Ben Chestnut, Co-Founder of Mailchimp, started his business with a simple question, What if a simple site could allow small business owners to easily email their most loyal customers? Mailchimp launched in 2001 and remained a side project for several years until 2007, when it hit 10,000 users.

Mailchimp pitched employees on profit-sharing over equity stakes, and stability over rocket-ship growth. But it grew at a viral clip anyway to over $600 million in revenue. Ben and his co-founder, Dan Kurzius, shunned venture capital cash and bootstrapped from their profits instead. In September 2021, Ben and Dan sold Mailchimp to Intuit for $12 Billion with each founder owing 50% of the company.

Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, CEO at All Raise, has a long track record for supporting startups and funds led by women and people of color. Beginning her career as a startup founder in Silicon Valley in 2011, Mandela went from Founder to Funder back to Founder with the launch of Founder Gym in 2017.

Founder Gym was an online training program specifically designed to help underrepresented tech startup founders raise money to scale their startups. Over the span of 5 years, Founder Gym graduated over 656 underrepresented startup founders from around the world that raised a combined $130 million in venture capital.

McKeever "Mac" Conwell, Managing Partner at Rarebreed Ventures, came up the idea to raise a fund to support rare founders and set out to raise $10 million. Unfortunately, through using his personal network he only raised $400K.

With only 2,300 followers on Twitter in May of 2020, Mac decided to tweet more consistently which attracted investors to him leading to him growing his following to 70K+ followers on Twitter, scheduling over 1,000 meeting with investors, and closing his first fund of $3 million within 18 months.

Kobie is a Partner at Upfront Ventures and Co-Founder of Valence Community. He has deep knowledge of emerging sectors including VR and AR and was an early personal investor in Oculus, later sold to Facebook for $2B. Earlier in his career, Kobie helped found OpenView Venture Partners and was an investor at Insight Venture Partners where he sourced notable early investments in Exact Target (acquired by Salesforce for $2.5B) and Instructure (acquired by Thoma Bravo for $2B). Kobie brings expertise in SaaS businesses and marketing technologies.

Arlan Hamilton built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a fund that is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Started from scratch in 2015, Backstage has now raised more than $10 million and invested in more than 130 startup companies led by underestimated founders. In 2018 Arlan co-founded Backstage Studio which launched four accelerator programs for underestimated founders in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and London. Arlan was featured on the cover of Fast Company magazine in October 2018 as the first Black woman non-celebrity to do so, and her new book "It's About Damn Time" was released on Penguin Random House's business imprint Currency in May 2020.

By age 15, Sahil Lavingia created over 20 mobile apps and made more than $100,000. After just 4-Months into college at USC he was recruited to join Pinterest as their first designer and second engineer hired when the popular bookmarking tool only had 5,000 users.
Sahil left Pinterest at the peak of its growth to start his own startup Gumroad, a marketplace for creators to buy and sell digital goods. After Gumroad raised over $10M+ in venture capital Sahil decided to take a NEW route to building his business by focusing on profitability and crowdfunding in which his first book about entitled The Minimalist Entrepreneur.

Beatrice is the Founder and CEO who started the world’s first plant-based feminine care line with a $21,000 loan. Today, The Honey Pot Company’s products can be found online and in stores nationwide at Target, Walmart, Urban Outfitters, Walgreens, Bed Bath and Beyond, Wegmans and Whole Foods, among other retailers. Beatrice has also been a recipient of the Sundial and Unilever’s multimillion-dollar New Voices fund; was 1 of the first 40 women of color to raise one million in venture capital. Beatrice sold her company, The Honey Pot Company, for $380 Million.

Janine is the Founding Partner at Overlooked Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies who have been historically overlooked and financially underserved.
Before launching her fund, Janine founded and built a legal tech company called NextChapter, serving as founder and CEO for 6 years until it was acquired by Fastcase in September of 2019.
Janine's startup journey went from paralegal to startup founder who bootstrapped her startup to acquisition while being a mom of four to now breaking barriers in the Venture Capital world by investing in overlooked startup founders.

