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I am a millionaire. The first in my family. A self-made success. It’s the story we love to tell ourselves in America about how anyone can make it. Except it’s not true. The reality is that most entrepreneurs — myself included — are the product of generations of privilege that enable success. You just have to look a little deeper to see it.
I was not born into wealth. Both of my parents were teachers. My dad worked an extra job making pizzas to pay the bills. My sisters and I wore hand-me-down clothes donated by our church. We were lower middle class — never hungry, but definitely not rich.
My grandfather ran a small business. His success enabled him to help my parents with the down payment on a house in a good neighborhood. Because of this, I attended a great public school and got a good education. While I was in college, my parents received an inheritance from my grandmother. I got a small piece of it as well, which I used to ensure I finished college debt-free.
I was well-educated, intelligent, and looked the part as a white male. This enabled me to rise through the ranks at a handful of marketing firms. By 28, I was leading the digital team at an agency. I was consulting with big brands and making close to six figures.
At this point in my career, an older mentor told me he thought I had the makings of an entrepreneur. He encouraged me to start my own business. I had not even considered this path, but his words inspired me to at least give it a try.
I didn’t have much exposure to entrepreneurship. My grandfather was the only business owner in my family, and I never got to know him — he died when I was young. I had no idea how equity or investment capital worked and had never seen the inside of starting a business. I didn’t know where to begin.
How my wife’s family helped me with connections — and investment
Thankfully I had married into a family that had a little more experience. My wife’s family was not wealthy, but was definitely more upper middle class than mine. My wife’s uncle ran a small business, and her aunt was a lawyer. They had worked in Austin for decades and were quite connected. They made introductions to people I could learn from and served as a sounding board for my ideas.
Meanwhile, I spent most Saturdays brushing up on my coding skills. I had the seed of an idea for a software startup and was considering raising money to focus on it full time. I figured I would need $250,000 to be able to quit my job and hire a developer friend of mine.
I had read plenty of books about starting a business. I was familiar with the “family and friends” round of financing most entrepreneurs use to get started. I almost certainly would not have been able to raise that kind of money from my family or peer group, but before I even got started trying, my wife’s grandmother offered to fund the entire thing.
Nana had been a schoolteacher along with her husband. They had saved their money and bought a piece of land in central Texas decades earlier. She offered me the proceeds from selling that land as seed capital.
I was well aware that most startups fail. There was a good chance I would lose Nana’s money and be out of work. And yet she assured us she did not need the money and would be okay if we lost it. I was confident I could get another job if things fell apart. And if worst came to worst, we could always go live with my wife’s aunt and uncle.
Having weighed the costs with my wife, and realizing we had a sound safety net, I decided to take the plunge. I quit my job and became an entrepreneur.
I had a great education, a stable family, and other advantages
It’s worth taking stock of the cards life had dealt me at this point:
- I was born with a decent intelligence, curiosity, and an energetic personality. This was nothing I worked for or earned.
- My home growing up was safe and secure, and I felt loved. This enabled me to develop confidence in myself and an optimistic outlook on life. These feelings were bolstered by the expectations our culture places on boys to be assertive and confident (versus submissive and pretty for girls).
- I had a great childhood education, which I parlayed into a college scholarship and degree.
- I was debt-free in part due to an inheritance from my grandmother.
- My wife’s family made introductions to successful leaders that helped me learn how to start a business.
- Our family safety net meant I wasn’t worried about where we would live or how we would eat if the business failed.
- My wife’s grandmother provided $250,000 to get my business off the ground.
- In my interactions with potential partners, customers, and investors, my physical appearance as a young white male opened doors that might have otherwise been closed, consciously or not.
Without all these things, I likely would not have made the leap into entrepreneurship. And a majority of this privilege came from generational wealth. My success came on the shoulders of the generations before me. And theirs on the generations before them.
It’s unlikely I would have enjoyed those advantages if my family weren’t white. Just two generations ago, mortgage and lending discrimination were much more widespread. It would have been significantly harder for my grandfather to start a business as a black man. I probably wouldn’t have grown up in the same neighborhood with the same schools as a result.
