VentureStaking™ Arenas | The Game of Venture for Communities | Icebreaker

VentureStaking™ Arenas | The Game of Venture for Communities | Icebreaker

Members

Gerry Hays, JD, QAI

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I began my career in politics and government affairs, getting licensed to practice law, before pivoting to launch my first startup, HomeYeah.com, where I helped hundreds of homeowners sell their homes online. In 2003, I sold that business to the private equity firm behind Help-U-Sell Real Estate. In 2004, I was invited to teach a pilot course on Venture Capital and Entrepreneurial Finance at the IU Kelley School of Business, a top-5 business school. I’ve been teaching there ever since, which led me to write a 5-star rated book on capital formation: The First-Time Founders Equity Bible. And for the past 10 years, I've taken students to Hong Kong, China, and Singapore to meet with VCs and Entrepreneurs to learn about their venture ecosystems. In parallel to teaching: - From 2005 to 2016, I co-founded the Charley Biggs Food Company with my brother to save our father’s distribution business, which was getting squeezed by a manufacturer. I served as CEO and acquired elite selling skills getting over 1,000 grocers in Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Utah, Texas, and Winnipeg (CA) to switch from their existing fried chicken programs to ours, going from $0 to $10MM in ARR within five years. With our father’s business saved (through the creation of a new food manufacturing company), I was ready to return to my own pursuits. So, we arranged a private equity transaction that allowed me to exit the business. - From 2009 to 2014, I was co-founder and CFO of Apparel Media Group (later Pear), where we scaled custom t-shirt advertising until our acquisition by Custom Ink. I also originated the idea of FounderSuite and found a partner in San Francisco to build it. Today, it's one of the top SaaS fundraising management platforms for Founders. - I’ve been the first check in multiple startups, some of which have achieved profitability or raised over $20MM in venture capital. I made my first Bitcoin purchase in 2014 and continue to invest in companies building out the Bitcoin Layer 2 infrastructure. Today, while still holding my professor’s seat, I’m dedicating the remainder of my career to making venture permissionless. My audience of millions isn’t swimming in capital or well-connected networks, so the path forward is through Alchemy—the process of creating something from nothing. It’s a formula grounded in a distinct mental framework and relentless execution. I founded Doriot.com to teach this process and provide execution pathways for founders and investors who, like myself, want to own equity upside in the future.

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I fell in love with entrepreneurship when I started my first business Left, Right, Center. My goal was to bring simplicity and transparency to news consumption by making users aware of each article's biases. After that project, I moved to Austin, TX to be where people were building businesses and products. In Austin, I spent 7 months at Veryable learning and executing their go-to-market strategy. I want to discover users' problems and ideate and execute creative solutions to solve those problems. I have experience with Python, Java, R, SQL, HTML & CSS, Scikit-Learn, product prototyping, sales, and account management.

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Global Metrics Initiative Intern Working on Outerbounds Compute Grant for Nvidia H100 Cluster

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Software Engineer @ Roblox | CS @ UC Berkeley