4:And so, believe it or not, I had a meeting with the guy that started the angel network in Austin white guy, jamie Rose. Good people, not only did he start the one in Austin, but he started angel networks all across Texas. So he was like the guru and he's like Preston I wanna help you start an angel network to invest in black entrepreneurs. Because that's what I was talking about. I didn't know how to do it. He said I'll help you. I said okay, I was like I don't know what I'm getting into. But what I was after was we need access to this investment capital, because we're not getting access to it. And not only that, we need to be able to bring our capital and invest in ourselves. Right. And so I started the angel network and let's just say it did not come to full fruition. We got to about six or seven investors.
Speaker 4:My mistake was that I tried to make it exclusive to black and brown investors In Austin. There is not enough In 2014,. There were not enough of us to do that. So, just like any entrepreneur, you have to go understand your market. I ain't do my market research, so my business didn't fly right. We had a core group, but it just wasn't enough capital.
Speaker 4:But what I had learned from that process was not only did black Hispanic women founders need financial capital, but when they came to pitch, when they came to talk to you about their business, and I showed this often and I'll just go to it. When the white guys came and pitched to me, the quality and sophistication of their presentation of their business was here. When black, hispanic and women came to pitch to me generally speaking, not everybody it was here, and I was like why does this gap exist? And I got another problem Not only are we not getting access to financial capital, we're not talking to the, we're not talking in an influential way to convince an investor to write a check for your business.
Speaker 4:And I say that now to be pretentious, I'm just out of curiosity. You're telling me this is your company and I can't understand some element of it. It doesn't make any sense. The market's not big enough, you don't understand how to scale, you don't have the right expertise, the revenue model doesn't make sense, and so people, other sisters, we used to get mad at me, man, just mad at me, and I'm like why are you trying to help you? And so it was this dynamic, like okay, you might be on to something between that, articulating it in an effective way. So how do we fix that?
Speaker 4:So now here I am, and I'm also talking to a lot of white leaders in the community who had already been startup ecosystem, both at Capital Factory, techstars, which is another accelerated program. And I'm talking to these white leaders like, yeah, man, we're trying to get more diversity out here, but that's just not enough. It's not working. It's mixed results. I was like what are y'all doing? What are y'all really doing? You got nobody on your team that looks like me. You got no connections to the community that I have Just by the mere fact that I'm a black man in Austin in tech. It's gonna be like a draw. People are gonna be like I need to go talk to him. I need to go talk to him and they're gonna come and talk to you, right?
Speaker 4:So, getting all this understanding about what was going on, I was like and then doing the research, I did market research, this time right, and doing the research across the United States and, based on what I had seen, it really came down to one word that represented the challenge that we were having, and that one word was access. We weren't getting access to education, best practices in the know-how, right. How to articulate what are the investors looking for, right? Two was the network, the community, I'm telling you people talking about financial capital, the human capital, getting access to mentors, people who've been there, done that, the talent pools quite often is just as important as the financial capital, depending on the timeline, right, what you need. And the third piece was financial capital. That's okay, that's it right there. So what do I need to build to solve for that? And so Divink was born out of how do we solve for that? And that's been the driving mission.
Speaker 4:As I've gone along with it, a lot more insights have become available in terms of how much money VC capital is putting in. You know, what's our average revenue for startup companies and things like that. That really, like Jesus, this is a heavy lift. I don't know if I signed up for this, you know, but this is a heavy lift, right? So Divink was born out of that, and our signature program is an accelerator program specifically for BIPOC Women Startup Founders at the early stage, specifically at the early stage.
Speaker 4:And that ideation a little bit past ideation where they've got they understand what their product is, they understand what their market is and they're trying to get their early revenue, or they have some early revenue and they're trying to really kind of tighten that up so that they can grow and get more revenue. And so we were born out of solving for that, because at the time, most of our companies were at the early stage. Anybody that was coming in and talking about seed investment in Series A and Series B, which I'll explain shortly that's big money, but you gotta go drive a lot of revenue to go get that big money. So if everybody's talking here, who's helping the folks who are gonna be the next row of innovators and can't have access to the networks? They don't know how to access the networks, right? So Divink was born out of that.
