May 01 2023 23 mins
In this episode, Toussaint chats with Uplifter Marlon Evans. Marlon is the CEO of Nex Cubed and President and Founder of the HBCU Founders Accelerator, a nonprofit organization that partners with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), to engage rising students and alumni across all HBCUs interested in developing solutions that close the wealth gap ranging from increasing access to healthcare, education, and financial services.
HBCU Founders Accelerator Website
Marlon Evans Bio: Marlon's professional career spans higher education, foundations, Fortune 500s, and startups. The driving force behind all of his career choices has been a desire to create positive social impact. In 2018, Marlon was named CEO of Nex Cubed, an investor that creates and accelerates frontier tech companies with an emphasis on digital health and fintech. To date, the Nex Cubed portfolio consists of 80+ startups with an aggregate value of $500M and over 60% of the startups are led by female and minority founders. In an effort to increase Nex Cubed’s impact, Marlon led the launch of the HBCU Founders Initiative, a 501c3 organization designed to inspire entrepreneurship at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In partnership with corporations such as AT&T, Franklin Templeton, Verizon, Mastercard and Morgan Stanley, over 500 students and alums from 60+ HBCUs have participated in its acceleration programs. Finding that many of the teams with venture backable ideas lacked access to pre-seed and seed funding to help grow their business, Nex Cubed recently launched the HBCU Founders Fund, a 40M accelerator and fund investing in the most promising startups where at least one of the founders is a HBCU student or alum. Prior to joining Nex Cubed, Marlon served as CEO of GSVlabs (renamed One Valley), a global innovation platform that accelerated startups and connected corporations to exponential technologies, business models and ideas. His career includes experience as a Director of Corporate Affairs at HP, where he led HP Company Foundation programs, including Matter to a Million, a company-wide employee engagement program in partnership with Kiva. He received his BA in Political Science and a MA in Sociology from Stanford University, where he competed on the football and track & field teams. Marlon lives in Redwood City, CA with his wife Dena Evans. They have two daughters, Adrienne and Elise.