I'm excited to announce the launch of my client, The Legacy Movement, an educational ecosystem for emerging entrepreneurs in underserved communities. The Legacy Movement was the lead business story in Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times. Read the full text below, or view the original article here. Please help spread the word to entrepreneurs!
Chicago Sun-Times
Empowering entrepreneurs
BY SANDRA GUY October 12, 2012
DIGITAL SECOND CITY SCENE
While Chicago’s startup cheerleaders trumpet rapid-fire business launches, South Side native Aaron Gray is working to empower the underserved, overlooked and unconventional businessperson to think about a variety of options.
Gray, 31, has started the Legacy Movement to upend the conversation about business startups: He has set up LegacyMovement. net for would-be entrepreneurs, franchisees and business owners looking to sell, as well as people aiming to start for-profits, nonprofits or social ventures and others who don’t necessarily want to start a company from scratch.
The Legacy Movement, whose network charges $25 a month, is focused on many of the people who suffered the most in the recession: women, military veterans and people of color.
“Our goal is to change the conversation about success in entrepreneurship in underserved communities,” said Gray, who now lives in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood.
These groups are largely invisible in the dealmaking networks of Silicon Valley, Wall Street and even the Silicon Prairie, Gray said.
“There is a knowledge and opportunity gap,” he said.
Vivek Wadhwa, a tech entrepreneur and academic who has criticized Silicon Valley for its barriers to tech-leadership diversity, said the Legacy Movement “is exactly what is needed” and “a great first step” in helping people outside of traditional networks achieve success.
“By hanging out with others who’ve achieved success, people gain ideas, and if investors like those ideas, they will invest in them. It builds on itself,” said Wadhwa, vice president of innovation and research at Singularity University, a California-based center that educates select leaders about technologies soon to change the world.
“We need to have this [network] increased by a factor of 100,” said Wadhwa, whose new book, “The Immigrant Exodus,” calls attention to barriers to immigrants’ success as tech entrepreneurs in the United States.
There’s another group Gray wants to include in his network — one he knows from his own experience — the successful corporate professional whose alienation and lack of fulfillment make him or her realize he wants to run his own venture.
Gray had an enviable career as a successful investment banking analyst and venture capital associate with the best-known names on Wall Street and in the investing world. But the 16-hour days and other demands of the shrunken work force cause many people to figure out they’d be better off investing that time into their own companies or nonprofits, or to carry on the legacy of a retiring businessperson whose venture would otherwise disappear, he said. The Legacy Movement’s technology platform aims to counter the isolation with free resources and information online, outside of the monthly-fee network: Books and articles with pertinent advice and YouTube videos of workshops and seminars the Legacy Movement does for college students and business people.
The Legacy Movement has inspired Gray’s friend, Michael Curry, 32, a second-year MBA student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, to explore putting together a group of investors, mentors and supporters to connect first-time entrepreneurs with businesspeople looking to transfer their companies to the next generation.
The network, Project Rejuvenate, would help MBA grads in a tough job market find an existing business to run, and let baby boomers ready to retire pass on their business legacies, Curry said.
“Aaron’s ability to develop his site is helping our group’s growth,” he said.
http://www.suntimes.com/business/15682545-452/empowering-entrepreneurs.html
