G rowing up in Pine Bluff, I was surrounded by successful entrepreneurs. We just didn’t recognize our ingenuity.
Boasting a population of only around 40,000 today, Pine Bluff does not have a major corporate presence. Instead, the town’s businesses are run by the people who live there. I saw relatives, family friends, and community leaders owning and operating our grocery stores, automotive shops, and retailers, making sure their neighbors’ needs were met.
Much of this is still true in Pine Bluff today. It’s not a city you would typically think of as having a startup ecosystem.
However, small towns like Pine Bluff are no strangers to ingenuity and developing solutions to problems. In fact, being raised in such proximity to entrepreneurs gave me my first taste of being one myself.
I went to college at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the state’s largest historically Black university and second oldest public postsecondary school. The experiences I had at UAPB furthered my interest in business, especially within the tech space. After I graduated in 2010, I landed an internship with Microsoft at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Despite the preparation I received from UAPB, I couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated. I was interning alongside folks from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and other prestigious universities. The work was intense, leading to long hours and late nights. I wanted to prove that a young Black man from Pine Bluff was good enough to be invited back. My hard work paid off. The internship bloomed into a full-time job with Microsoft, where I remained for four years.
It may have seemed crazy at the time, but I left my job at Microsoft to take a pay cut to join a startup. I had a plan, however. Joining the startup allowed me to learn firsthand what it was like to build a business from the ground up. In my six years there, I worked my way up to senior engineering manager and gained the insights I was looking for. Feeling well-equipped, I set out to build something of my own.
This brings me to my tech company, Bruce. I started Bruce in 2023 as a tool for fellow entrepreneurs to simply and efficiently manage their social media presence. Bruce was built out of a need that emerged after my wife and I co-founded an app called Vow Affirmations. After creating Vow, I assumed that marketing our product would be the easy part. Instead, I discovered it was an entirely different mountain we would have to climb.
If marketing was the mountain, Bruce was my hiking stick. It automated Vow’s social media presence by placing affirmations from its database into a stockpile of handpicked, ready-to-post images and videos. Bruce made our lives easier and led to measurable success for Vow, including a rise in social media followers, increased traffic to the website, and more app downloads. I wondered if other business owners would want access to Bruce to solve their marketing challenges, so I took the first step any entrepreneur should take before launching a new product or service — I started talking to people.
Once I validated the interest of potential customers, I was ready to launch Bruce, but didn’t want to go at it alone. I knew mentorship, funding, and training would be necessary to pursue an opportunity of this magnitude. I came across Nex Cubed while scrolling through social media, and it seemed like exactly what I needed.
Nex Cubed is a pre-seed accelerator and startup program that seeks to provide opportunities to underrepresented founders who are rarely seen in the startup space. In addition to securing funding, I thought the experience would also connect me with people who have already had the kind of entrepreneurial success I was looking for. So, I applied.
And, I wasn’t accepted.
If every business owner quit after a single rejection, the world would look a lot different. Upon receiving feedback on my application, I was encouraged to apply to the HBCU Founders Initiative, a nonprofit organization built on Nex Cubed’s knowledge base and supported by Nex Cubed, as well as outside funders like the Walton Family Foundation.
Based in Bentonville, the Walton Family Foundation is a philanthropic organization focused on investing in its home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. The Walton Family’s Arkansas roots led to the addition of two historically Black universities to HBCUFI’s program base: Philander Smith University and my alma mater, UAPB.
This partnership made it possible for founders from rural HBCUs, like me, to use our talents to incubate tech businesses.
HBCUFI has a simple, but powerful mission: to engage with the HBCU community to reduce the wealth gap using technology. They do this by supporting students, alumni, and faculty who have started (or plan to start) solution-oriented technological businesses. The program perfectly aligned with what Bruce aimed to do and its target audience. I applied and was accepted.
HBCUFI operates an eight-week pre-accelerator designed to help entrepreneurs during the early stage of their business by providing access to resources and events. As part of my participation as an HBCUFI founder, I had to prepare and deliver a pitch for Bruce in a competition for grant funding. The team and the network of founders I became a part of helped prepare me for the pitch competition, giving me perspectives in the tech industry that I had never heard before. With their support, I was able to get first place in the pitch competition, winning $3,000 in grant funding.
Entrepreneurs don’t get rejected from paths meant for them; they reroute.
Winning HBCUFI’s pitch competition caught the attention of Nex Cubed, and I was welcomed into their HBCU Founders Accelerator program. This has positioned me to start seeking venture funding opportunities and equity investors for Bruce, Nex Cubed itself being one of the first partners.
HBCUFI and Nex Cubed allowed me to understand something about my relationship to entrepreneurship — representation matters. Growing up in Pine Bluff, the people who ran the businesses were just like me. Not only did they look like me and live like me, but they were literally my family.
As an adult, I carried their faces in my mind as I moved to the West Coast, and the faces in Silicon Valley did not look like mine. Those small-town entrepreneurs were the ones who told me I could be one, too. Then, right when I needed it, the HBCU Founders Initiative introduced me to Black leaders in venture capital and startup funding. They coached me into taking the next step with Bruce and gave me resources to keep growing in my entrepreneurial endeavors.
That’s what I think all burgeoning business owners need: to hear the right words from the right voices. Fortunately, I was never in short supply of either.
Garland DeShawn Trice III is a tech entrepreneur currently based in Oakland, Calif.