Preston James and the room with a hundred mentors

Preston L. James II went to an Austin pitch competition as a mentor and did a little counting. A hundred mentors. One Black man: him. He knew enough talented Black people to find that arithmetic suspicious. “Why am I the only one here?” he remembered asking himself. The question stayed with him. A room full of people helping businesses get started had somehow acquired a very narrow idea of who belonged inside it.

He had already spent years leading technology sales and consulting teams. He knew how introductions worked, how an experienced colleague could save someone months of mistakes, how much a business depended on the people willing to take its call. Around startups, he kept encountering the same absence. There were events, investors and ambitious ideas. The connections between them were distributed unevenly.

In 2016, he became a co-founder of DivInc, an Austin nonprofit helping women and entrepreneurs of color build technology businesses. The response was practical: business instruction, mentors, access to investors, and a community in which a founder could ask an elementary question without feeling like an intruder. Ten years later, he has handed over the CEO job. The original question has become an institution’s daily work.

“It was just time to put in the work.”

Preston L. James II

New York, Georgia, then a Texas adjustment

James grew up in the Bronx, attended Howard University in Washington, DC, and lived in Georgia before moving to Austin in 1997. Howard gave him an engineering education; technology sales and consulting became the work that carried him into corporate leadership. He and his wife, Kim, arrived in Texas as a young married couple. They would raise four children there. Austin offered room for their careers and family, although its social landscape took some getting used to.

His move brought him to Dell’s Executive Briefing Center. Over a roughly 20-year Dell career, he held leadership roles in enterprise technology, sales and consulting, eventually becoming managing director of its Global Center for Entrepreneurship. The work put him in contact with small businesses, universities, accelerators and investors. Corporate technology and young companies shared a meeting table. James had a seat at it.

At Dell, he led teams responsible for more than $250 million in revenue and oversaw a $100 million credit fund for small businesses. Those figures belong to the scale of his corporate responsibilities. They also help explain the experience he carried into his later work: he had seen resources mobilized in volume. Building a support system for a young company was a problem he could approach with an operator’s eye.

He took early retirement in 2014. The word “retirement” would soon be doing rather more work than the facts warranted. He became involved in mentoring, angel investing and entrepreneurship education, including a two-year entrepreneur-in-residence appointment at the University of Texas at Austin’s Herb Kelleher Center. He was moving through the places where businesses acquired their first outside believers.

Four visitors, and a useful phone book

One early assignment arrived soon after he left Dell. An entrepreneurship exchange connected to the State Department and the University of Michigan still wanted his involvement. James hosted four fellows in Austin for two weeks, calling people across the local startup community to make it happen. Without the corporation behind him, he had to assemble the connections himself. The exercise widened his own network while putting it to use for someone else.

That practical experience sits alongside a more systematic investigation. As a Capital Factory mentor, an investor involved with E3 Angel Network, and a university entrepreneur in residence, he saw founders in different settings. Some pitches arrived polished; others did not. He wanted to know what happened before the microphone was switched on. Conversations with founders and startup leaders brought him back to three kinds of access: education, people and money.

A polished pitch can conceal a long apprenticeship. Someone has explained the vocabulary, challenged the business model, made an introduction, or listened to a rehearsal. James’s diagnosis gave those advantages names. Human and social capital meant relationships with people who had already done the work. Financial capital meant the money to try. Education supplied the tools for deciding what to do with either. DivInc would put those resources closer together.

The first nine

DivInc’s inaugural pre-accelerator was scheduled to begin on September 19, 2016, at Galvanize Austin. Its first cohort had nine people: five women and four men. Eight came from ethnic groups underrepresented among technology founders. James founded the organization with Dan Austin, Dana Callender and Ashley Jennings. Their opening move was small enough to fit around a dinner table, which suited a program that included weekly dinners.

