Tade Oyerinde is aiming to disrupt the higher educational system and Shaquille O’Neal is helping the founder do just that.
Oyerinde founded Campus, an online community college platform to help grant students from all walks of life to access complete obtain an associate degree in business via live, face-to-face classes led by professors who also teach at top-ranked universities including Princeton, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, and Howard.
The startup has already secured funding from OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Discord founder Jason Citron, and Bloomberg Ventures. O’Neal came on board this year after learning about the startup’s mission via a Forbes article and deciding he wanted to support its mission in a substantive way.
“I’m very big on the education,” O’Neal shared with Oyerinde during a sit down interview for his video podcast Campus Culture. “So, when I got your paperwork on my desk and it taling about helping kids get their associate’s degree, it’s definitely the right thing to do. Because when I talk about partnerships and investments, I try to do things that’s going to help people.”
He adds: “I wish I could take all the credit, but I have a lot of friends in the business, and a friend of mine knew about your story and thought that we would work well together,” referring to a feature on the venture via Forbes.
O’Neal went on to share why the funding move meant more than just receiving a return on his investment. It was a way to lean into the legacy he wants to builds for himself.
“When you talk about partnerships and investment, a lot of people ask how much are you going to make? I’ve never been that guy. This is going to help people. It’s going to change people’s lives. It’s something that could be talked about 30, 40, 50 {years from now}. It’s going to be talked about forever. I would like to be part of that story because remember, I like to be the first. So it’s an athletic, a little bit of an arrogance thing. Shaq was the first. So he did this, he did that. So then when I saw you, I don’t like to use the affirmative action thing, but then when I saw you as a brother, I was like, I’m in. I’m in all the time. I was very impressed that something so elaborate was done by a young brother.”
That chance meeting was a game change changer for Oyerinde.
“When we met and he shared his life story with me, it was almost immediately obvious that his values aligned with our mission of maximizing access to world-class education,” Oyerinde shared via a statement on Campus’s site. “We also had a lot of fun, and we both got excited about the chance to bring him onto the investor team. As a partner, Shaq brings his enormous influence and his belief that education has the power to help people build the lives that they want.”