Building a startup while battling a mysterious illness requires the kind of drive and passion that's lead George Azih, the founder and CEO of LeaseQuery to be named EY's Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2020, collaborate with Microsoft and be featured in the pages of INC.
LeaseQuery has grown from a one-person startup to a thriving software company with 180+ employees. Its products help businesses track leases, avoid overpaying on rent, and manage lease accounting. Number 29 on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies, LeaseQuery has seen its revenue grow 8,080 percent since 2016. 2019 George lead the company to hit $24.9 million in annual revenue and raise $40 million from Goldman-Sachs.

Elise Smith and Co-Founder Heather Shen formed Praxis Labs with the purpose of bringing research-backed, immersive learning experiences to the forefront of DE&I training. Before jumping into entrepreneurship, Elise worked on the IBM Watson team where she began building Watson for Education products and doing B2B Sales for the Watson group. She then went to New Schools Venture Fund, a philanthropy that invests in EdTech companies, where she supported the Diverse Leaders portfolio in finding, funding, and coaching DEI entrepreneurs.

Ms. Smith is one of 93 Black women to have raised more than $1 million for a venture-backed business as of August 2020, according to Project Diane and has helped secure major corporate contracts for her startup with Ebay, Uber, Amazon, Google and Target.

Adam Wexler has more than a decades worth of experience in building digital & mobile startups. His first startup was in music-tech, second was an enterprise SaaS social media software that was acquired, and Founded PrizePicks, a company most known for its daily fantasy sports game. PrizePicks is now one of the fastest-growing sports companies in North America according to the 2023 Inc. 5000 rankings and the largest independent skill-based fantasy sports operator in the country.

After learning about Bitcoin as a college student at Morehouse, Shawn entered a Hackathon in 2014 with the idea of disrupting cloud storage using bitcoin’s blockchain technology... this idea eventually became Storj. As a founder of color, Shawn had difficulties raising capital for his venture so he decided to take an unconventional route to raising capital by launching a token sale, or Initial Coin Offering (ICO), where he raised $30M in 6.5 days. Now, Shawn runs Prodia, an AI-powered Music Generation and Streaming Platform allowing anyone, regardless of musical ability, to create high quality music in minutes.

Philip is passionate about implementing and managing internal deployments of no/low-code solutions. Phil is the co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, an error monitoring and incident response platform for Zapier and Integromat which has a goal of helping no-code products become more scalable. Phil has raised $4.5 million for his startup and sold his company, NoCodeOps, to Zapier.

Sevetri Wilson is an entrepreneur and the founder of two companies: Solid Ground Innovations and Resilia. She bootstrapped her first company, SGI, to seven figures with zero capital and has raised over $11M to date for Resilia. She is the first Black woman in New Orleans to raise over $1MM in venture capital, and has raised the most of any female founder from her home state of Louisiana. She has been featured in Forbes, Black Enterprise, Essence, Inc., Entrepreneur, CNN, and USA Today.

Carlos L Gonzalez is a celebrated community catalyst with more than a decade of entrepreneurship and technology innovation expertise. His natural ability to understand new industry trends, strategize, and promote awareness through networking and cross-cultural community building has lead him to collaborate with top global companies like AT&T and Harman.

As co-founder and COO of Tyrannosaurus Tech, Carlos leverages his extensive product development experience to ensure clients meet market needs while employing agile and lean methodologies. Together with his team, he has helped clients from highly competitive industries increase revenue by embracing technology and innovation. With years of explosive growth in the city of Atlanta, Carlos and his founding members are on a quest to propel Tyrannosaurus Tech into a top-tier globally competitive agency.

For the past 10 years, Lawrence has applied his unique background in social sciences, visual arts, and software development to help build businesses for himself and others with no formal marketing or business training.

Currently, Lawrence leads Digital Marketing classes at General Assembly but previously Lawrence has held stints as the Marketing Associate at TechStars Atlanta, Director of Entrepreneurship at The New School, and Most notably, he helped grow Atlanta-based, event software startup, Gather into a company that powered over $1 Billion in event sales in 2017.

