I thought I had the perfect career, successful start-ups, great jobs with the most influential tech companies on the planet. I was privileged to be given a chance and lucky enough to have had some success. But something wasn’t right.

Helping companies grow has long been a passion, so I took that success and began to advise, sit on boards, invest; the usual tri-fecta of Silicon Valley naval gazing. I was helping the next big tech companies grow and that’s a good thing, right?

Today, I realize, that there was one common element across each “success” — access to help. It’s as simple as that. Without access, I never could have accomplished any of it. The truth was, all of the CEO’s and entrepreneurs I was “helping” — had access to it too. It was this self-fulfilling game of privileged access. It’s a good game if you are allowed to play. That never sat well with the state school, western New York kid in me with that chip on my shoulder.

Let’s back up… a few years ago, I got a phone call one day from a mentor of mine (a key “helper” along my path). Asking me to fly to my home town (Go Bills!) to help him bring entrepreneurship back to the Buffalo area. I remember the call vividly, thinking… “Why would entrepreneurs want to go to Buffalo when they can come here to Silicon Valley?” But I went. What I found was a world that opened my eyes and changed my life. Jordan (the mentor) showed me company after company. All smart, dedicated, hardworking, most with real revenue, profitable (because they didn’t have the luxury of investors), solid companies with people passionate about building them. I realized; it was me that had it wrong. I was applying the rules that are good for 1% of the startups to the other 99%.

I jumped in and started to volunteer to help. I was stunned by how the simple best practices that I took for granted, impacted these companies. Soon, I found myself volunteering extra time with the folks at 43N and judging a $5M pitch competition. Here, I met Melissa. On the surface, we had NOTHING in common. She was black, lived in the DC area, had dedicated her life to working with minority and women owned entrepreneurs and was on the non-profit path; quite a stark contrast to the privileged white boy life I was living in the bay area. Though we presented very differently on the surface, we were both there for the same reason — to help these companies. The “new-majority” entrepreneurs were just as talented, just as smart, just as dedicated, and just as driven as ones that you would find in the Valley or New York City, but they lacked access which multiplied the challenges of entrepreneurship. Melissa educated me about the challenges of supporting underserved and overlooked entrepreneurs — marginalized by geography, race, gender, etc. She helped me realized that Buffalo was merely a proxy for entrepreneurs who suffer from simply not having the access to critical resources. As we talked for over a year, we kept trying to find ways to change the trajectory of these talented entrepreneurs and provide the resources they need. Our individual paths were not having a significant enough impact on those that needed it most.

Rob is the best operator I’ve ever met (more of that privileged access to help). He called me to see if there was a community that he could plug into of other coaches and mentors in Silicon Valley so they could share best practices. He was full of energy, talking about the smaller companies he was working with, “Because they need it, and it’s so much more rewarding,” were his exact words. He was struck by how much he could help, so quickly.

I quickly convinced Rob and Melissa to come to dinner and we had our Ureeka moment: What if we built a platform where every entrepreneur — irrespective of race and gender — could have access to the best materials, resources, coaches, mentors, & capital that has historically been reserved for the “Technorati” elite? What if every entrepreneur could have a community to rely on? Ureeka was born.

The mission of Ureeka is to democratize economic opportunity by enabling community and by reducing the cost and risk associated with growing a small to medium business. Ureeka enables access for underrepresented SMBs — geo’s outside of Silicon Valley, women, people of color, and others — access to a collaborative community, tools, & services that the 1% take for granted.

On November 6th, we are opening our scaled beta of Ureeka. We hope that you will join us in this journey in building a new community for all entrepreneurs. Follow us on Instagram or Facebook or simply shoot me a note.