Resource Stories: Preston James II, DivInc

In June 2020, Preston James wrote a post on LinkedIn that expressed emotions he needed to get out in the world.

“Our anxiety never stops,” he wrote. “It never takes a break. It never goes easy on us for a week. Being Black or Brown in America is rife with bias, unabashed abuse and oppression.”

In the midst of nationwide protests about social justice and police brutality, Preston challenged his audience to do more. “The moves we typically make just aren’t big enough,” he wrote. “We’re often unwilling to risk losing what we have, to have a chance at what we want.”

The post announced the launch of the Social Justice Innovation Accelerator, a new offering by his organization DivInc. It was a pivotal moment for the four-year old organization, expanding beyond their already-ambitious goal to build Austin’s BIPOC tech ecosystem, and transforming DivInc into a national organization supporting startups advancing social justice and racial equality.  

“With yet another wave of injustice and national anger,” he wrote, “my team and I are ready to take action again, in the best way we know how.”

From Atlanta to Austin

“You must have lost your mind, going down there.”

Preston’s friends were surprised, to say the least, when he told them in 1997 that he was moving from Georgia to the sleepy Texas town of Austin, for a job at a small but fast-growing tech company called Dell.

Preston grew up in the Bronx and spent much of his early life in other heavily Black communities, like Washington, D.C., where he attended Howard University. In Georgia he married his wife, and he was ready to settle down when the offer came in to use his unique set of technology and sales consulting skills in a newly created position in Dell’s Executive Briefing Center. 

When Preston arrived in Austin, he was in for a culture shock. He enjoyed meeting his colleagues, but quickly found that there weren’t many other Black employees. “The quality of life was great,” he recalls. “But it was hard to find a church, a jazz club, or good food.”

Preston worked as top IT technology and sales leader for Dell for several years, but he was always drawn to innovation. He worked as the Director for Enterprise Systems Consultants for Dell, and later became the Director of Enterprise Technologists in their SMB segment. It was a role where he managed a global team of 25 people, and brought in $100 million in sales. He eventually landed him a role as the Managing Director for the Dell Global Center for Entrepreneurship, working with small businesses, startups, co-working spaces, tech accelerators, local universities, and investors - both angel and VC investors.

Preston took an early retirement from Dell in 2014 to explore his next chapter in the startup world. Within three months, he was approached with an unexpected offer. The State Department wanted to continue their entrepreneurship exchange program (through the University of Michigan), but they wanted him to participate despite having left Dell.

Would Preston run the trip on his own - without the budget or network of a large corporation behind him?

Preston didn’t skip a beat. He called everyone he knew in the Austin ecosystem. He hosted four fellows in Austin for two weeks. The experience forced him to connect with people he would not have otherwise, and to build a wide network in the city. After the program finished [successfully!], people were immediately interested in Preston’s vision. “They saw what I was doing before I knew clearly what I was doing,” he said.

“Why am I the only one here?”

Preston remembers the first time he went to a pitch competition in Austin as a mentor, only to look around and realize that he was the only mentor out of 100 who was Black.

He remembers thinking, “I’m not the smartest, wealthiest, or most experienced black tech leader in Austin. Why am I the only one here?”

With a little digging, he learned that the investor pool in Austin was also lacking in diversity. He added “angel investor” in his Linkedin profile and joined the largest angel group in Austin, as one of the only black members out of 125 angel investors.

What happened next is a familiar story: as the sole Black person in these spaces – tech breakfasts, pitch competitions, angel investor meetups – Preston became the de facto subject matter expert on DEI in Austin’s tech ecosystem. He began presenting at people’s request, speaking on panels at conferences and workshops.

He’d talk about how Austin was struggling to represent black and brown communities in tech. But he soon grew tired of only talking about the problem.

“I’m a Black male and an entrepreneur,” he says. “I see the gap between these two worlds. I realized I was in the unique position; maybe I could be the bridge.”

Preston’s organization, DivInc, is a three-month accelerator program for Black and Brown tech entrepreneurs in Austin. Entrepreneurs learn business skills and meet with mentors, including alumni from previous DivInc programs.  

It’s been a busy few years - hardly what many would consider retirement. In just four years DivInc has run seven cohorts for 85 entrepreneurs. Preston also launched Startup Sistas, an initiative to support female founders of color.

In January 2021 DivInc expanded to a second city, with an accelerator in Houston, 165 miles away. Then George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Movement shook the world. And DivInc began to expand in a way that was more than just geographic.

Time for an Overhaul 

“We were at a very frustrated, very angry, very emotional time,” Preston later told a local paper. “[We asked ourselves], rather than just stay that way, what can we do to really affect that change? The concept of the Social Justice Innovation program came out of those emotions.”

DivInc launched the first cohort of its social justice Accelerator in August 2020. The accelerator is an evolution of DivInc’s mission: it’s focused on finding the most innovative organizations across the United States that are addressing inequities and disparities caused by institutionalized bias and racism.

Preston decided to keep eligibility for the accelerator wide, accepting applicants who run both for-profit and non-profit organizations, in Austin and beyond. For instance, the Lone Star Justice Alliance is a local non-profit in Austin that works with youth and young adults in the criminal justice system. Civic Links is a for-profit out of San Francisco that helps people navigate the byzantine world of government benefits like SNAP.

The first cohort for the accelerator runs this fall; the second cohort will begin in early 2022. “DivInc has been in this equity fight for the last four years,” Preston says. “This program is an extension of what we already do very successfully.”

What’s next 

Moving forward, Preston has big ideas to reach entrepreneurs at different stages in the pipeline. He wants to support later-stage entrepreneurs; a natural evolution after several successful cohorts. DivInc now has several dozen alumni who have collectively raised more than $3 million in capital since going through the program. Preston wants to help them reach product-market fit. That could even involve an equity investment fund to allow DivInc to invest in its success.

It’s a whole market approach. “We need to be developing a pipeline, a development ecosystem. If we don't have infrastructure then we are not creating systemic change on a consistent, sustainable basis.”

Preston and Divinc are not here for the short term. Divinc is invested in transforming infrastructure: both the infrastructure of the startups they work with, and the infrastructure of the larger economy that contributes to the racial wealth gap.

“We’ve all read the reports on how much hasn’t changed for black people in the last 50 years. I don’t want my kids to be reading reports about how things are the same 50 years from now.”

- Written by Ambika Samarthya-Howard