Throughout her career, Elizabeth Gore, 47, has had a passion for entrepreneurs. “I really had a fever, which I still do, about small business,” she says.
Gore grew up in Texas and got her bachelor’s in animal sciences at Texas A&M University, initially thinking she would work on her family’s cattle farm. A college internship for a senator on Capitol Hill convinced her to pivot, and she ultimately worked at the United Nations Foundation for nine years helping building initiatives like Girl Up. It was there that she “got really obsessed with how critical small business owners are to the world,” she says, working with them in various capacities.
In 2017, after leaving the UN Foundation and working with entrepreneurs at Dell as their entrepreneur in residence, she co-founded a company herself: Hello Alice, a tech platform which helps entrepreneurs gain “access to capital like grants, loans, credit,” she says, as well as offering business planning tools and mentorship.
To date, Hello Alice has helped 1.5 million small business owners and contributed $52 million in grants, says Gore. Here’s how she built her career.
Realizing ‘how critical small business owners are in our country’
At the UN Foundation, Gore started seeing the power of assisting small business owners through small loans.
“I was looking at the developing world, and particularly women,” she says. The theory was, “if they were able to make their own income, they could pay for family health care and their kids could go to school.”
As an entrepreneur in residence at Dell, she helped new companies through the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network, which ensured “that our female customers had the technology they needed to scale,” she says.
That experience taught her “how critical small business owners are in our country,” she says. “They are the largest job producers” in the U.S. But it also taught her about some of the challenges they face.
“I was shocked at how hard it was [to start your own business] in the U.S.,” she says, adding that that was particularly true “for women, people of color, our veterans,” who might not have the same types of resources other communities do to get started. In 2024, female-founded companies got just 2% of VC capital, according to Pitchbook.
Entrepreneurs were ‘this big opportunity’
Gore started running into her future Hello Alice co-founder, Carolyn Rodz, at various events and conferences. Rodz, who’d come from a financial and entrepreneurship background herself, was also passionate about serving small businesses.
Rodz saw the challenges the community faced “as less of a problem and more as this big opportunity,” says Gore. Around 2014, while attending a conference, the two started mapping out their new tech platform, which could address some of the challenges small businesses in America face. They ultimately launched Hello Alice in 2017 as a business that could “fuel and fund itself,” says Gore.
The company has since raised $28 million in multiple rounds of funding, says Gore. Their biggest profit area is a business health score tool they license to banks, fintech companies and others, says Gore, which they launched in April 2023.
To use the platform, entrepreneurs sign up for free and receive a tailored dashboard with grant listings, educational content and networking opportunities. Hello Alice also sends email alerts about new grants, funding programs and relevant resources based on the user’s business profile.
Down the line, Hello Alice hopes to adopt AI to help run their platform by analyzing business data in real time, providing personalized recommendations and anticipating challenges through predictive analytics.
Beyond giving entrepreneurs tools to grow, Hello Alice “advocates on behalf of our small business owners” to ensure policymakers create legislation that supports them, she says. “We are really passionate about showing that they are literally the beating heart of this country.”
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