Speaker 3:That's helpful, the context is helpful and going back to the mission of Divink to drive that equity, both social as well as economic, can you talk about the connection between entrepreneurship and equity?
Speaker 4:Yeah, from my perspective, you look at some of the challenges that we see in our communities and a lot of it comes down to economic mobility and financial right. And there's also a component where, if you're doing all right, the community from the social aspect tends to be better. So if we can list our communities by helping to generate more revenue, more jobs, right, it brings a better social component as a result of doing that. So that's sort of like the equity piece, and how do we bring that up to parity with our peers? The other piece that really hit me like a ton of bricks is when I first got a hold of there was some data that came out some time ago with regards to the racial wealth gap. There was one set of data and then there was another set of data that came back for the first time that I had ever seen a breakdown of black-owned businesses, like basically all small businesses, but it broke it down black-owned, hispanic-owned, white, asian. So let me start with the racial wealth gap. So the racial wealth gap has gotten worse over the last 50 years 100 years but the last 50 years has gotten worse, which is kind of, in my mind, like that shouldn't be the case, right. And so what's going on with that? Yes, we're carrying a lot of debt. We're being denied home ownership loans and things of that sort. Education is a component of it as well. So, looking at where the key elements that help lift up the wealth of any family or any individual so you got the home right. You have equity assets which could be stock that stock option that I didn't get at, but I got a lot of that first time. Yeah, I missed that one right. Investments, if you will. Any other is business ownership right. So those are the key assets. You just like. Where are the key assets that actually help a family with racial wealth net worth? So, education, if you look at how do we do on investment in real estate and owning stock and all that and I'm just gonna change it for a quick I would speak to students at UT College as well as high school and I ask folks do you know where the 401K is?
Speaker 4:And they didn't know. You don't know what a 401K is, okay. And then also, when I was at Dell, if you had a 401K, you asked people how much they're putting in their 401K. It was like you're not putting in maximum. Why are you not putting in maximum. This is the fastest growing company. Dell was the fastest growing company from 1990 to 2000. Put your money in the 401K, Let it ride right. We're doing that. So it's a missed opportunity. And if people are going into a company they don't know what it is, because you almost guaranteed you are going to get incremental money that you don't even, you really don't even need. It's just making money for you. But we didn't know that. I ain't know about stock options when I came out of college. I was missing component there, right, but anyway. So those assets.
Speaker 4:Business ownership was something I was like I'm seeing all this innovation. I was seeing guys they were startup founders that were selling their companies for 20, 40, 100 million dollars, right, and they're becoming multi-millionaires in their late 20s, early 30s. How come we're not participating in that? How do we do that? We need more of us doing that. But not only are those founders of those companies becoming wealthy, but the employees who sign the stock options, like I didn't. They get wealthy too. All those Google folks in the beginning. So many of those folks left Google after they got theirs and started companies, right.
Speaker 4:It's kind of like the most of us probably follow NFL, football, basketball, whatever it's like. You have this head coach and they have these assistant coaches, and those assistant coaches go on to become really great head coaches. It's really the same thing, right? You go, you build a company, you part of that company, you get some equity stock, or maybe you're an executive ranks company, does really well, it sounds, or goes IPO, but it took us down, what's next? And then they can. You just need probably created 10 million years like that, right, and then maybe one out of I don't know 100 companies, what 1000 companies. But we need to be, we need to be in the arena, we need to be playing in that space. It's not for everybody, though right.
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Speaker 4:So that was the aspect of that business ownership. Now I will say this a startup company because there is investment in that company and there's equity stake in that company. There is a value associated with that company. In order to make an investment right, there's got to be some numbers associated with the company. So if you build a company and some of you entrepreneurs today if somebody says what is the value of your company, you should have an answer. Whether it's a startup or whether it's a non tech, you should have an answer. Why? Because if somebody wants to buy your company, you should be able to say my company is worth X In the startup world.
