An Army of Normal Folks - The American Dream Needs Mentors—Here’s How You Can Help (Pt 1)

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Is the American Dream real if you lack access to the Holy Trinity of mentors, education, and capital? The truth is that it's a distant dream for too many Americans. In this episode, Sky’s the Limit co-founder Bo Ghirardelli shares how he built the leading digital platform for connecting 100,000 underrepresented entrepreneurs to all three, including 10,000 mentors! And how the American Dream needs us—An Army of Normal Folks—to be fully realized for all Americans.Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most of us don't like hearing that two-letter word no. But to make skies the limit the success it is today, your goofy self decided, I want to hear a thousand nos. Explain it. One of the things I've learned about entrepreneurship is failure is a necessary component. But if you reframe it as learning, you know, everybody can get behind learning, right? But if you say, do you want to fail? people are like, no, I'd rather not. So getting to a thousand knows means that there got to be some yeses along the way, right?

Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm a football coach in inner city Memphis. And that last part, well, somehow it led to an Oscar for the film about one of our teams.

It's called Undefeated. Guys, I believe our country's problems are just never going to be solved by a bunch of fancy people and nice suits using big words on CNN and Fox that nobody really ever uses. But rather, by an army of normal folks, that's just us. You and me deciding, hey, maybe I can help. That's what Bo Gerdelli, the voice you just heard, is done. Bo is the co-founder of Skies the Limit, the World's Leading Digital Platform for Connecting Underrepresented Entrepreneurs with Education, Mentors, and Access to Capital. Since 2010, their own army of 10,000 mentors have supported over 100,000 entrepreneurs, and have helped launch 7,000.

and businesses across the country. But it all started with Bo taking one step to help a couple of entrepreneurs and of all places, Morocco. And he never dreamed that this work would get this big. Bo will teach you about taking the best next step as a social entrepreneur or as a volunteer right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2. podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Tremaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termaine was sentenced to 99 years.

I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotize? hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.

Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

segregation and the day integration at night When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping on another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together, but not everyone was happy about it.

You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out. to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach, comes Charlie's Place. A story that was nearly lost to time.

Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I heard and TikTok have come together to create something new. Where the world of TikTok meets your playlist. Three words that will change your life. IHeart TikTok Radio. The biggest hits across IHeart Radio. What's trending for you on TikTok?

Tell me a sound that's better than this. IHart TikTok Radio. Plus TikTok's most influential creators all in one place. Search for IHard TikTok Radio. Make it a preset and stay connected all day. All right, son. Time to put out this campfire. Dad, we learned about this in school.

Oh, did you now? Okay, what's first? Smokey Bear said to First, drown it with a bucket of water, then stir it with a shovel. Wow, you sound just like him. Then he said, if it's still warm, then do it again. Where can I learn all this? It's all on smoky bear.com with other wildfire prevention tips, because only you can prevent wildfires.

Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the ad council. Beau Garrardelli from Seattle, Washington. Welcome to Memphis. Well, I thank you. Everybody, we are live. We have a live audience. We're here at the Memphis Listening Lab and the Cross Town Concourse. Longtime listeners of the show will have heard about this facility, Cross Town Concourse and the Memphis Listening Lab. We want to thank the folks at the Memphis Listening Lab for hosting us. We have in the audience today, 15,000. 50 or 60 people that are part of the Memphis Society of Entrepreneurs and the Memphis Chamber small business council. And so, Bo, you got an audience. There you are. Hey, audience, clapping up. So everybody hears it. Yay. For all our listeners and audience, everybody, Bo is the co-founder and CEO of Skies the Limit based out of Seattle, but by no means restricted to the bounds of Seattle. And your story is amazing. I can't wait to get into it.

So first, you know, the vast majority of people in our country run from instability, but you dove headfirst into instability, and even more than diving headfirst into instability, you dove head first into instability into the Arab Spring. What and why? Well, to answer that question, I probably got to go pretty far back. Are you ready for that? I'm ready.

Okay. So I was born and raised in Oakland, California, and to answer this question, I think it matters, right? Because it chose these things because of the way I grew up, right? So if we go all the way back to being raised in Oakland, at the time, it was the murder capital of the country. So that was one dynamic of my life growing up. And then I'd say probably the most momentous thing that happened to me as a kid is I lost my mom to cancer at six. And that made me start to ask questions about life and what the meaning of life was, I think, a lot earlier than my peers would. That question, why am I here? What am I doing?

