Resource Stories: Garry Johnson, First Founders

Garry Johnson remembers a moment in 2016, when he was still a junior at the University of Delaware, when he had to freestyle an entire startup pitch.

It was at a tech conference for startup founders from Garry’s home state of Delaware. Garry was the odd man out: the entrepreneurs he was competing against were all pitching products, like a microwaveable bowl that retains heat, while Garry was pitching a social impact incubator called Creative Minds that would teach young people in Delaware how to start a business.

When he stepped out on the huge stage with lights shining on him, and turned around to look up at his pitch deck – it wasn’t his slides up on the screen.

There’s a video online that shows what happened next: Garry freestyled the whole pitch without the aid of a deck: “I’m so passionate about making a better life for these kids,” he told the judges. “I really think we can improve kids’ lives through entrepreneurship. Because if you give people the tools to solve their problems, they will go off and do it.”

Garry didn’t win that pitch competition. But after the event one of the judges, the head of the entrepreneurship program at the University of Delaware, approached Garry and offered him a scholarship to pursue a masters in entrepreneurship, while teaching business skills to high school students on the side as a graduate assistant.

Five years later, Garry has grown that seed of an idea into an organization, First Founders – a Delaware-centric non-profit that helps early-stage entrepreneurs launch successful startups through accelerator programs, community support, and access to resources.

From Exercise Science to Entrepreneurship

Garry has lived in Delaware since the eighth grade. He credits his business mindset and hard work ethics to his mom who ran a property clean out business. 

After high school he got into the University of Delaware with a plan to pursue a career in physical therapy, with a major in exercise science. But on campus, he felt a different calling. He found himself drawn to the university’s Venture Development Center, a building on College Avenue that served as a hub for the community’s entrepreneurs. “The first Free Lunch Friday I attended at the Center changed my life,” he says. “Even though I didn't have an idea of what business I wanted to start, I saw other people who knew they could start something; they looked at me and saw that I could too."

Garry picked up a minor in entrepreneurship and started spending a lot of his time at the Venture Development Center. That was where he brewed up the idea to create a pitch competition for local Black youth, with all-Black judges, sponsored by the Center. It was where he stayed up all night to prep for pitch competitions. And it was where he started to question whether Delaware’s startup scene was offering an even playing field for entrepreneurs of color.

First Founders

Garry likes to tell a story about a panel discussion he attended for grad students pursuing work in Wilmington, Delaware.

“Unsurprisingly, this was an all-white panel, so I decided to ask these representatives how their company defined diversity and creating an inclusive workplace,” he’s written. “After an uncomfortable pause, one responded with feigned excitement: ‘We’re super diverse! I mean, look at this guy’ — he gestured to a co-panelist — ‘He’s from Ireland. Ireland!’”

Delaware, like many states, struggles with diversity in tech. As one data point, three quarters of tech workers in Delaware are male, and almost 60% are white. So Garry decided to do something about it. After meeting a local government official responsible for economic development at an event, he wrote her several letters and landed a meeting to challenge her on barriers for entrepreneurs of color. By the second meeting, he brought a proposal for an accelerator to connect founders with resources. That’s what led to First Founders’ first 12-week cohort in New Castle, Delaware.

First Founders ran its first successful cohort in 2019, and graduated a second one the following year. When Garry launched applications for the third cohort in the fall of 2020, he asked founders to submit audio pitches of what they were passionate about, why they were building, what they were working to build, and what an inclusive and equitable workplace looked like to them.

When 120 people applied to the program, far more than he expected, he felt clear on who he should accept.

All of them.

A Demo Day (on Twitter)

After First Founders decided to accept everybody in their cohort, they had to quickly iterate. “We realized we would have to rely on the power of the community to support one another,” Garry says. 

Garry started hosting educational sessions on Saturday mornings, with some people attending at 6:00 a.m. in their time zones. He also created a Slack channel with dedicated time for check-ins; he’ll prompt the founders in the group to share their biggest current challenge, and then other founders weigh in with expertise or a resource. “It’s less of us teaching and more of the community coming together.” At one point a Delaware-based chess startup connected with a New York-based educational system. “All that cool stuff happens all the time,” Garry says. “People are probably in there right now dropping in resources.”

The 120-person cohort ended with an innovative demo day on Twitter (“because the “venture capital world is on Twitter”). Garry started a thread and every founder responded with their one-minute video pitch, tagging different VCs and startups. “We would see a VC tagging their team members saying ‘We should check this out’,” Garry says. “We could see the power of leveraging networks in real time.”

He also launched the creative idea of a Podcast Pitch Competition: a fully-online pitch competition where 27 startups posted startup pitches and had two weeks to get as many listens as they could. The contest generated a combined total of more than 21,000 listens.

First Founders’ initial 12-week cohort was two years ago. Since then they’ve kept building, including the launch of an entrepreneurs-in residence program for their alumni. “We want to support early stage founders, and provide them with a paycheck,” Garry says.

If there is a theme that runs through Garry’s very-busy past five years, it would have to be access to opportunity. In June 2020, Garry Johnson wrote an open letter in Technical.ly, a local tech publication: “Delaware business community, you’re officially on notice.” He’s still calling on business, government and community leaders to level the playing field for founders of color – even if it means speaking honest truths out loud.

And First Founders’ curriculum follows that same model. The accelerator focuses on goal-setting and accountability, as opposed to teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. “These founders don't need to learn how to pitch and how to do a business model,” Garry says. “They need help getting traction. People make the most of things when you give them opportunities.”