Speaker 4:It's basically already stated Right Because of the investments being made on the paper, there is a valuation associated with that company. My company is your asset. That stock that you have in that company is an asset. You are able to claim that as value, as part of your net worth. So the more of us that put that build companies that have a valuation Right, the net worth goes up If you have the opportunity. Now and this is different too this was really really different for me is that people were building these companies to sell them when I first started working at Divi and Kotaku to black entrepreneurs hey hell no selling my company.
Speaker 4:I put blood, sweat and tears up in here. It's all no damn company. Why would I sell my company? That's a grand card of billion dollars. If someone gives you five million, you probably put 250,000 over time your company. Maybe they may want you to do for five million, I don't know. Maybe it's 50 million, why not? Then you could decide whatever the hell you want to do. You want to retire and chill. You won't go try to do it again.
Speaker 4:My wife, our white counterparts, usually sign up and do it again. Why? Because it's a little bit easier, because they've already been in and done that. They've made all the mistakes. They know all these people. They're their best practices and know how they understand that. They network. They got that financial capital access. They got that. So those barriers have been removed. I think it's a really interesting opportunity. Then you throw job creation and revenue generation Wherever your business is in the community. If you're generating revenue, that's probably some tax revenue for the community. So it's all kind of like a win-win situation. More of us need to get into that innovation space.
Speaker 3:We're going to do a little bit of definitions here, because I know that obviously we have people from a variety of different backgrounds people on the phone. So in our community, in terms of starting businesses, we tend to do the barbershops, the beauty shops, the restaurants. How does your definition start off and differ from those types of businesses?
Speaker 4:Let me do this Today, a lot of services, businesses that are not necessarily innovators in their approach, but they're services-based and you can go find a community where your services needed and there's a good market for that. But it's probably going to be more local, maybe it's regional service, maybe it's even national, maybe more services-oriented, whereas a tech startup is really coming in from a mindset of I'm solving a problem, I'm using innovation to solve a problem or a challenge or an opportunity. So it's a big. Very typically, it's a big idea. It should be a big idea where it's like that ain't happening, it's not happening. It should be that kind of idea Versus services. It's like, yeah, we're providing X type of services, consulting or whatever. Usually you're using your expertise to go build a business and go build your brand, whereas a tech startup is I am going to solve a problem and it may be. So you take something like Uber, right, and somebody said, yeah, we're going to do ride sharing. I know when I first heard about ride sharing, I was like, oh hell, no, getting no damn carbon, no stranger. Right. But they knew the technology that was coming and they had some sort of negative experiences with taxis, right, and they, you know, did their research and whatever, and they sort of like pull this thing together and say, yeah, we're going to do this, this sharing concept, it changed the whole game. It changed the whole game. I'm like damn, airbnb, you're going to just start renting out your home to some folks who come what Hell? No, they come and do me first. Right, airbnb got you. The folks are making a living off of Airbnb. Those are really innovative type of deals Very big, typically very big ideas, big markets talking about multi-billion dollar markets and investors in tech innovation companies. If it's not a billion, two billion, three billion plus, they're really not interested. It's too small, yeah, you know. So that's kind of how we differentiate.
Speaker 4:Now I'm going to tell you the beauty of this, based on the data I was talking about before, the breakdown of the black owned businesses. It's old data but the numbers may not have changed that much. We had, I think it was like 2012, 2016,. Something like that. We had, like I think it was like 3.2 million black owned businesses and the data was basically coming back and saying 97% of black owned businesses were sole proprietorships. 97%, that's not saying they didn't have contractors or whatever, but there was one employee 97%. So I think that all the others the Asians had like 22,. 25% of their businesses had employees. White folks had 22%. Hispanics were like around 6%. We had kind of like the similar problem. So I said, well, maybe that's not a big deal, maybe black folks walking around we making a lot of money for that one person company. So I said let me take a look at the revenue. So I looked at the revenue. The average revenue for those businesses that had sole proprietorship was under $60,000. So 97% of our businesses are sole proprietorships and they're generating less than $60,000. On average for all of our companies it was less than $250,000 average. Right, the companies that had employers, their average revenue was close to a million. So I was scratching my head and I was like, even if you had three to five employees, your opportunity to generate revenue scaled and grow, grew. The difference between employer based business of black owned employer based business and the right on an Asian owned. The difference actually decreases. I was like, okay, so three to five, 10 employees, your revenues are here. We're drawing some parity now with the rest of the market, but they have way more employer based businesses than we do. So how do we do? How do we get parity at that level.