Led me down many paths. And purpose and service was something that our family encouraged. And I found a lot of value in it. And I found a lot of meaning. And that's from service trips to building houses in Mexico, to be in the philanthropy chair, my fraternity in college, and then to joining Teach for America right out of undergrad and rush into South Central Los Angeles to teach sixth graders, English and social studies, which was the hardest thing I've ever done to this day. and and all of that, I think, built up to why to go to Morocco.

I realized, so 2007 to 2009, I was a teacher. And you kind of forced into the union in the teacher's union in the Los Angeles Unified. And in 2009, they laid everybody off, but they laid you off in the reverse order of you join the union. So I was a young teacher. So we were the first ones to go, even though we were really cheap as far as teachers went. And I had to figure out what to do. You know, I got a pink slip in May. The end of the school year was two weeks later. I had nothing lined up. I thought I was going to

teach again. And I took a year to kind of figure out what to do. I mean, it was not a good time to be a 24-year-old in 2009 looking for a job. And I, you know, I got to have some experiences. I moved to Dubai. I thought that was a good place to find work. It wasn't. I ski bummed with my best friend for a winter. We tried to get, try to work on the mountain. But those jobs were all gone too. and then with my other best friend, I took a road trip around the country for three months because by that time I realized that I should probably use this time in my life

to find something that's less depressing than getting rejected from jobs. So we did the four corners of the United States road trip, and that's where I discovered the Smoky Mountains and had it a wonderful time there. I did not get to go to Memphis because we wanted to stay in nature. I was cheaper too to get a tent out in the smoky mountains. And that's why I got to see our country and got to learn about what an incredible country it is.

So all of that, during that time, I was like, I guess I got to go back to school because what I really want to do is I was fixated on this idea of like, there are all these market failures out there. why a nonprofit exists. I think nonprofits, at least I think that, I think nonprofits exist to solve market failures. Capitalism is amazing until it isn't. And I think that by and large, I love the system. But there are some things that slip through the cracks, and that's where we got to address them. And often there's not a business model, for-profit business model that will support you doing that. And so I went to school for nonprofit management at University of Washington and Seattle. And I, you know, learned a lot more from my family full of small business owners at the dinner table growing up and realized that, you know, kind of between the two of these experiences, I could put that together. And the Arab Spring at this time was dominant on the news.

And it was particularly resonant with me and my generation because it was. about young working-age adults being unemployed, right? That's the, for those of you remember their spring, you know, really the unrest was started by people being unemployed. When you have 50% unemployment rates, you can imagine how destabilizing to a country that is. To a whole region. To an entire region. I mean, I know you were in Morocco, but the data I've read is between 40 and 60% unemployment across the entirety. Now, Morocco is North Africa, obviously, and we think of Middle East starting on the other side of Egypt. But really, if you ball up all of North Africa into traditionally Prussia and the Middle East, Egypt, all of that area, in 2010, I've read the unemployment

rate over the entire swath of that area was 40 to 60 percent. And so as Americans, when we see all this stuff on the news about unrest and everything else, it really does boil down to poverty and lack of jobs for the young people coming up and they have nothing else to do. I mean, is that correct? That was my takeaway. And that had been a belief I'd built through my entire life little signals that say really a job and poverty is the root issue in your life if you're experiencing it, right? And even when I was teaching in South Central LA with sixth graders, you know, I got to teach an elective and I let my students pick. I said, what do you all want to learn about? And they said, we want to learn how to make money. And I said, okay, so this class is now

called entrepreneurship because that's, I think. think one of the best ways to learn how to create value, which is what you, if you can create value, then you can make money and capture some of that value. And so that there's all these little experiences that laddered up to going to North Africa where, you know, the work of skies of the limit began. So you go from Oakland to South Central L.A. to a tent in the smoking mountains to Morocco. Everybody does that, right? I mean, there's a train. I love that you say you got to see how wonderful our country is and what a great country it really is, especially in your generation, that perspective is awesome to me.

