John Guydon
John Guydon was born in Compton in 1983. Determined to have a better life, John’s parents moved his family to Orange County. When John was 7 years-old, he came to the conclusion that Santa Claus was either racist or didn’t exist. This led him down a 3-decade long journey to learn more about the connection between race and money, which ultimately ended up fueling his lifelong passion for the connection between mindset and performance.
At age 10, John developed his own strategy to overcome a severe stutter. He started a business selling candy in the 7th grade to pay for lunch and football cleats, eventually going on to play Division I football at The University of Colorado and earning a Broadcast Production degree from the school of journalism.
In 2005, tired of the constraints of the traditional corporate world, he left to start his own business. He created a commercial text message platform called Duffled that allows businesses and organizations to text customers using a commercial short code. It’s known as the most powerful SMS marketing software on the planet.
In 2012, he sold the company which still runs today, and set his sights on a new problem to solve. After the 2012 kidnapping and murder of a young girl just blocks from her home, John discovered that the Amber Alert system is over a decade old and takes hours to be deployed. He decided to create something better and launched The Lassy Project, software that gave parents and guardians the ability to notify an entire local community about a missing child in seconds, not hours. This gained national notoriety when a special needs boy went missing in Colorado and was found in just 17 minutes using this technology.
During his time with The Lassy Project, he became the first all-black founding team to be accepted into the single largest technology accelerator program in the world: Techstars. His involvement with Techstars launched John into the big leagues, leading to an exclusive invite to spend a week on Necker Island with Richard Branson and top entrepreneurs from around the world.
In 2014, John founded Startups Illustrated, which helps companies raise rounds of funding and gain acceptance into top-tier accelerators. It focuses specifically on empowering underserved communities, encouraging participation and success in the innovation economy by partnering with local students, economic development organizations, corporations, and accelerators to deliver entrepreneurship training programs and boot camps. Through his experience coaching nearly 200 entrepreneurs from all around the world; John discovered that many of the things holding people back (not just entrepreneurs) are 100% within their control. Family, finances, tragedy, even racism, don’t stand a chance against your mindset.