Speaker 4:Me being an engineer, I'm like, let me do some math on these numbers. And these are a bunch of numbers, right? Nothing that must be losing my mind. I'm sitting, I got sheets of paper and like, okay, what if 20% of three million black owned businesses, right, generated a million dollars and had three to five employees? The numbers were going through the roof Billions, hundreds of billions being generated in revenue, millions of jobs being created, just like that. If we just get to parody 20%, 20% is two out of 10. That's easy, man. Two out of 10 is 20%. I said, damn, can we get two out of 10 to create a company, three to five employees, more than $250,000, then we can change the game. How do we do that? So that was part of the big thing too. Like, okay, I want, if I got 10 companies, I want seven of them To get three to five at least, right, and start generating some revenue. Well, let's see if we can do that. That's the data.
Speaker 1:So I want to give Preston thank you for talking to me. Thank you for facilitating. We're getting close to time, preston, you don't mind staying a little bit longer? I know you got to drive back. I want to give brothers in the audience and folks on the Zoom the opportunity to ask at least three questions Related to what we talked about today, and then I have a final question that I'm going to ask. So, brother in the audience, if y'all have any questions, feel free to raise your hand. I do have one for Logan Napalm. Right, we've talked in the chat and you might have answered it and gave you an opportunity to think of what you want to ask. And he's asking, from an education standpoint, what has hurt in students and our community as far as their journey has become a lot of human. So maybe what can we do from an educational standpoint to promote entrepreneurship?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think from my perspective it's got to be exposure, right, we've got to bring entrepreneurship to our students and expose them to it. Now my story is a little bit different, right, Because I came through and I did the corporate thing. Right, so I spent 20, 25 years. I'm not saying you got to come out of school and be an entrepreneur. I'm not saying that I had to tell students that. You know, when I was talking to them I said don't go home and tell your parents that Preston said you're becoming an entrepreneur, you're throwing, you know, you're throwing your scholarship away.
Speaker 4:Now and again, it's not, it's not for everybody, right, but they have to be exposed to what the possibilities are, what they can do and the thought. I mean, I don't know about you all, but I know I grew up and even as a young, you know, employee at Dell and constantly ideas would be coming to my mind. No, oh man, it would be cool if we did X, y and Z, but I didn't know what to do with it, I didn't know where to go with that, I didn't know who to talk to. So that idea goes out the window Two years later, three years later it goes, that company hey, I had that idea first. It don't matter, that person knew how, what to do by chance, but if they don't know where to go, how to go, who to talk to, then it all falls by the wayside, right, and so we have to provide not only the visibility, but we have to provide a pathway for those ideas to at least be To play with those ideas right, to build on those ideas, and I would talk to students at UT, in Houston, tullison, and often times they would have ideas, but sometimes not necessarily big enough, like what about if you did this and you did that? And often times they would get scared oh no, no, no, that's that's, that's that's, that's too big.
Speaker 4:The flip side, though, is, I guess, in our culture the way I would try to throw it out there is, if the idea you have Is an idea that you can imagine, that you can do yourself by yourself, it's not big enough. If the idea that you have, if you are spiritual, believe in God and Can only be done by his support, that's probably the one, because it has to be big enough to scare you, that makes any sense. So we've got to put that out there, you know, and you know, I mean, I got big outside over here. He puts his kids out there to to get exposure, to grow, to see what's really out there. We've got to provide that pathway to our young folks and to folks in the community that, hey, you can come here and you can learn, you can build.
Speaker 4:Yes, you don't know any of the language, you don't know nothing about the speak, but this is where you can come in and be, ask all the questions that you want, right, do all the make all the mistakes, because this is about. You know, the tech startup was about making mistakes, it's OK. I grew up I was like I ain't making no mistakes, I ain't got no flaws or nothing. I'm tight, I'm coming in tight, right, but in the startup world, you need to be making mistakes, right, and it's OK.