But you find yourself from Morocco, I think, through the Peace Corps, correct? Correct. All right. So you show up Morocco. You work for the Peace Corps, right? What is your kind of job? and then tell us how skies the limit became a thing of all places Morocco. Well, I'd say the Peace Corps was definitely a catalyst,

but not in the way that they would probably want to be. It's probably where my belief that the government is not going to save us or started when I saw just how the, bureaucracy and culture of the government wasn't interested in results and was it for me in my Peace Corps experience. So they gave me a job and I said no that's not what needs that's not what the community needs and why else am I here if not to you know try to be valuable to the community I'm living in. There's no other reason to do the Peace Corps in my opinion than to to try to be valuable in your community that you're living in.

And so I get there and in the first month, I'm approached by over a dozen young people who say, I got business ideas. I need to do this. I have no job. I need to put food on the table. I need this business idea to work. And there's no jobs to be had.

There are none. So you've got to make your own, right? This is sometimes called necessity entrepreneurship. And that was, it was just, you know, as clear as day that this was what I needed to be doing. This was the, and it was an organic coming to me. I wasn't out there, you know, I'm trying to guess at what the issue was. So I said this is what I'm going to do.

And now a few messages from our generous sponsors, but first, you guys got to hear this, okay? This is a real opportunity. Our six local service clubs are now badly, one or not. other through April 8th to see which of them can recruit the most members to their giving circle of just $10 a month and up and the winner of this thing is going to get a $25,000 grant from staying together. If you live in Memphis, Oxford, Atlanta, Wichita, Northern Duchess County, or Ozaki County, join your giving circle today by the visiting normalfolks.us backslash service clubs. Normalfolks.com backslash service clubs and just

click on your club. And again, guys, the club that raise the most money and gets most people and the most of the giving circle stand together is going to grant that club 25K to go do something good in your community. I can't imagine why you guys wouldn't do that. It's free stuff. We'll be right back. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground.

He identified Tremaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Germain was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything. I was a monster.

Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of Hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP.

It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the eye heart. radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation and the day, integration at night.

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping on another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together, but not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah. dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away

from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush you. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place. A story that was nearly lost to time. Until now.

Listen to Charlie's Place on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I heart and TikTok have come together to create something new. I love it. Where the world of TikTok meets your playlist. Three words that will change your life. Iheart TikTok Radio.

The biggest hits across Iheart Radio. What's trending for you on TikTok? Tell me a sound that's better than this. I heart TikTok radio. Plus TikTok's most influential creators all in one place. Search for IHard TikTok Radio. Make it a preset and stay connected all day. All right, son.

Time to put out this campfire. Dad, we learned about this in school. Oh, did you now? Okay. What's first? Smokey Bear said to... First, drown it with the bucket of water, then stir it with the shovel. Wow, you sound just like him. Then he said... If it's still warm, then do it again.

Where can I learn all this? It's all on smoky bear.com with other wildfire prevention tips. Because only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the ad council. You know, the Peace Corps also says you're not allowed to start an organization while you're in the Peace Court. And I ignored that rule, too. But I just didn't see that it was aligned with the interests of the community. And we did.

So we started an organization, both the United States and in Morocco, a nonprofit. We essentially, after we, so after these aspiring entrepreneurs got their business, idea is mapped out and they knew what they needed to do to launch the company. They said, we need funding now. And this is, you know, so we went around to the microfinance organizations. We're talking about $1,000, you know, $500 in some cases, right? And these microfinance organizations were also nonprofits and backed by the government. And they said, nope, you're too risky. I was like, well, what's the point if you have in philanthropic capital, if not to solve for this issue. So I was upset by that and I flew home to the United States and put together a fundraiser

and raised some money for a microloan fund, flew back the next week. And then, when you say some money? Like 10 grand. Okay. Yeah. And the reason that's important is when you hear the numbers of the later when we talk about the numbers of people that your organization serviced, you think in terms of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which seems out of reach for a normal person, right? You're talking about 10 grand here. You raised it in a week. Yeah, now I'm lucky, right?

And the point that 10 grand can make such a difference, I think we can't just walk past that fact. No, but I do think that, like, you need to know people who have 10 grand, you know, I mean. Or you need to know 10 people that have a grand. That's what I mean. I mean, it was really more like 20 people of 500, right? So that's what it took. And then we used that money.

