Go Where There Is No Path

Stories of Hustle, Grit, Scholarship, and Faith

Christopher Gray, Mim Eichler Rivas

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780062992109
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062992116
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

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. 

Chapter 1
Your Call to Action

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

—Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka

How did it feel?

That’s a question I hear a lot from aspiring entrepreneurs who want to know how it felt to have the big aha! moment—the one that happens when you conceive of the idea that could be your version of winning the jackpot.

While I can’t speak for everyone, I think that anytime you’re struck by inspiration, it has a feeling of magic. To come up with an idea, then go from nothing more than a concept proposed by your imagination and turn it into something as massive as a multimillion- or billion-dollar enterprise—definitely that can be a heady experience.

It’s no wonder that the most iconic tech wizards of recent years have been compared to superheroes with superhuman powers. The reality, however, is that for most entrepreneurs, tech and others, just having a killer, genius idea is no guarantee whatsoever that it’s substantial enough to become a business, let alone a profitable one.

There is something to be said, though, about the added potential that appears when you’ve been attempting to solve a challenging problem and you rearrange the pieces of the maddening puzzle and suddenly you go “Oh!” And then you arrive at a fresh solution, that maybe no one’s ever put together in the same way.

It’s like the smoke clears and everything just clicks. I’ve heard researchers in the medical/tech space talk with almost a skeptical surprise about how those discoveries began. As in—Huh, wait, did that just happen? They repeat the experiment enough times to make sure the solution wasn’t an outlier, sometimes getting a result for a problem they weren’t even trying to solve. In fact, that’s how antibiotics were accidentally discovered. Next thing they knew, history had been made.

I like imagining what Benjamin Franklin felt in his aha! moment, when he had a hunch that metal would conduct electricity and then went out to prove it with a kite and a key in a lightning storm. Or how Thomas Edison and his team felt, after so many failed attempts, when they finally came up with the right materials to carry an electric current and they flipped a switch and turned on the actual first light bulb. Franklin and Edison may not have had the full picture yet as to how their inventions would change life on Planet Earth for all of humanity, but they must have realized that they would not be lacking for customers for a very long while.

We’ve all had brainstorms—great ideas—and then second-guessed them. Maybe they weren’t actionable. Or scalable. Or potentially profitable. Maybe we ran with them and they didn’t go anywhere. Usually, I would add, when we lose traction on our own efforts it’s because they don’t have that same wow! feeling that entrepreneurs, inventors, and speculators like to recall about striking gold.

The best way to describe how my most dramatic aha! moment felt (there were earlier, lesser ones) was like a tap on the shoulder—as if the universe was trying to get my attention. When all you’ve been getting have been red lights, you suddenly get that tap. Like all systems are go. There’s that path ahead, and you’re not sure where it’s going but you don’t care—because you’ve got your own compass that’s pushing you onward.

All of this is to try to answer the question. My hope is that it may be helpful to you at different times in your life when you’re wondering which way to go—with an idea, an offer, or a decision, whenever you’re contemplating your next step.

Those aha! moments—when it might seem that you’ve come to a clearing in the woods—are, to me, inflection points. They are peak moments that will change what happens next. And how that state has really felt in my experience is as a Call to Action.

If you ever have any of those feelings, all I want to say is—heed the call.

For me the big Call to Action came in the spring of 2013, in my third year at Drexel University in Philadelphia, just over six months after my twenty-first birthday. One of the reasons that I chose Drexel was for its LeBow Business School, a stellar program, where I could take classes as an undergrad. There was also the opportunity to add a fifth year off campus and intern in the field of my choice, earn college credit for it, and get paid. Turns out, just because you have a ton of scholarships and financial aid doesn’t mean you can access dollars whenever you need them.

My co-op internship the first semester of my third year had been an eye-opening experience at Fannie Mae—where I saw firsthand why government-supported and -backed programs periodically falter even when intended for good. When I returned to campus, full of steam to take on the status quo and confront systemic issues, I found myself immediately busier than ever with my unofficial job helping friends, fellow students, and friends of friends find outside scholarship money and navigate the maze of the financial aid process.

Two and a half years earlier, in the fall of 2010, I had arrived in Philadelphia as a stranger in a strange land. My admissions offer had included a paid visit, and I had done almost a drive-by of Drexel and Philly. Everything, the buildings and the people, seemed to tower over me—and that’s easy to do because I’m not the tallest person, although you wouldn’t know it from my personality. Momma’s five-foot-nine, and my father was over six feet. I say this having only one memory of meeting him when I was applying to college and he was required to sign my FAFSA paperwork.

Adjusting to the northeastern mentality wasn’t easy. Once I got past my culture shock and started to make friends with students from a lot of different backgrounds, I kept hearing everyone talk about the continual struggle to get enough financial aid and about how to plan for dealing with mounting college debt from high-interest loans.

“Have you ever looked into applying for outside scholarships?” I’d ask, out of reflex—just as I had once done out of desperation. Very few knew anything about the shocking secret I’d come across after a similar suggestion had been made to me back in high school.

“Can you show me where to look?” I’d be asked, and then pretty soon I’d be demonstrating the various steps I took to track down scholarships. Word rapidly spread that I had this talent for finding obscure scholarships that were available not just for your first year of college but for the rest of your undergraduate and even graduate years.