Speaker 5:How do you see a quick question, a quick comment. How do you see government investing in tech entrepreneurs? Are there case studies around the country? Is there a pathway you think that they can be a part of?
Speaker 4:In terms of investing in companies.
Speaker 5:Can you specifically black and brown?
Speaker 4:I mean the numbers are pretty dismal, right, I mean so at the venture capital level, we're less than 2 percent. We get less than 2 percent of the financial capital, right, and it actually went down after COVID, so people are pissed off about that. The amount of capital that we did get actually increased, but the percentage of the total decreased. So we're like don't be fooled, right, same thing with women. There's went down to, so they're pissed. So now what's happened, that has been happening is that there's been an increase of investment funds, some angel, but mostly venture I have to explain venture capital venture capital funds that are investing in black, hispanic and women startup companies.
Speaker 4:What about government? Government is coming. It has been coming to the table as well. Right, they've got programs minority business development agency, the EDA. What does EDA stand for? Economic Development, economic Development Agency, small Business Administration. Biden's got some, some other initiatives going on. So there's money at the government level, but traditionally, historically, man, it's been hard to get some of that to come all the way down, right, but now it's supposed to be money available. The financial institutions Bank of America, jpmorgan, capital One and many other institutions have allocated money to give to black-owned businesses as well, and I think most of us learned a lot of lessons about the PPP and all of that. But the money has been allocated, like I'm talking about I think JPMorgan is in the trillions over 10 years or something. Bank of America is hundreds of millions, over billions, if you will. So we have to go get that money and put ourselves in a position to get that money.
Speaker 5:I just made a quick comment, so I'm counting Mr Tommy Calvert.
Speaker 1:You didn't read the. We're not going to talk about it.
Speaker 5:No tiles. I just want to look for it. I understand, for the, for the reason, for the reason I'm connecting this up. It's a challenge. I read it, barrage, I got it.
Speaker 1:All right. The reason that.
Speaker 5:I'm mentioning this is to rely on your expertise for expanding the capital with government. I'm going to give you a case study. Here in San Antonio there was an innovation district created by Bear County, the innovation district excuse me, not district well, both the district and the fund the innovation fund and the skills development fund, which both of which would help with tech companies and did help to finance some of the businesses from the groups connected to capital factors. So Graham Weston pretty much every entity that he wanted to have the county invest in. They did Okay.
Speaker 5:So millions of dollars over a decade sub time, about a decade of time they were the county was called upon to invest in those businesses. Very few of them are minority owned I can think of one off the top of my head and so the challenge is that there, there, I think, is room with leadership like yours to get some of that pie investing in black and brown businesses in the tech sector and other sectors through certain tools. So I just want to kind of plant the seed that we can work on something together Absolutely Specifically targeted towards those down of that particular.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:So we're going to do these two questions we got big and we got the metric and then I'm going to close it out with a final question.
Speaker 2:So, President James, thanks so much for your time. So wealth is a fact of not what you make, but what you keep. We're coming into tax season. So you've been an employee, you've been a business owner, you've been a sole provider and now you're an investor. Is there any knowledge or information to share with us about wealth that you keep as opposed to the wealth that you make?
Speaker 4:The wealth that you keep and the wealth that you make. And I'm going to say this man, I came up and I've been fortunate you know my career at Dell and put a little bit of money on the side. I honestly did not know what I was going to do next with that. You know you got. So what? You have some money. That's not like, oh, you're like crazy rich, you can go do this, that you have to go get a private plane. No, I was.
Speaker 4:My thought was let me take care of the family first. We can make sure my kids we can get the education. Because my thought was I don't want my kids to come out of school with debt, so if I can fix that, I can give them my age up, right. The other piece is okay. Now, what kind of investments can I make? And this is for all of us.
