DivInc

Preston L. James II

Austin, Texas
Accelerator
ECO & Cofounder, DivInc

DivInc is a startup accelerator focused on removing barriers to entrepreneurship, and enabling underrepresented founders to build viable tech startups through access to capital, curriculum, community, and connections.

As part of a long career in the technology ecosystem, I attended a myriad of investor events, demo days, and pitch competitions, and at each one I noticed the lack of people of color or women in the room. Too often, I would be the only Black guy present. It wasn’t right, and I didn’t see anything being done to address it with any sense of urgency. There were plenty of panel discussions about the lack of diversity, but I decided it was time to build something to truly address it. DivInc is about fostering startup ecosystems that are vibrant, diverse, inclusive, and increasingly successful as a result of those qualities. To do that, we are focused on helping diverse founders to build viable tech startups through our accelerator, a 12 week intensive program which provides founders with access to capital, education, mentorship, and networks. Our mission is to create social and economic equity through entrepreneurship. DivInc firmly believes entrepreneurial inequity is the most unrecognized contributor to the racial wealth gap in the United States.

We primarily work with early-stage startups that are pre-revenue or early revenue. Our job is to help founders successfully navigate from the pre-seed to Series A stage, thus building investable and scalable companies. A critical part of that is helping founders to understand where they’re going, and chart a strategy for an eventual exit. For most startups, that isn’t going to be an IPO, but rather a merger or acquisition (M&A). Founder education is really important to facilitating eventual M&A transactions. Helping them understand what a proper term sheet looks like or how to structure their cap table when seeking investment is key.

More importantly, however, especially for BIPOC and Women founders, is gaining equitable access to the resources and opportunities that facilitate M&A and being part of the “M&A ecosystem” because we learn better and faster by engaging, seeing, and doing. Successful M&A can be life changing and transformative for founders, their families, their employees, their communities and their investors. In some cases, generational wealth can be created. BIPOC and Women founders have been unfairly excluded from this experience. Imagine our economy, innovation, job creation, and wealth generation if we enable equitable access to M&A.

Ultimately, anything policymakers can do to help facilitate successful exits for founders—especially underrepresented founders—is really important to the ecosystem. These exits, which lean heavily on M&A, are a critical step in the path of building wealth and creating new opportunities in diverse communities. With the capital from selling their company, as an example, a Black founder can become an investor that then invests in more Black founders. They can share their expertise to help those founders build to their own exit and the cycle repeats. Over time, this ripple effect builds generational wealth and fosters an ecosystem that helps diverse communities to prosper.