Matthew Mills
Matthew Mills is a multifaceted entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author who is dedicated to making a positive impact through his philanthropic organization in underserved communities, TecFarms Philanthropies. This organization utilizes innovative, data-driven artificial intelligence to drive its mission, which is focused on core areas such as the GreenEnergy Initiative, aimed at providing healthy foods to Black and Brown communities and addressing systemic health issues resulting from underinvestment.
As a foster child, Matthew Mills was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and later moved to Bedford Stuyvesant when he was ten years old, where he personally witnessed the lack of access to healthy foods in his community and the profound impact it had on the health of his neighbours. While living in Bedford Stuyvesant as a teenager, Matthew became an entrepreneur by finding ways to make extra money shelving snow, washing cars and cleaning up backyards. Rather than pursue an art career, Matthew went the opposite direction and went to William E. Grady High School to begin his electrical engineering journey.
After completing his electrical engineering degree at Pratt Institute, Matthew Mills remained deeply concerned with the issues facing Black communities. As an entrepreneur, he founded and sold various startups, but it was not until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, disproportionately affecting Black and Brown communities due to existing health disparities, that he began to explore new ways to address the problem. Mr. Mills decided to start growing vegetables in his backyard to donate to people in the community. Though his initial efforts were unsuccessful, he was determined to learn from his mistakes and improve until he was able to successfully grow crops that could help address food insecurity in Black and Brown communities.
Mrs. Mills, along with Jim Del Rossi, is the co-author of "Agile Funding," a book that emphasizes the importance of business budgeting in iteration and transparency. The book provides an overview of the process and defines Agile Funding roles, events, artifacts, and rules. The core concept of Agile Funding is to fund teams and/or ideas rather than projects, enabling businesses to significantly increase deliverables through a rapid, mitigate risks, maximizing value, in a controllable incremental approach.