Speaker 4:So you want to make investments. You want to make investments in spaces that you have knowledge about. Really, yeah, that's your domain expertise, right, I'm not saying you can't venture out, but when you venture out, you got to do more diligence in terms of, you know, investing in something new that you don't know about. But typically, if you invest in something. It's something that you may be familiar with. So if you make an investment in real estate, it might be in an area that you're familiar with. I know about this area, this, this, that and the others going on. I'm about this piece of property in 10 years, these things going to be like totally different deal, right?
Speaker 4:So I didn't know what I was going to going to do and this opportunity came up to do some angel investing. I stopped doing it to go focus on divvink, because building divvink was a lot and I didn't notice at the time. But divvink was the first program, startup program focused on by pocket women, founders in all of the state of Texas, and I thought this is 2016. How in the world can I be the first? But that's all another story. And so I made about five or six investments and I had three exits, and when I say three exits, that means the company either sold and as a result of selling, then there's value in the shares that that person invested in that company or so one of them sold, one of them, one IPO, right? Actually, two of them sold and one of them went IPO. The one that went IPO was a stretch for me. It was in pharmaceutical company. I ain't got no pharmaceutical back where, but they were making a product for diabetes. I know a lot about that in our families and so I was thinking about what did do and I ended up meeting with the CEO, with the product chief product officer, chief technology officer. I examined the product, understood how it worked, understood the market opportunity. They were pretty early and the question was where is this company going to go? It could have gone. It could have gone to an exit or it could go IPO, right, and so it went. All those became totally new experiences for me in terms of what you could do with some of your quote unquote wealth and so make money with more money, right, that's the whole, that's the whole deal and that's what's happening around us. A lot of our white peers are getting those opportunities to this day Still get people emailing me wanting me to invest in their companies and I'm like, okay, I just need to put a sign up somewhere that says I'm chilled out for the right now, let me get my babies through college, I could get back to you, but that's you know.
Speaker 4:We need to be able to do that Now. I'm going to address this too. So David is a nonprofit organization and it's okay. Well, that's sort of you know, yeah, and I'm like okay, like any business, you want to start a business, you want to understand what your revenue model is going to be. How are you going to make money? And here was the deal. We came to the table and I said, okay, how are we going to make money? We can charge the people who come to our program. Well, if I did that, then I'm creating another barrier. So that ain't it. I could take equity in their companies, where those companies are pretty early and rather, as the sisters for the most part were, like, I ain't giving up no equity in my damn company, I work too hard for this, while I'm going to give it up and understanding, necessarily, the math behind giving up equity. So that was the education piece, right? So we didn't do that. So we're like okay, we don't really have a revenue model, but we can start off as a nonprofit and then try to figure out what that revenue model is over time.
Speaker 4:So the next thing for us is going to come up to your point is we're going to start an investment fund. Right, we're raising money right now. That's going to be my for profit side. And we're going to make investments into BIPOC founders Right. And we're going to do, you know, try to grow it as much as we can. We'll do the first one really small than the next one. We'll try to go real big and try to make our investments into black, black owned businesses. You know, bipoc businesses, probably mostly in Texas, but national, right, because we want to get a return back into the company, right. So that will be in. That arm is going to actually partially subsidize divink, the nonprofit, so divink can become even more financially sustainable, right. And so you kind of build on and build and learn on that.
Speaker 4:And I'm going to tell you all you say I'm about 30 years old. I mean, I'm older than that. Come ahead, andy. I am learning something new every day in this space. I think that's a great way to live. I'm coming home, I feel like a child sometimes. The stuff that I'm learning every day, that keeps us going right. I would encourage that to be.
Speaker 4:We can't be afraid of technology. We cannot be afraid of technology. It's an enhancer, an enabler, but it's also a divider between our communities as time goes on, if we don't embrace this technology and leverage it for the good of ourselves and our businesses and our communities. It's just going to become a greater divider. That scares me. That really scares me. That's part of why I'm like let's come in here, let's just get into this innovation economy.
Speaker 4:Whether you're a creative, an art side, whether you're a tech wizard type of person, or maybe you're a marketing guru, but marketing has changed in the last 10 years. It's digital marketing. The pace of marketing is insane. The music industry has changed I mean everything. The movie industry has changed. It's all changing so rapidly and we have to have our generations of folks up in there. A lot of the work that we're doing today it's not necessarily just about today. It's about this next generation. If they can see leaders and tech entrepreneurs, then that says I can be that. I can be that. That's a huge difference, because back in the day it was like yo, I want to be MJ, mj, I'm going to be MJ. Everybody want to be MJ. Everybody cannot be MJ, everybody can be MJ.
