Pinckney recalled his own journey to being a first-year student. As a teenager with entrepreneurial dreams, he sought out a school that would set him up for long-term success in the professional world. He found USC and Marshall.
“When I toured USC, I immediately fell in love. Just the people, the campus, the culture, people skating around,” Pinckney recalled. “Getting to go to a great business school with great weather just seemed like a no brainer.”
Through USC coursework, Pinckney quickly discovered real-life business applications, as well as his eventual co-founder. He formed the idea for his first startup, Discz, in an iOS App Development class, later pitching it to fellow Marshall alumnus and his eventual co-founder Michelle Yin ’18. Discz, often described as “TikTok for music,” plays 15 second snippets of songs and utilizes AI to provide recommendations based on users’ preferences.
Pinckney says he comes up with his ventures by identifying a solution for a common problem. In the case of Novo North, a goal achievement program tailored to young men, Pinckney noticed the growing rate of male loneliness. He hopes Novo North provides young men like him direction in life and encourages them to spend their time with intentionality and discipline.
“Real successful people got there by doing little productive things, investments in themselves, taking actions towards their goals, and that compounded over time,” Pinckney said. “A lot of young men, unfortunately, just don’t have that guidance or those people that they can look up to or confide in. Novo North is my attempt to try to support that crisis I see.”
Similarly, Pinckney and Yin are developing Housewarming, a social network that aims to bring people together through AI, rather than isolating users through attention-seeking algorithms. According to Pinckney, the program’s artificial intelligence employs knowledge about users’ daily needs to catalyze positive social interactions.
“You can think of when you’re sick, [the AI] nudging your friends to send you something that made you smile last week,” Pinckney explained. “You can think of it settling debates or hyping you up or giving you ‘should I send this text?’ therapy. It has that understanding of who you are and who your friends are, but it’s not meant to pull you away. It’s meant to essentially promote those social interactions with you and your friends.”
Pinckney is attempting to make the most of a shifting technological landscape, but he believes current Marshall students have the best chance to shape the future.
“This is the golden age for Marshall grads,” Pinckney said. “Marshall grads and Marshall students right now have an opportunity. They can have the skills to think about the business case, think about the problems, and have the agency and the intellectual curiosity to ask the right questions and develop essentially anything they want … Those tools are just a few questions away with AI right now.”
The founder walks the walk, hiring more grads from USC than any other school. He explains that it’s more than about supporting USC; hiring Trojans is just good business.
“USC students in general seem to be very attuned to taste, to culture, to multidisciplinary elements that are just as important to making a business work, especially a business that touches real people,” Pinckney said. “Our hit rate with USC students for who’s successful in our companies is just so much higher than any other school.”
