What OGA Means to Me
| | The OZY Genius Award provided me with valuable experiences and opportunities. Yes, the $5,000 award helped, but the knowledge I gained was worth so much more. I’d been working on my idea for months before winning the OGA, but the publicity from becoming an OZY Genius made people pay more attention to the potential of my idea. There are so many amazing young people that need platforms like this to highlight their brilliant ideas, but they also need money to bring their ideas to life. This is one of the hardest obstacles to overcome, especially for minorities in the tech industry, where the youngest entrepreneurs aren’t able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from friends and family to invest in their startup idea. You will need to be resourceful and hustle extra hard to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of your idea. That’s what I did in the beginning; I refused to let my circumstances discourage me from trying to realize my dreams. There are lots of other young people in that situation. I’ve met so many Historically Black Colleges (HBCU) and Universities students who have brilliant ideas but lack the capital and resources to bring them to life. I was once in that same boat. I believe the OZY Genius Award can help attract resources to talented HBCU students and change that. |
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| | How it helped me | My experience with OGA helped me figure out the next steps for my startup. I needed to surround myself with a team of amazing co-founders who had strengths in the areas where I was weak. Understanding that I couldn’t accomplish all of my goals alone was pivotal for me. I was accustomed to shouldering all the weight and responsibility in so many different situations while growing up in life, but the traffic generated from the opportunity with OZY allowed me to partner with Andrew Suggs, my co-founder and CEO, who has been a huge mentor in my life, inside and outside of Live Chair Health. As a first-generation college graduate, I was determined to be successful and inspire students who, like myself, come from poor rural towns to pursue their dreams. Thanks to OZY, I realized that I enjoy helping people and resolving their problems. For a long time, I wanted to know how I fit into the tech industry outside of being a co-founder. This led me to pursue a career in the tech industry, along with working as a customer success manager. In the future, I may make a slight career change and seek opportunities as a customer support manager to really focus on putting more systems and processes in place to help more customers at tech startups. Know that, over time, goals may change as you gain more experience and knowledge and that is totally fine, because we are meant to evolve as people. |
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| | Why you should apply for an OGA | If you have an idea that you truly believe would make a difference in the world, I strongly encourage you to apply. It could be an app, an invention, a book, a nonprofit or some other type of startup. You will never know how far your idea can go if you don’t apply. As an HBCU student, I spent many hours and nights whiteboarding my ideas. I was passionate about bringing Live Chair to life. I did not reach my goal overnight or within a year, but I stuck with it through the highs and lows. I even took out loans and worked side-hustle jobs just to stay in the game. Then one day in 2017, Live Chair arrived in the app stores. That was an unbelievable dream come true for me. The current version of the Live Chair Health app is now shareable and downloadable to our customers via a link. In June 2022, Live Chair Health raised $3.5 million in funding from investors, and it all started when I clicked here to apply for an OGA. I look forward to hearing the stories from the next class of OZY Genius Award winners. It’s time for you to shine and let the world know you are here to make a difference with your idea. Apply today! — Michael DeVore, OGA Class of ‘15 |
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