Speaker 1:So that was actually a piece of my question. So, throughout the conversation, this was great. There was a lot in it. We talked about being an accredited investor. We mentioned a lot of our IQOs and the investing and kind of bridging that gap, and also about the next generation of people just mentioned.
Speaker 1:So what you say is necessary that the narrative changed. What I mean by that? That the narrative is satisfied. So, to the same standpoint of what you mentioned, how the conscious business model changed with Bloomberg, wright, sherman sharing your space. Now what I mean by the narrative changing is that even a teenager knew all these things. Now, with the advent of blockchain, technology, like the accredited investors is old. Iqos are old. Now there's ICOs To let a team know it and then let everyone here know that, literally you can invest in tech companies at a rapid pace at such a vast scale in your return to be way beyond being a stock, any 401k that you could produce. So shouldn't we speak towards that now? Absolutely, even now you see that there's free to earn, watch to earn, drive to earn, save to earn, and this is all coming through the advent of blockchain.
Speaker 1:You know, what I'm sorry.
Speaker 4:No, no, no. I'm saying absolutely, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:So I guess, to simplify when sharing with teams and sharing with audience, that you don't have the way to do these things, but right now, if we have the courage, you can get involved with so much and accomplish the same.
Speaker 4:Right, right, I absolutely agree with you, and I think it's what I was saying before about the exposure. I mean, if this group right here went to or hosted students or whatever, or y'all went to schools and just break it down, right, just, I mean, you can break it down in so many different ways. So you know, the investment that we're talking about in startups, or you can get involved in a blockchain, is YouTube. I mean, there is an art to doing a YouTube business. I don't know what it is. My son might be able to tell me better than, but there is an art to doing some of these things. They may not know how. I would guess a lot of them are trying on their own. And let me, let me draw this parallel real quick. I would guess a lot of kids are trying to do something special, right to get their thing going, whether it's Instagram or YouTube or whatever. That is the similar experience of a startup entrepreneur trying to start their own business. They're going to do it by themselves. They're going to churn, churn. They're going to keep trying to do this, start up, build this, build that, but they haven't got anybody that can help them. They haven't asked for any help, so they're churning right. Not everybody's going to get it as quickly as that person who made who's making millions of dollars, but if it were a little bit of help, you might be able to change the direction of that. They have to get exposure to that help. Where is that help? They probably don't know where to get it. Someone will figure it out. The other thing I would say to you absolutely right, what are the opportunities for them on these various different platforms? I was again the platform. Yes, I can't remember what it was called. They allow you to invest in commercial and whatever real estate without being the expert $1,000 minimum. I can do a babysitting job, make $1,000, and I can start making investments in commercial real estate at the age of 14. Yes, you can do that. But how do they know, right? So that's what I would say that exposure. If you did like a series and just give it to them and break it down, give them that exposure. I'll go to sports, even Name, image and likeness.
Speaker 4:Just the other day, a kid broke off his commitment to the University of Florida. Did y'all read this story? He broke off his commitment to the University of Florida because his four year $13 million deal didn't that come through? He's 18. 18 years old, he has a four year contract, a $13 million. The next school that wants to come up and sign it with him. What do they have to bring to the table? $14 million minimum at 18 years old, that's crazy. He ain't done nothing yet. I mean, I had him like saying he ain't done nothing. He did 18 years of great football, but that's an opportunity. So there are all these opportunities out there. We got to get in. We got to get in those. We got to get in those. So to your point about changing that absolutely, who's going to do it? I would challenge y'all to go do that. I'll do my part, but there's what 25, 30, 50 people. There is no reason why we should not be doing that collectively, no reason.