I'll get to the later pieces of raising money because that's definitely part of the journey. Not why I got into it, but it seems to be my job a lot these days. But that money was able to fund 12 entrepreneurs to launch in Morocco. And they used the capital to buy inventory, right? This is like really just trying to drive straight to revenue. I know the media likes to talk about entrepreneurship is like raising all this money and then, you know, living on a hope and a prayer that you eventually make revenue someday. But that's just not entrepreneurship to me.

So they got these companies up and going and then they said, well, how do we keep this alive now? How do we grow it? And that's where I was like, oh, we need a mentoring program because each of you dealing with such nuance around your personal situation, what you know, what you don't know, what resources you have, what resources you don't, what connections you have, and those you don't, you need somebody to individualize their support for you, and that's why mentors are so important. They've been hugely important to me and so important to the entrepreneurs we helped get off the ground. And the good thing was, is those mentors helped us help the entrepreneurs to make

money, which means they could pay their loans back, which meant we could lend it back out again. And that's what I did for two years. We got the state. We won a very competitive State Department grant. So I, you know, don't like the government, but I'll take their money. But. Amen. And then we grew it. So, and I turned over the operations of that organization, the Moroccan organization, to my co-founder who's Moroccan in my, lived in my village who was part of one of the microfinance organizations and talked to him into joining us

and running that. And yeah, kept that going for many, many years. One of the things I read that you said is that the Holy Trinity for you in Morocco, which actually, I think remains the same in your construct, is one, education for entrepreneurs, two, business mentoring, and three, access to capital that they just can't otherwise fund. You want to talk about that a little bit? Yes, you nailed it. So that's exactly right.

And I think that you get results great in the sum of its parts when you put those three things together. If you look at how, you know, there are some entrepreneurs who don't need a lot of help, right? They learned how to build a business from a parent or a grandparent or an aunt or uncle. Somebody who'd already built a business, maybe a bunch of them, and they all coached and helped. That's the entrepreneurship education piece that many successful small business owners have. Then they had friends and family money because that's where your first capital to start a company comes from. Banks won't touch you, right, unless you want to put up your house. but if you already own a house, you've already got more money than many people do.

And so then that's not necessarily your issue. So that Friends of Family Capital is vital. And we've named Sky's the Limits Grant Fund, the Friends of Family Fund, because we're trying to recreate that level of support for entrepreneurs who don't have friends of family. And the grant's $2,500. So it's not a lot, but it's enough to start making money if you're careful with it. And so then the last piece is that is that mentorship. I had a, uh, uh, uh, uh, one of my college

friends, dads is a lawyer and he did our 501c3 filing for us, which was would have cost thousands. We had another guy as an accountant family friend. He helped us set up our books. There's another couple grand, you know, and then it goes out. We had marketers who helped us for free. These are, this is that mentorship, this, a, subject. Jig matter expertise. Yeah, but let's be real, if you're some poor village of Morocco or maybe more locally, the hood in Memphis, you don't have any family friends of their attorneys that can set up a 501. That's my point. You don't have any family friends that are accountants that can help you with your books. You don't have any of that. So one, you don't have the expertise available to you.

And two, to garner the expertise, you've got to bleed. Yeah, you've got to pay for it. The point is, it doesn't matter for talking Morocco, South Central L.A., Chicago, or Memphis, without mentoring education and access, not only to money, but access to the mentoring and education. You can have the next great $10 billion idea, but it ain't going nowhere. And that's what you tapped into.

Yeah. And I think, I think unfortunately our culture has portrayed entrepreneurship as trying to chase billion-dollar ideas. And those billion-dollar ideas are great. And those companies change our lives, right? Sometimes in good ways, sometimes in good ways. But entrepreneurship at the end of the day, it looks like small business mostly. If you look at the number of entrepreneurs out there, it's like less than a couple percent that are building high-tech, high-growth companies that everybody, would know the name of. So to me, it's small business is the backbone of our society. It's the backbone of

most stable societies around the world have a strong small business sector. So you learn it. You do it. You get it off the ground in Morocco. You actually get paid some of the back money. And over the two years after those first 12, you real briefly, because I've read the list so that people to really actually hammer home, what you just said, about billion dollars for small businesses. What are some of the businesses in Morocco? I mean, I read like one was a farm for fruit or something. I mean, what are the businesses? Yeah, that was two brothers. Two brothers. They basically realized that there was a bumper crop that season in the fruit orchards in the area where I was. It was a very agricultural town, town of 15,000 people.

