For all who dare to go off the
beaten track, this is the inspirational, power-packed playbook for transforming
your life and your world—from a young, Black social entrepreneur whose
dorm-room tech startup has helped millions pay for college and access
unprecedented opportunity.
Gray, the
son of a single working mother who had him at age fourteen, grew up in deep
poverty in Birmingham, Alabama. An academic star, he had every qualification
for attending a top college—except for the financial means. Desperate, Gray
headed off the beaten path, searching online to apply for every scholarship he
could find. His hustle resulted in
awards of 1.3 million dollars and became his call to action to help other
students win their own “schollys.” It inspired him to start up Scholly, an app
that matches college applicants with millions of dollars in outside
scholarships that often go unclaimed.
When he
was a senior at Drexel University, he appeared on Shark Tank as CEO of
Scholly. In the most heated
fight in the show’s history, the sharks challenged Gray as to whether his app
was a charity or a profitable business. Both, he insisted, proposing
a new paradigm for social entrepreneurship and netting deals from Lori Grenier
and Daymond John.
At the
time Scholly’s subscriber base was 90,000 users. Today the app has 4 million
subscribers who have won scholarships totaling more than $100 million.
Meanwhile, Gray—without help from the mostly all-white boy’s club of Silicon
Valley—has emerged as a tech startup superhero now tackling the crisis of
student debt with innovative, unrivaled strategies.
Gray’s premise is that when you
lead with the good—confronting issues such as poverty and racism—the money will
follow. His story is proof that when you
develop a mindset for success, you turn disadvantages into gold. And when you
create opportunities for others, you enrich the marketplace for yourself
too.
Gray shows us, we can carve out
new paths to better days and leave trails for others.
Christopher Gray, co-founder/CEO of Scholly, is a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine, has made the top of the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Social Entrepreneurship, and was one of Oprah’s Inaugural Super Soul 100 honorees as one of her favorite people. He is the recipient of the 2016 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award. A highly in-demand public speaker, Chris has served as the U.S. Embassy Speaker for the U.S. State Department. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, he lives in Los Angeles.
Mim Eichler-Rivas is coauthor with Chris Gardner of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Pursuit of Happyness. Mim’s list of more than thirty acclaimed coauthorships includes the national bestseller Finding Fish with Antwone Fisher. Mim’s solo title, Beautiful Jim Key, has sold briskly for more than a dozen years and has a feature film in the works.