Introvert Entrepreneur and Engineer. Jose had to really get out of his comfort zone to learn sales and marketing. He claims he does not have a Sales personality AT ALL but has read, studied, and learned on the field for the past 10 years becoming a Top 1% sales performer at HubSpot and becoming a Sales and Growth Coach and Mentor for Startups. Jose is a proud father and Husband, loves Progressive rock, and all sports, especially Soccer and Football (Go Hawks!)

Sidney is a passionate data-driven marketer with over 10 years experience in Marketing and 5+ years leading demand generation teams in B2B Saas companies in a new different industries. She is now a Senior Director of Demand Generation at Refine Labs, a demand accelerator for B2B SaaS startups.

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a platform built to make entertainment more diverse, inclusive, connected and essential. She has raised millions in investment and crowdfunding, secured large brand partnerships, and built a world-class team for Seed&Spark. In addition to her work at Seed&Spark, she has produced films, series and VR projects that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca and more. Her most recent series, "Fck Yes" Refinery 29 called, "The sex education you wish you had in high school." Emily has taught crowdfunding, pitching and creative sustainability in more than 50 cities around the world - and is now turning her in-person community-building efforts towards virtual efforts to help secure the sustainable future of creators everywhere.

Jose Vieitez is the cofounder of Boomtown Accelerators and serves as their Director and Portfolio Manager. He’s the founder of five startups, one of which was acquired. Previously he worked as a designer at Google, and was a Fellow at Access Venture Partners. Jose is a Stanford graduate with a background in management science, industrial engineering, and interface design. He earned an MBA and master’s in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s a salsa dancer and also serves on the board of the Thorne Nature Experience.

Candace V. Mitchell is a technology powerhouse and visionary entrepreneur. As co-founder and CEO of MYAVANA, a digital hair care company that recommends products and regimens based on scientific analysis of your hair Candace has been featured in CNN, Headline News, BuzzFeed, The REAL daytime talk show, Marie Claire Magazine, ESSENCE, Black Enterprise, and Business Insider.

Candace has been recognized for her work on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and WWD’s Top 50 Beauty Innovators Under 40. Currently, she serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Ascend2020 Atlanta, a technology startup and small business support ecosystem for minority-led companies. She shares her knowledge and insight with other entrepreneurs as an author of The Shift , her first book that helps entrepreneurs gain the spiritual transformation needed to endure and excel on the entrepreneurial journey.

For over 15 years, Manav has strategically executed customer acquisition and retention strategies for global lifestyle and consumer brands, including Ace Hotel Group, Coqui Coqui Group, and Standard International. He is currently Co-founder of Subziwalla, disrupting the $5B ethnic grocery industry by offering access and convenience to Indian ingredients through a personalized online grocery shopping experience. He has been featured in publications such as Forbes, Bisnow, and Grocery Dive.

Thought-filled software engineer and entrepreneur who understands that deliberate, consistent progress over time is life's greatest growth strategy. Regardless of his job titles, Morgan sees leadership as a choice, not a rank. He strives to make that choice daily and challenges others to do the same.

Morgan has a passion for helping first time founders and nontechnical teams launch their software and their business. Currently he is the CEO & Co-Founder of Polar Notion a software development company based in Atlanta. Formerly Morgan was the CTO of, Y-Combinator-Backed startup, New Story Charity, a non-profit organization that provides homes and 3D printed homes to people living with inadequate shelter.

Born in Terry, Mississippi, Sheena Allen had a non-traditional path to the startup world. After moving to Silicon Valley, Sheena started her first company, Sheena Allen Apps, and bootstrapped the app company to millions of downloads.
In 2016, she started her second tech startup, CapWay, which gave Sheena the title as the youngest female in America to own and operate a digital bank. The fintech company connects underserved millennials and Gen Z to today’s cashless economy.
Sheena has been featured in various publications, including Inc Magazine and Black Enterprise. Sheena is a 2018 Business Insider Under 30 Innovator, part of the 2019 class of Forbes 30 Under 30 and Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30, and the 2019 Inc. Female Founders 100 list.
Also, Sheena has garnered the attention from some of the world's most prominent investors that are currently investors in her company CapWay including: Alexis Ohanian (Initialized), SoftBank, Y-Combinator, and Backstage Capital.

