Resilient

2The Difference

The biggest risk of all is not taking one.

—Mellody Hobson

My good friend Sherrell Dorsey, founder of TP Insights, referred to me as the “antithesis” in an article she published for her editorial and tech platform, The Plug.

I'm female, Black, from the South, and a nontechnical solo founder. In all respects (and perhaps statistics), I'm everything that they say a tech founder can't be.

Overall, I've now been an entrepreneur for over 12 years, and what a roller-coaster ride it has been, from bootstrapping my first company Solid Ground Innovations (SGI) to raising capital for my second company. It's been more than what I could have imagined, and really little of what I expected. But what could I have expected, being that I had no true blueprint starting out?

Yet, I feel that entrepreneurship was in my veins. Do you remember starting or selling anything, from Girl Scout cookies to lemonade stands? I never did either, but I did sell candy for my school's annual fundraiser. Looking back, that was a form of entrepreneurship mixed with hustle, too.

In this book, a lot of lessons are transferable to mostly all entrepreneurs regardless of sector, though I'll spend most of my time focused on walking you through the steps of launching and raising capital for Resilia, the tech company I launched in 2016. If you want a more detailed description of how I built Solid Ground Innovations, the professional services company I started in 2009, I have an entire self-published ...