The WILD Accelerator, with Natalia Bishop
Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Natalia Bishop is originally from Colombia and has spent the last 25 years or so in Louisville, Kentucky, where she runs Story, the largest co-working space in the state, and the Wild Accelerator, its nonprofit arm for founders from historically marginalized backgrounds and the “flyover states.” Mash talked with her about how Wild went from a duct-taped, grant-funded cohort to Wild Academy, a $29-a-month product with an AI coach named Willa. They also covered how she landed partners like JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft, and why she thinks a whole city could get startup curriculum for free.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
“Build the bridge as I go”
I mainly do this podcast for the startups in my accelerators and incubators, and for my students at the university. Looking at what you’re doing, you serve the same audience. Tell me about you and your company.
I’m originally from Colombia, and I’ve been in Louisville, Kentucky — out of all places in the world — for the last 25 years or so. I sort of stumbled into entrepreneurship, as a lot of people do. I swore I wasn’t going to do that, and then did. I found my way from a very creative entrepreneurship background into startups, and into VC and all those other pieces.
Not being on the coast, but here in the Midwest-Southeast, I found that I was oftentimes the first, the only, the different — woman, immigrant, person with an accent, whatever it was at the time. I’ve always had this pull to build the bridge as I go. So it became a calling to create spaces, in person or virtually, where people who want to birth their ideas and bring something to the community or to the world could have that chance to do it together.
My for-profit company is called Story, and it’s a co-working space — about 22,000 square feet here in Louisville, with some plans for expansion. The thing that connected us is the Wild Accelerator, which is a nonprofit arm of our company. For the last six years we’ve been serving founders from historically marginalized backgrounds, and from geographies that often get overlooked — what we call the flyover states. The idea is to offer not just education and resources, but cash and connections and mentorship — everything it takes to build a company, and not doing it alone.
The way I see it, there are two types of accelerators. Equity accelerators say, “I’ll give you $200,000 for 5% of your company and connect you with everybody I know.” Then there are what I’d call experiential-learning accelerators, with a curriculum that helps early founders get their feet on the ground. Which is yours — or is there another kind I’m not thinking about?
Like I said, we’re building as we go. Wild Accelerator actually started as a female-only accelerator, and I wasn’t even part of the founding team. A different team came in with the idea, and we met through Story because they needed somewhere to host it. Because it’s a nonprofit, instead of taking equity it was, “Let’s find you some funding that is nonrestricted,” and we became a pass-through. Founders were getting $25K, $50K put straight into their companies as grants, through sponsorships from PNC Bank and larger banks, plus some curriculum and some in-kind support.
We call the iterations seasons, and that was the first season of Wild. Then it became, “Let’s figure out some curriculum,” because it was held with duct tape and whatever you could do at the time — this is 2018 or so. I got involved at the end of season two. They were struggling with getting funding together, and they said, “We need some help and some support.” So we ended up buying the assets for the brand and revamping what it would look like. That was 2020, the virtual land of everything.
Season three was very much about what was going on at the time, political-climate-wise. If you’re familiar with Louisville, Breonna Taylor was shot here in 2020. We felt really compelled to do something for the Black women and the Latinx women in our community, so we deemed it our Black and Latinx female-identifying season. We picked six women with startups we thought could scale and did the same thing: found funding through the state, became a pass-through, took no equity, and used grants to create the programming and the connections.
It became a holistic approach. They were going through therapy and leadership coaching at the same time as they were getting connections on demo day. Some of them needed child care — that was a barrier to building these companies. We called it an accelerator, but in reality it was a pre-accelerator, because we found they were undereducated and under-resourced at the time. So we had to pivot and track back a little. We did that with the support of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation.
Some of those women got into the Google accelerator. Some were in our larger-scale local Vogt Awards, and some took part in an Awesome Inc. challenge. All in all they raised about $580,000 from the accelerator, which is great for a first iteration.
“Pivot, kill it or put some fuel on it”
But we realized the founders applying were still stuck in a very small-business mindset, or had a concept that could scale but didn’t quite understand how to do it. We didn’t want to spend that energy here when we knew we could scale this piece and make the funnel larger. We recognized there’s a phase one that needs to happen before the phase two we were doing, and phase one became Wild Academy.
We launched it in partnership with the Louisville Urban League, a local organization; Simmons College, our only HBCU here; and a local incubator. Those organizations already had entrepreneurs in community, so we didn’t have to go and gain their trust. We actually paid those organizations — “Pilot this with us” — got larger grants from larger organizations, and helped founders go through a six-week curriculum. About 78 founders went through it, and we also had University of Memphis in that cohort. It was virtual, six weeks, with people coming together once a week, in late 2024 and early 2025.