And these two brothers said, there's not enough people to pick it. And some of these farmers wanted to de-risk. And so they were willing to sell the yields to these trees before it fully matured. And so they didn't have people to pick it anyway. So they got this huge discount rate on buying the peach yields.

And that's what we financed. And then they went and picked it, and they, you know, they 10xed their money. Phenomenal story. Yeah. And barbershops and other stuff. I mean, just name them. Yeah, a sheep farm, right? So just getting the original, you know, five female sheep, one male sheep, and just you're going and starting a farm.

And then that, if you take good care of them over the years, you know, it exponentially grows. and each of those sheep not only provided food security for their family, so if it was a bad year, like, you could just eat one of your sheep, right? But if you didn't have to do that, you could sell the sheep and pay for everything else. That almost sounds funny, but that's 1920s America. Yeah. That's what America was across the landstrap of this whole country, was tons of small farmers who ate what they grew and sold the rest.

And if things got bad, they at least didn't starve. A lot of the world still looks that way. Yes, it does. But the point is, if you don't have money or access or drive or anything, you can't even do that basic sustenance. Yeah. And that's what you felt. We'll be right back. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast.

This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth.

For 22 years, only two people knew the truth, until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually around. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP, might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Come check this. IHeart and TikTok have come together to create something new. I love it. Where the world of TikTok meets your playlist. Three words that will change your life. IHeart TikTok Radio. The biggest hits across IHeartRadio. What's trending for you on TikTok?

Tell me a sound that's better than this. IHart TikTok Radio. Plus TikTok's most influential creators all in one place. Search for IHard TikTok Radio. Make it a preset and stay connected all day. Segregation and the day integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside.

It was like stepping on another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach, comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now, listen to Charlie's Place on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Babes, what are you doing? What? I'm just mowing the lawn.

No, it's blazing hot and dry out here. Don't you remember? Smokey Bear says, Avoid using power equipment when it's windy or dry. Where'd you learn this? Oh, it's on... Smokeybear.com, with many other wildfire prevention. tips. Right. Thanks, honey, bear. Because remember, only you can prevent wildfires.

Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. So, cool story. Two years, you handed over to your Moroccan co-founder and you're helping entrepreneurs of Morocco, but America's your home. America's the home of the American dream. that we really need this help here? Yeah, we do. And I was raised on the American Dream. I drank that Kool-Aid. And it certainly felt like I got to have,

I feel like I had some of the American Dream, but I don't think that everybody gets the American Dream in the United States. And I think that there are huge pockets of talent around the country that are, lacking opportunity. And that's why we exist with sky's the limit. So when he came back, what'd you do?

Well, we had one of these donors who chipped in a few hundred bucks during that Christmas time fundraiser when I came back for a week from Morocco. He said, why aren't you doing this at home? And I said, oh, that was a light bulb. Oh. And sure enough, you know, basically as soon as I came home, you know, I was broke. I spent my savings trying to get this thing up and running. So I got a job teaching entrepreneurship with a nonprofit program. And on the side, I was building what is the sky's the limit in the U.S.

We already had the nonprofit set up. So it was. all about establishing a pilot program and getting out there and showing that we could do what we said we could do for entrepreneurs and that there was really a need. The need was obvious. It was very easy to find particularly young adult entrepreneurs who are saying, I need to start a business and bring them in. And we partnered with some other nonprofits who said, we have all these young people who want to start businesses and we don't know where to send them because we don't do that. You know, we teach how to get a job. Um, usually it's a workforce development type program. So, um, that was it. That was the first year. It was like working,

you know, I was, I was living in my parents' basement, uh, you know, my parents charged me rent, uh, market rent, uh, because that's how our family roles. And so I, kids are going to listen to this and laugh. I do the same thing. Yeah. I mean, I raised you. I got you clothed in house and fed. I got you through college. What else am I supposed to do? You got to pay your rent. Absolutely, absolutely.

