I was the first, but I won't be the last

In this series, professionals discuss their experiences accomplishing something for the first time. Read their stories here, then write your own using #IWasTheFirst in the body of the post. 

I'm going to share the best-worst joke I’ve ever been told. But first, a little context...

I grew up without my father; the youngest boy of a single-mother home. My mom worked two jobs throughout my childhood, earning between $12,000 to $20,000 a year for much of it, which I still can’t fathom. I know food stamps and free lunches had a little to do with us getting by paycheck to paycheck for all those years, but my mother was, and continues to be my ultimate role model, for her drive and work ethic. She was the inspiration for the book “Real Role Models” which I co-authored and University of Texas Press published in 2010. When I became the first person in our family to graduate from college, in 2005, I got my degree framed and hung it on her bedroom wall where it still hangs today. I have a lot of personal agency to succeed in life, but much of my ambition and drive comes from this living source of motivation: my mom.

From my mother, I learned accountability, diligence and persistence. Case in point, she became a first-time homeowner at 45 years of age and a college graduate at 50 years old. But all that happened years after I had graduated from college myself, so let me get back to the joke...

My freshman year of college, I joined a fraternity despite telling my mom I’d never do such a thing ("I don't need to buy friends," I remember saying). But it wasn’t just any fraternity; it was a fraternity with a history of being among the first to mix Christians and Jews in the early 20th Century and one of its oldest chapters nationwide. At the turn of the 21st Century, here I was pledging to become the first African-American brother in one of the oldest chapters of Delta Sigma Phi. My experience was not quite as monumental as Jackie Robinson’s in baseball 50-plus years prior, but for an 18-year old attending one of the most storied universities in the American South, it wasn’t easy.

I had 11 pledge brothers, and my nickname was “Superpledge” as a result of how hard I'd worked during the pledging phase and how quickly I learned the Greek alphabet.

And now for the joke.

“Superpledge, how many pledges are in your pledge class?” asked one of the senior frat brothers and pledge trainers.

“Sir, 12, sir,” I replied as the “sir sandwich” was a requirement throughout pledgeship.

“Oh, you mean 11 and 3/5ths,” the upperclassmen and my future “brother” replied jokingly as I processed his well-timed but ill-intended reference to the Three-Fifths Compromise.

I don’t share that story to talk about the racism and prejudice I experienced in college. I share that story to relay to you just how unique my college experience was not just because I was the first African-American member of an all-white fraternity at the University of Texas at Austin, but also because I was the first person in my immediate family to graduate from college. I had chosen this path and been reminded of how hard it would be through my own choices of where I went to school and what I did once I got there.

I’d worked tirelessly through middle school and high school, plotting a course from 7th grade onward, to ensure I would be the first in my immediate family to graduate from college. Sure, I’d had one or two second cousins or distant relatives attend college and graduate after 6 or 7 or even 8 years, but the traditional 4-year college tenure was not something I’d ever seen first-hand or heard about from my parents or older siblings. I’d often go to the middle class homes of my classmates and learn about college and professional careers from their older siblings or parents who’d had degrees hanging up on living room walls. If they could do it, why not me? So was my thinking.

So after dozens of courses from the honors classes in 7th and 8th grade to the AP courses during my junior and senior years of high school, after countless hours serving as a leader for various clubs like the Math & Science Team or National Honor Society, and being an All-County member of the band and a varsity track and cross country athlete, the sum of my K-12 education was a letter of acceptance to The University of Texas at Austin, one of the leading public universities in America. Through the hard work, I was able to win over two dozen academic and non-athletic scholarships, including the National March of Dimes Scholarship, to attend four years of college nearly free of charge, too.

And, yet, there I was just six weeks into my life as a college student being reduced to just three-fifths of a person as my slave ancestors had been during the Constitutional Convention some 200 years ago in Philadelphia. Had I really come only this far?

But that joke wasn’t enough to break me or deter me for one moment from the path I'd charted. If anything, it motivated me even more to become the kind of person who would make my mother proud while also creating a fundamentally new and lasting legacy of accomplishment and excellence in my family for generations to come.

Fast-forward a full decade from graduation and there I was, a groomsmen at the wedding of one of my pledge brothers, still one of my best friends. During the rehearsal dinner, I’d introduced myself to one of the bridesmaids and her husband, telling them I was a first-time tech founder taking a small break from the grinds of startup fundraising to enjoy the wedding festivities. Lo and behold, the husband happened to be a longtime Facebook executive named Blake Chandlee who’d recently begun making startup investments with a couple of his fellow Facebook alum.

Over the next month, this man looked past the color of my skin, looked beyond my underprivileged upbringing and, instead, he chose to look at the merit of my emerging business and my makeup as an entrepreneur to make an investment decision that changed the trajectory of Localeur for the better. Today, we've raised millions of dollars, expanded to three dozen major cities on our way to reaching 100 cities globally in the coming year, and signed partnership deals with leading brands like JetBlue. Localeur has been named one of the top travel apps by Forbes, Time and many others.

So would I be where I am today as a founder and CEO without my college education? Probably not. Would Localeur be where it is today without my having joined that fraternity, stuck with it and later attended that wedding where I met this angel investor? Probably not. Most importantly, would I be the man I am today in this unique position as one of the few African-American founders to have raised millions for a consumer tech startup without my having become the first? Definitely not.

So as I continue leading my company to new heights and build upon the role I'll play in the expectations of future generations of my family, I fully recognize that I was the first in my immediate family to graduate from college, but I definitely won't be the last.