There were founder lunches, daily mentor office hours and sessions covering matters such as legal questions, branding and building a team. Participants came through referrals, with motivation, commitment and coachability among the selection criteria. The businesses needed a validated concept, preferably a minimum viable product. An idea had to have begun its journey into the world; the program would help its founder work out the next stretch.

The detail about meals matters. A founder can read a business book alone. Meeting someone who will discuss a failed launch over lunch offers something the book cannot supply. DivInc brought those encounters into a schedule. Its approach made the informal machinery of entrepreneurship more available to people outside the usual circles. In a business culture fond of celebrating individual brilliance, it gave the supporting cast some overdue attention.

A larger map of the same problem

James grew impatient with conversations that stopped at describing exclusion. His argument extended across the startup community: investors, advisers, leadership teams and talent networks all affected who got an opportunity. Training founders would help, but the people making decisions also had to widen their own circles. He wanted participation to change throughout the system.

In 2020, DivInc developed its Social Justice Innovation Accelerator, applying the organization’s startup methods to organizations tackling systemic inequities. The program invited both businesses and nonprofits. The underlying idea was that people working on difficult public problems could benefit from the same practical help offered to a young technology company: define the problem carefully, test an approach, and find the partners needed to put it to work.

Houston followed in 2021. In 2023, a partnership with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web supported a DWeb for Social Impact Accelerator. James’s concern was familiar: women and founders of color should have a chance to participate while a field was taking shape. Getting access early could mean helping decide what gets built, alongside learning how the technology works.

Across these changes, his ambition reached beyond running cohorts. Entrepreneurship could give people an ownership stake in the economy. A growing business could produce income, jobs and assets, with effects that lasted beyond its founder’s first pitch. That is why he connected startup support to the racial wealth gap. The question was becoming how to make opportunity repeatable, across cities and across generations.

The coach away from the pitch deck

There is a less corporate side to James: a sports enthusiast who enjoys music, food, travel and time with his family. In 2023, he also described having recently mentored youth football. His interest in coaching stretches back to high school. The setting changes; the habit of helping someone else improve appears to have followed him for a long time.

His colleagues’ descriptions add texture to that habit. Former teammate Sandie Coco credits him with supporting a different business approach when she brought him an idea. Longtime peer Gary Phillips describes a manager who sought feedback and listened to it. These are individual assessments, but they point to an everyday side of leadership that a job title misses: whether another person feels able to suggest a better way.

He has received public recognition, including Austin Business Journal Power Player selections in 2023 and 2024 and a President’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet a coach’s contribution is often harder to put on a plaque. It lives in another person’s confidence, a useful correction, or an introduction made at the right moment. Those quieter transactions are close to the work he chose after Dell.

Leaving the chair occupied

On March 4, 2026, James announced his move from CEO to Founder & Strategic Advisor. DivInc named Tauri Laws-Phillips CEO on March 18. The succession was deliberate. She brought experience supporting founders through organizations including Andreessen Horowitz’s Talent x Opportunity initiative and SKU. James had chosen someone to carry the work forward, and he would stay involved with its longer-term direction.

His March letter gave an account of the organization’s progress: more than 140 startup launches supported and over $28 million raised by founders in early-stage capital. He also acknowledged that more than half of those startups were still operating. That qualification belongs beside the totals. Starting companies is uncertain work, even when the introductions improve. The figures describe activity and survival; they cannot promise a particular founder’s outcome.

His advisory agenda now centers on how capital and ownership are structured, with an interest in working with family offices, foundations and other long-term partners. The vocabulary has grown more institutional since those early founder dinners. The concern is recognizably the same: how people acquire a durable stake in what they help create. Access gets someone into the conversation. Ownership determines what they can carry home.

In July 2026, he appeared alongside Laws-Phillips at DivInc’s Innovation & Influence Accelerator Demo Day. A founder and his successor, at an event built around other founders: the arrangement makes a fitting picture of the handoff. Years earlier, he had counted a hundred mentors and found himself alone. He has spent much of the time since helping other people find their places. Now he has made room for the next leader, too.