Then we went back to the data. We wanted to get to three outcomes: pivot, kill it or put some fuel on it. Something like 75 to 78% of the people who went through said, “I really want to do this. I’m going to pivot and put some gas on the pedal.” Only a handful wanted to kill it — and that’s also great. It’s okay to kill it. Some of them were like, “This idea is not it. Let’s find something else.”
Our curriculum is also very culturally relevant, so it’s filling in gaps. But going back to the customer and taking our own medicine, we realized a lot of people have three or four jobs, or are taking care of family members, and this format wasn’t fitting them. They wanted to complete the modules, but they couldn’t meet at the same time. And some had been in business for a while and didn’t need the first two or three modules; they wanted to jump right in. There was that tension and that friction. A lot of it could be solved with technology, so why don’t we create a product around it? We worked on that in 2025 and created Wild Academy as it is right now.
“Texts at 11 o’clock at night”
One of the more rewarding but also more difficult pieces to scale, as a mentor helping other founders, is time. You can’t sit with every single person who has an idea. At some point you find yourself giving the same advice over and over and over, or saying, “Go look at this Harvard article.” If you’re like me at all, I already have Google Docs of “this is where I need you to go and figure this out.”
So we decided to see how we could use AI to leverage that knowledge base — what we’ve been doing for many years — and create a 24/7, always-available, very specialized coach. An EIR, for lack of a better word. I’m getting texts at 11 o’clock at night from founders saying, “I don’t know what to do.” So we created the Willa app as a component of the Academy. It’s an AI coach that co-pilots with you, as opposed to just giving you the answers. It digs in and helps you in a very specialized way, as opposed to a generalized ChatGPT search.
We also created a path generator in the software. If you’re like, “I don’t want to watch six weeks’ worth of curriculum and do the workbooks — I’m just here for help with my pitch deck,” you can go in and say, “I have an investor meetup. Tell me how to do this.” It’ll say, “Watch these three videos, fill out this worksheet, and you should have everything you need.” So you can choose your own adventure, if that’s the way you learn. And if you need more handholding, to go through the journey with the support of someone, you have Willa and you have the path creator.
So now Wild Academy is a phase-one educational resource. You don’t actually have to do it to come into the seasons of the accelerator. Season five will be launching in spring of 2027, and hopefully in the future we’ll have a fund.
Every accelerator runs into what you just described, and they almost have to reinvent the wheel every time. How do I get founders non-dilutive funding? How do we match them with mentors? How do we deal with the time? You solved those along the way. But some of it is incredibly hard. How did you get JPMorgan Chase? Do you have a team? And how did you fund all that for yourself?
“A network of humans”
It’s all part of an ecosystem. Story, our for-profit, is co-working, so there are several revenue streams — memberships, dedicated spaces, bookings. That’s our main bread and butter, and there’s a programming bucket as well. We’ve been in the community going on 10 years this year, so we have established relationships with our corporate partners. We’re kind of the entrepreneurial hub of our city — the largest co-working space in all of Kentucky.
When people talk about network, that’s where it comes in. I built a network of humans who understood that I could execute in a very different way than most other people could, and that I was always also showing up for others while I was doing it. So there was social proof that I could do the thing. I’d also had a software company prior to this, or alongside it, so I’d gone through the pain points of growing another company and going through accelerators. I had that point of view, and my community behind me saying, “You can do this. I’m going to open this door and make this introduction for you.” That was a leg up in a lot of ways.
“It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive to make a ton of money doing this and scale it and make it sustainable, but also do what’s good.”
— Natalia Bishop · Inspiring Founders Podcast, Ep. 08
Our team is super small. Wild as a nonprofit doesn’t actually have any headcount. We have three people on our board, and it’s all volunteer. No one gets paid. We’re literally here for the founders. On the Story side, our team is small and mighty: an operations team that makes sure everything is ready — the coffee is made, the Wi-Fi is good — one person who does our programming, and me. We outsource things like bookkeeping.
I don’t know if you get into revenue on the podcast, but we do about $1.3 million a year right now. That will probably scale over the next few years as we think about creating additional spaces. So as CEO, I had the ability to say, “What are the relationships that are going to matter? How are we going to get this funding?” and make that my priority during those years. We’ve had the sheer fortune of making relationships with Microsoft, who gave us an early sponsorship, and JPMorgan Chase, who came in with a really nice-size sponsorship for both of these programs.
If you’re a for-profit founder, the nonprofit model — it’s like having to put your hand out. We wanted to make something sustainable. Grant writing is super time-consuming and very difficult, and competitive, especially in cities like Louisville, where we have more nonprofits per capita than anywhere else in the nation.
And they’re all asking the same people for money in a tiny little community. That’s got to be really hard.
