Project Description

A 501(c)(3) and its sister consulting company built to close the access gap — funding, mentoring, and radically documenting a new generation of young urban founders.

Brand Context

In 2011, the startup economy was exploding — and leaving an entire generation of young urban Americans behind. The number of 18-to-35-year-olds in urban communities who wanted to start a business had never been higher. Their access to capital, education, and even basic startup information had barely moved. Accelerators were concentrated around technical founders in a handful of zip codes. Business schools required tuition most of this audience couldn’t spend. And the people who most needed to see how the startup process actually worked were systematically excluded from seeing it at all.

TheCashFlow was our consulting and funding vehicle for early-stage ventures. 100 Urban Entrepreneurs (100UE) was the 501(c)(3) nonprofit we built alongside it — designed to guarantee that every young person in urban America had access to, and understood the essentials of, starting a business. Together they were an answer to a simple question: what does real support for the next generation of urban founders actually look like?

The Challenge

How do you close the entrepreneurship access gap for young urban Americans in a category that had spent a decade talking about mentorship and almost none of it delivering to this audience?

Strategic Insight

The obstacle wasn’t talent. It was access to information, capital, and professional networks — and the fact that for this audience, the startup process itself had never been made visible.

Our working thesis: make the whole thing transparent. Not transparent in the Silicon Valley sense of demo days for insiders, but transparent in the public sense — pitching, selection, funding, and launch, out in the open, in the communities where the founders lived. If a young entrepreneur in Dallas or Atlanta or DC could watch someone who looked like them pitch, get selected, get funded, and actually launch, the process stopped being a mystery. It became a path.

That reframe drove every program decision: transparent pitch events in the community, public funding, mentor matching by industry and need, and a contractual requirement that every funded entrepreneur document the journey — so one winner’s path became the education of thousands.

Creative Execution

We built 100UE as a four-part, fully integrated system for taking young urban entrepreneurs from idea to viable business:

  • 100UE Live Pitch Events — one- to three-day community events built around a 60-second pitch format, open to first-time entrepreneurs at the idea stage or in business less than a year. Held in urban communities across the country, in partnership with the White House Urban Entrepreneurship Summits, The National Urban League Annual Conference, Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference + Expo, and HBCUs including Howard University and Florida A&M University.

  • Startup Program — the 10-step curriculum taking founders from idea to viable business, covering Ideas & Identity, Market Research, Business Etiquette, Finance/Legal/Office, Technology & Partners, Supplier Diversity & Minority Certification, Marketing, Sales & Distribution, Team, and Funding — each step taught by an expert in that discipline.

  • Startup Mentoring — every funded recipient individually paired with a mentor matched by industry, geography, and need.

  • Documenting the Journey — every funded entrepreneur was contractually responsible for documenting their startup journey across video, blog, social, press, and third-party media — turning individual funding into community-wide education.

TheCashFlow operated alongside 100UE as the for-profit consulting and funding vehicle — embedding directly in early-stage ventures, shaping strategy, and tracking performance against specific growth milestones.

Results

  • $10,000 startup grants awarded to pitch winners, paired with an eight-week business-mentoring program.

  • 50+ entrepreneurs had participated in the program’s early cohorts, reaching thousands more in the process.

  • The pitch-event multiplier — for every pitch winner, 100UE reached more than 35,000 people: 150+ pitch submissions, 10+ finalists, 500+ in-room audience, 10,000+ media views, and 25,000+ social media hits. Message multiplied by a factor of 100.

  • National partnerships with the White House Urban Entrepreneurship Summits, the National Urban League, Black Enterprise, and leading HBCUs.

  • 501(c)(3) structure built to scale the model from single markets into access for entire communities.

Reflection

100UE was built on a belief I still hold: the entrepreneurship gap isn’t a talent gap. It’s an access gap — to information, to capital, to the professional networks that quietly carry most founders to their first dollar. The instinct to make the whole process transparent — pitch, selection, funding, launch, all of it — came from watching a generation of brilliant young operators try to learn the rules of a game nobody had ever let them watch being played. Every growth project I’ve taken on since has, in some way, been an extension of that first conviction: don’t hand founders a diploma. Hand them the map.

Founder · 2011