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“With Mighty Networks, this is my community. I own it.”
James Oliver Jr.
Founder and CEO
Kabila’s James Oliver Jr. knows how rough the road to starting a business from scratch can be. He drove it first-hand in more ways than one. Right after the three-time founder launched his first business, his twins were born three months premature and weighed just two pounds each. James had been commuting two hours each way to a startup generator in Wisconsin, thousands of miles from his family and friends.
“Driving back and forth, waking up in the middle of the night every night at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, crying, not sleeping, in and out of the NICU,” he remembers. “It was really hard. So that was my introduction to being an entrepreneur.”
Using community as a bridge
Initially, James started a community platform and podcast advocating for parents who were entrepreneurs, but eventually, he saw a need to advocate for another group he knew well: startup founders from disadvantaged communities. As a Black CEO who grew up in an underserved neighborhood of Brooklyn, James wanted to share his hard-earned connections and resources with other business creators tackling similar obstacles he faced in his journey.
“We lean into what I call overlooked founders,” he says. “There's so many different ways to think about that. If you don't live in Silicon Valley or New York, a lot of investors are not necessarily checking for you. Or people who didn't go to Harvard or Stanford. They don't have the networks.”
Kabila started as an app that matched co-founders — like Bumble for entrepreneurs. But instead of picking people based on photos, the app removed elements of implicit bias so members would find each other based on “the things that matter like value, vision, and mission alignment.” Now it’s grown into both a venture fund and a community that James hosts on Mighty Networks.
“The transition is, ‘How can we help you go from the dream of being a startup founder to actually becoming a successful one?’ Because it's hard, man,” James says. “They didn't grow up in these places and spaces. They don't know how to move in these circles. So we help them with that as well.”
More value in membership
James designed a $25 monthly membership that offers weekly check-ins, live events, and workshops alongside a community of people with deep empathy and understanding of each other’s experiences. For James, giving his 500 members a safe space to share their stories instead of a social media account has been a major reason to keep investing his energy in growing Kabila on Mighty Networks.
“Facebook is just too toxic and not aligned with my goals and my purpose in life,” James says. “I don't have to pay Mighty Networks $5 to boost a post. When I post in my community everybody sees it.”
With a place for entrepreneurs to connect across all kinds of barriers, the people magic has been transformative. One of Kabila’s members who had bootstrapped her life savings into her business received $15,000 worth of legal services for free from another member.
James wants to bring in more people this year so he can increase those special interactions so he recently started using the Mighty Networks Ambassador Program feature to reward referrals. Although starting a business can be complicated, his pitch for anyone curious about Kabila isn’t: “If you got a chip on your shoulder, you feel like you got something to prove, and you're resilient AF, join us,” he says.