Octavia J Gilmore is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Creative Juice, an award-winning creative agency. Gilmore was first introduced to graphic design at the young age of 14 and it has been her passion ever since. She attended the Savannah College of Art and Design where she obtained her BFA in graphic design. Gilmore took the leap of faith shortly thereafter, and launched Creative Juice at the tender age of 23. She has grown it from a one women shop to a forward-thinking, diverse agency serving Fortune 500 and 1000 clients.

Director of Finance for Atlanta Ventures, an investment fund which portfolio companies include Calendly, SalesLoft, Terminus, Atlanta Tech Village, and more. Durante is passionate about entrepreneurship, and improving the outcomes for founders. He is a proud graduate of Georgia State University, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), and an Atlanta native.

Lauren Patrick is the Head of Marketing at Venture-backed startup, Motivo, a marketplace connecting pre-licensed therapists with clinical supervisors through secure, HIPAA-compliant video conferencing. A graduate of UGA's Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication, she has spearheaded "Smarketing" for a bevy of technology startups including Preparis, Urjanet, MemberSuite, Terminus, and Bark. For 2019, The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) recognized Lauren as the winner of the SMB Marketing Campaign of the Year. Lauren is also the Editor & Founder of PrettySouthern.com.

Madison Jacobs is a technology marketing expert and Editor-in-Chief at Google for Startups. She previously worked on product marketing initiatives at Apigee, which was acquired by Google Cloud in 2016, as well as several other startups throughout the Bay Area. She has a journalism degree from The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Madison has a deep love for mentoring startups and spends time in her personal and professional life working to help Black founders get the resources they need to build and scale their companies.

Seth is a Georgia Tech grad who has started and grown multiple successful tech startups. He has led the product design and development of over 40 web and mobile apps, which have been featured on the App Store 100+ times around the world, including Apple’s App of the Day. Seth has made speaking appearances at TEDx and SXSW. His last startup, Crescendo, was acquired by Ultimate Guitar, and he currently leads Product at CharterUP.

Musaddeq Khan (MK) is the lead Entrepreneur In Residence for the Main Street Entrepreneurs Seed Fund. In 2002, he founded Prominus to help hospitals manage their receivables. In 2008, MK founded Verdeeco, a cloud-based analytics platform that energy utilities use to manage and analyze data to gain operational efficiencies. Verdeeco was acquired in 2014 by Sensus and Verdeeco was dubbed iTunes of the Smart Grid. MK has also led innovation teams for large corporations like Best Buy and Itron. In addition to his role at Georgia State, he is a mentor at the Atlanta Tech Village and works with startups and entrepreneurs nationwide.

Justin McLeod is a business savvy creative that loves bringing ideas to life. He is the Founder of Surthrive, a human-centered marketing agency specializing in communications for forward thinking brands, a Mentor a TechStars Social Impact in Atlanta, and helped startups led by women and people of color raise $860K+ in seed investments and generate $2.5M+ in revenue as the former D&I Program Manager at Atlanta Tech Village. By living in the intersection of culture and technology, Justin is on a mission to shift the narrative in today’s society by bringing more diversity into the tech industry.

Jovonni Pharr is a software/hardware engineer with a focus on Research & Development (R&D) in emerging technologies. He enjoys building solutions in Electronics, Materials Science, and Intelligent Systems. Jovonni is also the Co-Founder of Startup Exchange, a program helping college-student-led startups learn the fundamentals of building a startup, Mentor at The FARM Accelerator, and has built software solutions for brands such as Sprite and DreamWorks.

Michael is Vice President of Technology Banking at Silicon Valley Bank's Atlanta Office leading its Startup Banking Practice focused on Seed phase through Series A companies. Before this role, as ATDC’s Investor Relations Manager, he strategically matched portfolio companies to capital through curated investor interactions. Combined with his previous position as COO of the Atlanta Technology Angels, Michael has reviewed thousands of applications for funding and helped companies secure over $300MM in angel, seed, and series A capital.