Will Freeman, 27

Entrepreneurship is simply a way of life for Will Freeman. It’s what he grew up with. It’s all he’s ever known.

And, now, as founder of Freeman Ventures, and as a lecturer and writer, it’s what he helps others do.

Photo by Mark Wemple

“I’m always of the mindset of wanting to do my own thing and of the perspective of having an idea and running with it,” he says.

Freeman Ventures is consultancy that, in its simplest terms, helps technology startups lay out a game plan for growth and establish best practices.

The idea for it came from his work with LinkedIn and Oracle and his previous business, which provided analytics consulting services for global nonprofits. Freeman says in that earlier work he found that most businesses faced similar problems. While the size and scale may be different because of resources, most of the issues weren’t.

Before he started the firm, he had already been doing some work advising smaller technology startups through guest lectures and mentorship programs. But he saw an opportunity and wanted to “find that convergence between strategy type consulting work that I was already doing for large companies and… to transfer a lot of that knowledge and a lot of the learnings from there to help those early stage technology startups really grow and scale.”

Freeman grew up in a family of entrepreneurs in North Carolina. The legacy started with his grandfather, who began a residential and commercial construction company and then his father, who later started a government contracting firm.

His father’s company, which was sold in 2014, was named Training & Development Associates. Freeman says he got an MBA-level education while going to work there with his dad, starting before he was a teenager. 

Without realizing it, he learned the intricacies of starting and running a business, watching in real time as his father ran the company and simply being able to ask questions.

“Looking back, you obviously cherish even more and recognize what he was doing,” Freeman says. “But at the time, absorbing all this information kind of paid off and ingrained a good mindset of being curious.”

And the entrepreneurial family affair wasn’t just made up of his father and grandfather.

Freeman’s mother, Kaly Freeman, started and ran businesses as well. He says her “entrepreneurial mindset stems from her eagerness to take on new adventures and bring others along for the journey.”

The biggest lesson Freeman learned from Kaly, his mentor, is to “go out of your way to create and cherish experiences with close ones.”