Speaker 1:So I want to ask this question what does it look like for us in San Antonio? And I think Tommy brought it up in some of these things and relates what you just said. What does it look? Like for us to be right Right If Big Vink comes here, establishes a footprint. We're really dedicated to building out a tech and innovation ecosystem among Black communities here. What do we need to do to be prepared?
Speaker 4:What do you need to be prepared? I mean, just give me a moment to. I'm just trying to go back to some of the original days of Big Vink and then sort of bring that up to six years later. What's being done right now in building this community is so top of mind? Right, because you can say collectively, this is what our community is, this is what the opportunity looks like, because most people would say, well, there's not enough Black people to do anything significant. I guess that's what they would say. But you have all these voices and you have all these diverse experiences, so you already proven that. Right Now, the question is what do you want to do? And I think I was having a conversation with someone early today.
Speaker 4:You have some very well-intentioned people out there. With money, government included. They've been trying a lot of different stuff for a long time and it ain't working. Most of them are not working. They're looking for leadership. They're looking for leadership. Naacp I don't know what they're doing in entrepreneurship space. Urban League I don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 4:Black Chambers I don't know what they're doing, but there is a just like a start-up bunch from doing it. There is a need, there is a problem, there is a need, come together, let's figure out what that needs to be. If it needs to be, hey, we need to reach out to Divink and see how we can maybe bring Divink here. Or we need to do something that maybe the Chambers are not doing. That need to be done. Maybe there's a curriculum that we can build, but you probably don't have to build a curriculum because it's probably already built. There is a whole network in San Antonio of mentors and investors. It's all of that, it's all here, and for me it's a matter of an introduction. I can introduce you to so-and-so and so-and-so. Yes, ok, how do we work together and begin to collaborate? So that's the second piece is the collaboration. The collaboration is huge.
Speaker 4:The people who don't know how to do what it needs to be done for us, they need us to come up to the table as leaders Right Now. That's not saying, oh, they're going to be the white saviors, no, right, it's almost the other way around. We're telling you what needs to be done and we're saying, if you want to invest your dollars, you invest them here. This is not charity work. This is not charity work and I said this at a conference last week. Just, people need to stop talking about charity. This is not charity. This is investing in the communities that, quite honestly, doll scoot over several hundred years ago. You need to invest in that.
Speaker 4:I put out a word the other day like people are just screaming and upset that their kids are falling behind after two years of COVID, and in my LinkedIn post I said now you're screaming over two years of COVID and your child's behind. I said what do you think the impact is of neglecting and declining access to education for 200-plus years? But due to a community? You cried over two years. I got 200-plus Right. You promised for 40 acres of the mule and you broke that promise. So therefore, our access to real estate property and the valuation of that real estate property increasing over time. You took that away from us on a broken promise. So now we need to come to the table and talk about investment the right way, and we need to come up with the programs to be able to do that. We need to lead to be able to do that. So that would be my challenge. If you need my help, please it's nothing to call us Say hey, this is what we're thinking about, let us try something, and I would say I'm speaking on experience and I will let you guys know this, even if we're on camera.
Speaker 4:Divink explore going to another city Organizationaly. We were not ready to do so, but in the meantime we were there, we explored, we actually raised money. But we said, ok, we can't go. Well, the people that we were working with going to ground brothers and sisters they were like well, do you mind if we keep going, if we keep taking what you've already done here and we keep going? They said no, go ahead, because we've been working together already. So they already have money in the funnel. All they had to do is really execute some of the programming and they were off to the races.
Speaker 4:About three, four years ago we had a conversation about coming to San Antonio. We weren't ready then, for sure. But could we do the same thing and help San Antonio build the ecosystem here? And I look at Divink as an ecosystem within the broader ecosystem. The ecosystem that we have is our ecosystem, but BIPOC within the bigger ecosystem. Why does that matter? Well, everybody knows diversity drives innovation and so if we're building this ecosystem within the larger ecosystem, we're actually making the ecosystem better because we're bringing diversity to the table and we're making it bigger, we're making it better and we're making it more collaborative. That's the value, and they know that. Now the question is we got to get them to put their money where their mouth is.
Speaker 2:So Chris and I thank you for coming. I appreciate you taking this time, Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite. If you like the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.