My wife’s grandmother would almost certainly not have been able to buy the land she used to fund my business if she had not been white. Her husband probably wouldn’t have gotten the promotion to school superintendent and been given the higher salary to afford the loan on the land either.
What it’s like to run a startup
Thankfully, I had fresh investment money in the bank. I quit my job and dove into building a company. I was fortunate to have worked with some very talented people in prior jobs and recruited a few of them to join me. We had some major ups and downs. About a year in, we ran out of money. We were making money, but not enough to cover expenses. It was terrifying. I had a glimpse of understanding into how despair can take over a person’s life.
I sat down with my team and told them the next payroll was the last one we could afford. I encouraged them to dust off their résumés — I wouldn’t fault anyone for leaving. No one did, though. We threw everything we had at sales and managed to drag in just enough revenue to make one more payroll. Then another.
At this point, we had six employees — and after several months of barely making payroll, we were newly profitable. We had annual contracts with GE, Starwood, Red Bull, and other global corporations. We began to worry less about cash and more about competitors. Several had sprung up, and they had way more funding than us. I decided to raise a round of venture capital to help us grow faster and compete.
I probably pitched close to 50 VCs and was rejected by all of them. I had a good pitch, but I didn’t carry myself like the typical entrepreneur. I hadn’t come from money. I didn’t have a business or computer science degree. My career experience was in marketing agencies, not software.
So we ended up growing organically instead. Slow and steady, we got up to 16 employees and millions in revenue. Eventually we were approached by a public company to acquire us. The purchase price was small for them but life-changing for me — having not been able to raise venture capital, I still owned most of the company.
Nana got eight times her money in return for her risky investment in me. Everyone on my team got to keep their jobs and received healthy raises. I made enough to never have to worry about money again.
I’ve had people ask me how proud I must be of what I accomplished. I am certainly proud of the team I had the honor to work with and the things we were able to build. That said, I don’t feel like I deserve to have more success than others. There are plenty of people smarter than me who work harder than me their entire lives and have little to show for it.
The secrets to my success: generational privilege, and a lot of talented colleagues
I attribute a majority of my success to the generational privilege that comes from being a middle-class white American male. And from my perspective, the rest had more to do with the talented people I worked alongside than with me. While I may have some natural ability and put in my share of sweat and tears, the best pilot in the world cannot fly to the moon unless someone provides them with a rocket ship. Seen in this light, my privilege is the vehicle most responsible for my success. I may have flown it a little further than most, but I would be nowhere without it.
My great-great-grandparents were not slaves or Native Americans killed for sport. My parents and grandparents did not have to overcome generational inequity sown from centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, housing and loan discrimination, and cultural bias just to achieve success. And yet merely escaping persecution was no guarantee that those who came before me would work hard and leave anything to pass on to their children. Thankfully, in my case, they did.
I’ve flirted with feelings of guilt in response to my privilege. And it's not wrong to feel sorrow and generational shame on behalf of your ancestors. But on the whole, gratefulness is the response I choose to embrace. I'm grateful my parents provided a stable home where I didn’t worry about safety, food, or other basic needs. Grateful that my grandfather worked hard to start a business that enabled him to help my parents buy the house we grew up in. Grateful that my wife’s grandmother made a wise land investment. Grateful that she took a risk on me and invested in my company. Grateful to be born into a country with a stable government, good health care, and a strong economy.
My privilege is something that was given to me, that I did not deserve, and that not everyone gets. You don’t feel guilty when someone gives you a beautiful gift; you feel thankful. Maybe even loved. In an ideal world, those with privilege would have such a strong response of gratefulness that it would move them to kindness toward others. It certainly motivates me to work to make the world a better place — not out of guilt, but out of thankfulness for the undeserved blessings in my life.
It’s time for more entrepreneurs like me to stop telling the story of how they climbed their way to the top. To stop taking credit for flying to the moon all by themselves, as if the entire support structure they were born into had nothing to do with it. And it’s time for all of us to find ways to empower more of the world’s highest-potential entrepreneurs with their own rockets so they can show us the stars.
Jason Ford is a mentor with Backstage Capital, a fund investing in overachieving, underrepresented founders, as well as a board member and CTO at May Designs. Find him on Twitter @jasford.
This article is adapted from a post that originally ran on Medium.
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