As long as I had the time, I was eager to pass on everything I’d learned from the almost eight grueling months I’d spent in search of money for college when I was in high school. However, as junior year got underway at Drexel and I became more heavily involved in an outside project looking into venture capital possibilities and my course load became overwhelming, there wasn’t enough time. My biggest disappointment was when a high school applicant I’d been helping with admissions didn’t get accepted to her dream school. Her other options didn’t offer the same amount of financial aid, and the only way to offset the cost was to go in search of outside scholarships. There wasn’t much time. It had taken me continual hunting for more than half a year to get a list of possibilities that would fit my specific background, need, merit, and interests, and then to write the essays.

My sense of injustice was fired up. There had to be another, more expedient way to help students of color, students without resources for tutors or college test prep courses and, like the teenager I had been, without technology or the time to find and apply for potential scholarships. Come to think of it, there had to be a better way to create more access to opportunity for every student.

That’s close to what I said out loud to a fellow student as we headed back to the dorms late that March night of 2013: “There’s gotta be a better way!”

She agreed. Where had I said that before?

If I had to choose a major antagonist and social ill that I’ve battled since childhood, it would be poverty—an evil aided and abetted by the thugs of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, violence in all forms, exploitation, ignorance, greed, injustice, oppression, inhumanity, threats to individual and environmental health, and more. The way I see it today, in order to solve a systemic problem that is as age-old and pervasive as poverty, solutions are most likely to be found by people who have lived the reality of the problem.

From an early age, I believed wholeheartedly that education was the one superpower that could successfully combat poverty. The best metaphor that I can give for growing up poor is being stuck on Shipwreck Island, as I named it, with limited radio reception. Nobody I could see ever seemed to make it off the island. In my mind, the only ship coming to get me out of there would arrive by the force of my own will to study and work above and beyond expectations. Self-education outside of school was necessary too, and so were efforts to improve myself in every way that I could. With all the intensity, optimism, and persistence that pretty much describe me, I faithfully believed that when the time came to apply for college, my ship would come in. It would carry me off to a top university out of state where I’d get a degree or two and land a rewarding career as a business executive and maybe a community leader of some sort.

College loomed in the distance like a lighthouse in the dark. If I could hold out, I knew my prayers to get off the island would at last be answered.

To my shock, in my junior year of high school, when the time did come to start my research about where to apply, I discovered that it wasn’t as easy as all that. Just because you have excelled doesn’t mean all doors will fly open and you can walk on in. The costs had become staggering, for one thing. Even public and state schools were costly. Another thing was that we were still living with the fallout from the economic crash of 2008–2009, made worse by a housing crisis in Birmingham.

Then my mother lost her job. Until my midteens, I had been the only child in our household, and Momma had always managed to hustle up enough work to support the two of us. When I was fifteen, my mother and a new man in her life had two babies in fast succession, and the new family dynamic brought about drastic changes for me. Being a big brother of two very young siblings gave me an added sense of responsibility. I’d always been independent, and now, the tougher things got, the more ready I was to get off the island.

There were stretches when we were basically homeless. To ease the load on my mother, I went to stay with my grandfather, who lived closer to my school. He was wonderful and supportive—except for when the subject of college came up. He couldn’t relate, and so he couldn’t understand why I had begun to worry that there would be no resources at all for me to attend college out of state. Around that point, it began to register with me why people don’t follow any path at all—not the one that is unmarked, and not the one that’s more delineated. Some people make do with where they are and just stay in one place.

Remember, you never have to apologize to family and friends who may resent your ambition or your dissatisfaction with how things are. You have to tune that static out. Don’t listen to comments that make you feel bad because you’re being all uppity for wanting to attain more education and create better opportunities for yourself. Even the people who love you the most may feel threatened. Though it’s common in many families and communities, the resentment still hurts. On the flip side, I’ve heard from peers about being pushed too hard. Some were made to feel that if they didn’t get accepted into the most exclusive Ivy League school, or recruited by the football team at the biggest D-1 university, or get perfect grades or test scores, they were some kind of a lost cause. Whether pushed too hard or not pushed enough, neither attitude is helpful.

What I learned eventually is that when you understand the application process—which I’ll address further on—you will absolutely get into the right school for you. I promise. As for the lack of support at home you may experience, all I can say is that you will find your cheering squad if you are willing to look for real supporters.

The good news for me was that there was a great deal of encouragement at Ramsay High School, a highly ranked public magnet school that rewarded academic ambition and civic involvement. As a freshman at Ramsay, I attended an awards ceremony for graduating seniors and, for the first time, heard about the existence of outside scholarships—financial awards that are not instit...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Your Call to Action
• Chapter 2: When Life Tells You No, Tell Yourself Yes
• Chapter 3: Hustle and the Art of Being Resourceful
• Chapter 4: How Grit Makes Batman Fly
• Chapter 5: There Are No Wrong Turns When You Go Where There Is No Path
• Chapter 6: The Product Is Still King
• Chapter 7: The Legend of the Big Break
• Chapter 8: The New Networking Paradigm
• Chapter 9: Changing the Game
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher