Prep Alum Entrepreneur on Cover of Forbes

His passion for entrepreneurship was cultivated at Prep for Prep, where as a teenager he developed an embroidered wrist- and headbands business at Prep's Institute for Entrepreneurship and won top accolades at the Goldman Sachs Foundation's Youth Entrepreneurship Expo. 

The excerpt below is from “Ryan Williams, 30, Started A Revolutionary $800M Fintech. But Can He Escape His Kushner-Trump Connection?” by Nathan Vardi.

Like many young entrepreneurs on the hunt for capital, Williams knows how to market himself. His personal elevator pitch: a kid from Baton Rouge who went from cutting up worms and selling them as bait to a teen whose wildly successful embroidered wrist- and headband business won him top awards from the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the NAACP and the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Then came Harvard, Goldman and Blackstone, and then the Forbes 30 Under 30, on the back of Cadre. 

Williams and his family lived in rental homes in the northern part of the city, which has long struggled with segregation, crime and persistent poverty. "He grew up in a community where the likelihood was that one in three African-American men would be in the criminal justice system," says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, which invested in Cadre, and a native of Louisiana. 

"It was rough" is all Williams will say. 

His big break came right before high school, when his mother moved the family to the more results-oriented New York City suburb of Ossining. Williams threw himself into school and his entrepreneurial ventures. He ignored a guidance counselor who told him not to bother applying to Harvard, and he hooked up with a New York program that mentors poor kids with potential. At Harvard, Williams studied economics. 

His true major? Networking. "He is fearless in his outreach and pursuit of relationships," says Raymond McGuire, a vice-chairman of Citigroup and one of the most prominent African-Americans on Wall Street. Williams recruited McGuire to speak at an early meeting of Veritas Financial Group, a group he organized to connect undergrads with Harvard Business School profs. "I always thought," Williams says, " 'What was the worst thing that can happen? People say no.’ " They usually said yes, though: It now ranks among Harvard’s biggest student groups. 

"You can let being an outsider overwhelm you," Williams says, "or you can figure it out and reset people’s expectations." 

Read the full article here.