What I found surprising was that our community — and I don’t know if this is unique to Louisville; I’ve never lived anywhere else as an adult — was here for the connections, but when it came to actually writing checks, we had better luck going to national and regional partners than to our own community. Once I was able to make those relationships and truly show our execution — this is what we do and how we do it — it became a sales pipeline, just like anything else.
Part of the reason we wanted to build Wild Academy as a standalone product was sustainability. If it’s producing money, it’s evergreen. It’s self-producing, and you don’t have to worry about going to these larger organizations all the time.
So is Wild Academy part of the nonprofit, or does it come out of Story?
Because Wild doesn’t have any headcount or staff, it can’t run it. So we run it through Story, with basically a royalty agreement where the majority goes to the nonprofit, and we’re just making sure we’re covering those expenses. The idea is to create a solution so all these programs can run and we don’t have to go through writing grants every single time.
“Let’s go everywhere”
It sounds like Wild Academy could have a national go-to-market. You’re not restricted to place or time anymore. Tell me about your vision, and how it benefits people beyond your own Wild seasons.
I had an epiphany in 2023. The embassy of the Dominican Republic asked Wild to come do a three-day conference there, to meet with founders in the ecosystem and share how we’re doing things. While I was there with some of the other board members, one of the realizations was that people in these emerging markets are going through really similar things to what we go through, not being on the coast. These are repeatable problems happening everywhere. I think it’s a global issue for emerging markets. And it’s not just emerging markets, but emerging entrepreneurs who aren’t necessarily fitting the mold, or may not come from certain backgrounds.
So the thought was: we’ve been thinking about our little piece of the land. How do we blow the walls off this thing and let it go everywhere? We can do that through software. I had the software company before. I’ve built product, I know how to scale things. So let’s give it a go.
In the process, you’re debunking a myth. One of the things you hear from funders sometimes is, “There’s just not enough pipeline of great ideas coming from entrepreneurs of color. We wish we had more, but we just don’t have the right ideas.” How do we debunk that? By making access to these resources such that every middle schooler in America, every founder anywhere in the world, could come here and do this. Let’s go everywhere. Let’s go global. We’re still in that early beta — we just soft-launched it — so we’re doing all the fun stuff you do with product: what’s working, what’s the customer feedback, and continuing to build features until we’re ready to really go all the way.
What does “all the way” look like to you?
We always think, let’s go where the water is warm. There are already many individuals and organizations doing a ton of this work. You have entrepreneur service organizations that are locally funded. You have universities. You have professors like you saying, “I’m doing this on the side.” You have founders who’ve exited saying, “I’ll build this because I want to.” What those folks don’t necessarily have is the time to stay with everybody, or to give the same curriculum over and over. So we want to connect with those funnels, the way we did with University of Memphis and the Urban League, and say, “Here’s this thing. You can use the built-in curriculum, you can add your own, or you can white-label it as your own brand.”
If you’re asking me for a magic-wand moment: I love this city so much. What if every person who lives in the zip code just gets to come in and do this for free? No barrier. If you live in Louisville, Kentucky, this curriculum is yours for free — Wild Academy access, funded by the city, the chamber of commerce, whoever. Can we get more cities to adopt a model where entrepreneurship is part of our DNA? If you want to start a business, you don’t have to go to an agency or register for anything. You click once with your Google account and boom, you have everything you need at your fingertips.
“Pay what you can”
You’re mission-driven, but you’re also building a company and looking at scale. Having run incubators and accelerators at universities, in cities and with private groups, I know it always comes down to funding. So what do you say to a small, tertiary market that wants to open its entrepreneurial ecosystem to everybody — not just the wealthy or privileged — but the city says it’s over budget, the chamber says it doesn’t have enough members, and the SBDC says it can’t give money, only advisors?
A few things. Part of what we bring is that we know how to partner with the larger corporates that do want to be in their communities and do something with them. JPMorgan Chase is our largest funder, and one of the conversations we’ve been having is: now that we have this product, how do we go to Columbus, Ohio, and fund a million scholarships? The product is $29 a month for however long the entrepreneur is on there, so you can impact a huge number of humans for not a lot of money.
And even if it isn’t funded by entrepreneur service organizations, universities, a corporate or the city, an individual can jump in on our freemium model. It’s literally free. You can make your account right now, not pay a penny, and get what you need. You pay for a certificate, or for add-ons like the physical workbooks or merch, and that keeps it going. We price it in a way that’s sensible, so it’s super accessible.
Something we haven’t introduced yet, but we’re working on, is a pay-what-you-can model, because there are going to be people who benefit greatly from this who can pay a lot more than others, and some who will never be able to pay. All of those pieces are in place so that it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive to make a ton of money doing this and scale it and make it sustainable, but also do what’s good.
More conversations with founders on the Inspiring Founders Podcast.