And I would do the same. But I think that it was a great fire underneath me to be like, hey, I need to make this work. Because doing the side hustle, which is how so many entrepreneurs get started and working the full-time job, it's exhausting. But it's good to do when you're young. I had a lot of energy back then. And that's what it looked like. And you just kind of had to piece it all together. And we started to prove ourselves.

We got the Oakland mayor's office to back us. And that convinced another foundation to also join in. And that was our big break. And that's where I could leave my job and go full time. I read in 2015, you asked for. applications for help. And if there's nothing more than this one thing that proves out how important your model is, you've got 5,000 people to respond to say, I need a little money to help my idea. Yeah, not just even a little money. They need the package, right? It's the training. They're like,

how do I start a business? Because there are, there are, there are, um, some generally accepted principles. I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs. I think I've, almost everybody's an entrepreneur in this room or, or is, you know, supports or works with entrepreneurs. And if we talked about some of the ways to get started in a business, I bet we could all kind of agree on some things that, yes, generally you should do that. No, probably not do that. And so, that process of like trying to remove we don't teach entrepreneurship of schools so so where are you supposed to learn this so that education piece is huge but yes they also want money everybody wants free money right so so that's that's not hard but then also mentoring because it's lonely being an

entrepreneur most most entrepreneurs are solo entrepreneurs right having a co-founder is a is a luxury and and if it goes well and if it's not it's not it's a a curse. And so, yeah, 5,000 people signed up on our forum that said, you know, we want this. And we said, we have no way, no way, shape, or form can we meet this need. But it was evidence of demand. And we were able to show that evidence of demand to some other funders. And we got our next big break with Accenture. We pitched it to some Fortune 500s and some foundations. But really, it was Accenture who stepped up and they said, yeah, we think, you know, we think your plan to become a tech nonprofit is correct, right? We think that this is how you meet that need because you can't do

it from an office in downtown Oakland. It was, I think your co-founder and best friend who said, we can combine this program model with technology and address this demand at scale once you understood with the 5,000 people wanting your work that there was scale available to you. I think it's really interesting what Nick was also the co-founder of and how that kind of evolved into what Sky's Limit is now. You want to tell us about that? Yeah, Nick, Nick is, Nick's my brother from another mother. Like, he is, this guy is, has been with me in the trenches for over a decade. And the crazy part is that Nick was building a whole other high tech, high growth company at the same time as being my co-founder and put thousands and thousands of volunteer hours into it

along the way. But if we go back to how we met, he lived across the hall for me in the dorms freshman year. And we hit it off very early. We had similar values and we're asking similar questions about life and and what it meant and what we wanted to do with it. And he, you know, he was raised by a single mom in Colorado and, uh, and was an entrepreneur as a kid. You know, he was selling clams, uh, in Long Island, um, during the summers. And then you got into the web very early, at least for our generation. And at 16 had a, had a website development company. And, uh, I think, I think one of his favorite stories for that time is that, He learned, you know, a lot of hard lessons through this web development company as a teenager.

But he traded a full website build to this sandwich shop. And they're like, you guys can have a sandwich a day forever each for this. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't work when the sandwich shop goes out of business the next year. So they, you know, they learned. They learned things. Yeah, so he was a web developer and then he goes to college and he takes over the IT department

at the school and he was working all through college. And we were talking about service. I was the philanthropy chair, the fraternity and he was the president. And so we worked together a lot on that kind of stuff. And, you know, we both had that entrepreneurial spirit. And he went that tech entrepreneurship route and I went the social entrepreneurship route. And so I called Nick up and I was like, this is it. Like we have 5,000 people who want what we need.

He's like, yep, we'll build technology for it. And then we started shopping that pitch around. And at the time, he was, you know, had just launched a company called blockchain.com, which is a large crypto company now today. A lot chain. Yeah, yeah. And so he moved to York in the United Kingdom. It's a smaller, you know, small.

or regional city outside of a ways out of London, just sight unseen and to be their first CEO and co-founder of this company. And it grew like gangbusters, right? So this thing shot up, you know, 80 million users. They've raised over a billion dollars now in venture capital. And they're going to IPO this year, hopefully. And Nick's pledged half his shares in that company to sky's a limit, which is an incredible, on top of thousands of hours of his time, we'll trying to build this thing, volunteering. And that concludes part one of our conversation with Bo Gere Dely, and you do not want to miss part two.

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