Two years spent teaching elementary school in Las Vegas as part of Teach for America left a major imprint on Paige Hendrix Buckner.
Not only did she discover a love of teaching, but she met a business partner who would later allow her to combine that love of teaching with a passion for entrepreneurship. It was through Teach for America in 2008 she met Mandela SH Dixon, a fellow teacher and soon-to-be longtime friend.
When, in 2018, Dixon was launching the startup Founder Gym, aimed at helping underrepresented founders learn the ins and outs of fundraising, Buckner jumped on board.
The two have now helped hundreds of entrepreneurs who have gone on to raise $57 million from investors. Here's part of our conversation with Buckner.
Tell me about Founder Gym. (Founder and CEO) Mandela (SH Dixon) kicked off our very first cohort in 2018 was teaching underrepresented founders how to raise capital for their tech or tech enabled company. Since the first cohort in January 2018, we have successfully graduated 14 cohorts of founders that total 485 entrepreneurs in 26 countries on six continents. In addition to live training sessions, we have a really rigorous curriculum. So, they're spending the live training sessions and then office hours with me where I give them feedback on their fundraising materials every week.
What happens when they graduate? All those folks who graduate walk away with a toolkit that we then share with our trainer network of investors, accelerator directors, that kind of thing. And so the trainers who come in are people like a partner at Sequoia Capital, Alfred Lin, who was on the Zappos team. We have Michael Seibel from Y Combinator. We just had Sarah Kunst from Cleo Capital.
You said you are blown away by how tight the connections made between the entrepreneurs are. Why do you think that is? We help create a space where they can be vulnerable with each other and talk about things that maybe they can’t talk about anywhere else. The people that are part of our community are already amazing in their own ways. We have the first African American woman to ever graduate from the aerospace engineering program at the University of Kansas. A lot of our founders are the first in their families, and it’s not just to start a business, but to do all kinds of things. They are pioneers.
You went from founder to training founders. Did you burn out on being a founder? I did. A big piece of burning out on being a founder was I learned that I needed to be in a different kind of business. I liked running a business and the creativity behind it, but I wasn’t necessarily geeked out on the idea (behind Client Joy). That was really hard for me to personally understand. I’m used to doing hard things. Teaching fourth-graders is hard. My senior year of college I worked three jobs and took 20 credit hours. I worked a lot in my life. I didn’t realize that being a founder it can be hard but you can still love what you’re pursuing. I kind of fell into the idea around gifting and then tried to iterate and make it better.
What happened to Client Joy? I sold that business to someone else, which I did at the end of last year. Founder Gym reminded me I can work really hard and do something I really, really love.
What do you think is missing right now for founders in Portland? Looking at the Inclusive Business Resource Network has been a cool way for me to find new founders who need to get access to Founder Gym. Our most recent Founder Gym cohort had five graduates in it who got scholarships from Prosper Portland. That’s been powerful because then what happens is those founders who are supported by Portland then are put into our network and they grow their networks really fast to other places around the world.
Title: Chief Operating officer, Founder Gym
Hometown: Neosho, Missouri
Education: Bachelor of Arts, international studies, University of Missouri-Columbia; Master’s in education, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
Startups: co-founder, Tique Box, a subscription box of locally made goods; founder Client Joy, gift boxes of locally made products.
Nonprofits: Past instructor for TiE Oregon Youth Entrepreneurship program; founding board member XXcelerate
Currently reading: “The City We Became,” N.K. Jemisin; “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don’t,” James C. Collins
Favorite pandemic take-out: Pizzaria Otto
Last show you binged: “The Witcher”
Pandemic hobby: gardening
