 We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization that was created to help entrepreneurs start, build and grow businesses. We recognized there were some key things that entrepreneurs needed that they weren't necessarily able to get. The first was education, the second was mentorship, and the third was community. We believe all entrepreneurs should receive the same type of training, the same type of education, the same type of mentorship. We also believe you don't have to be a high-growth entrepreneur or a huge corporation to be respected and get value, but on the other side you could be a solo entrepreneur or two-man shop. The key to what we do is the community itself. We want the local community to embrace, adopt, accept and take ownership in what we're building. I think the opportunity that exists with the district is that you have a neighborhood of people that want to start their own businesses. They want to go out and build things that help produce jobs for the local economy. What we really need to do now is go in there and help them grow and recognize that success isn't necessarily about the number of cumulative jobs that are created in a different area or the number of companies are created, but it's about changing the trajectory of the lives of people in these communities who really begin to look at entrepreneurship as a career choice, as a realistic career choice, and then figure out how do we go in and equip them and empower them with both the skills and the resources to be successful, but just creating an entire entrepreneurial mindset because regardless of whether you start a company or don't start a company, that entrepreneurial mindset can change the way that you live your life. Our job as the deck is to build a central location for entrepreneurship that embraces not just our programming and the things we're pushing out, but an entire community who are coming in to support and grow the local entrepreneur. That's where the opportunity really exists in South Dallas. So when I look at the entrepreneurs that we have all across Dallas, I'm exceptionally impressed. Sean Scott is a CTO. He's got a company called Hack the Future Now, which focuses on helping young people learn to code. He's even going back into the community over there and starting to do programs specifically in South Dallas, and he's an exceptionally talented, exceptionally gifted leader in our community who is recognizing the need for all entrepreneurs to have equal access to the support services, the tools, the education, and the mentorship that they need. I've been a computer programmer since I was seven years old. I have an aunt that's an engineer. She was an engineer for the Air Force where she designed, she literally designed planes for the Air Force for 30 years. My grandparents were teachers. My mom was a teacher. My thing is I was able to succeed because I knew of all the possibilities that existed out there. And so at this point in my career, I'm looking back and like, I'm coming back right where I grew up and trying to expose the kids that are here to like all the different opportunities that are out here. I mean, we can go right outside the building and look towards downtown and you'll see AT&T's corporate logo and America Bank and all the high rises you see in uptown and all that. A lot of people over here don't necessarily think that's accessible to them. And it's literally some of that stuff is within walking distance. And so that's my goal now is to take what I've done in my career and then reinvest it in this community so that we can create more people that can have the same type of story as I did. Yeah. So actually I ended up working at the deck through a mutual friend from college who knew a guy that was working there that was working on an idea and he needed like technical help. The biggest thing there was just like being around a bunch of other like minded people and everybody was working on a different type of thing. But everybody was kind of just seeking out the answers of how do I get my idea to a product stage that people can actually use and then take it to the next level and actually make a business out of this whole thing. I guess the biggest thing that kind of came out of all that was you had, you know, any given day 50 people there, but you could ask anybody a question and they would try their best to help you out. And I think, you know, starting out that's what you need because your network isn't that vast and if we can all work kind of work together, then we kind of, you know, we all rise together. So I think there's a huge benefit to, you know, having a resource in your community that's within walking distance or like a quick bus ride that you can go to at any time and get the kind of help that you need. And it's also looking at the people there can truly identify with your community because they see your community just like you do every single day. It's all part of one big ecosystem. And I think we're all working together with the time and goal of just improving our community and our city overall. Had a vision for what I wanted to create and I saw an opportunity. I recognized that what we built was a community driven initiative that was about putting other people before yourself that was about creating a community where people were all coming in and their job was to serve other people and not making the deck the center of it, but making the entrepreneur the center of it. And if we did that in a way that had integrity, that had principles, that had morals, I felt like that would support, you know, my faith and what I was trying to do. And in the end, I realized that money was not going to ever make me happy. No matter how much I had, I've had the freedom to pick things that were not focused necessarily on financial gain, but focused on an eternal perspective.