Rise Up, Get Started competition set to award $1,500 grants; showcase paths from prison to founder

We took someone’s car at gunpoint,” recalled Marcus Bullock.

“It was about a week after my 15th birthday. I was 15 years old and I trembled at the thought of not a judge but to be honest, because I had to stand in front of a phone and call my mother and feel her ‘Marcus has been arrested,’” Bullock, the formerly incarcerated founder and CEO of Flikshop, told a crowd gathered for a 2017 TEDTalk in Washington, D.C.

From a jail cell to a corner office, Bullock is set to again present his story during Determination, Incorporated’s inaugural Rise Up, Get Started entrepreneurship competition Thursday at Plexpod Westport Commons.

A path to entrepreneurship and exposure to stories like Bullock’s which also saw the entrepreneur found a construction business before graduating the TechStars accelerator program and launching Flikshop in 2011 could help them better navigate their new normal, he added.

Bullock is expected to share stories from the founding of Flikshop, an app which allows incarcerated people to receive personalized postcards from their families, in addition to highlights from a follow-on project: The Flikshop School of business a project that teaches coding and software development in prisons, he explained.

Read more via StartLand News https://bit.ly/3di0bnh