Heli Rodriguez Prilliman, candidate for the United States Senate, visited Comanche County last week, to talk about how she plans to serve Texans if elected in 2024.
For 10 years, Prilliman was a tech start-up entrepreneur. Among other projects, she worked on customer loyalty technology for small restaurants. She participated from the beginning in taking the program from an idea, to building a team, to earning capital investment, to launching and supporting the product. Prilliman and her business team’s hard work paid off, because the company was recently acquired, and is now known as Fivestars by SumUp, Inc.
Prilliman said that taking the business from 10 people to 500 employees, who served clients around the country, was a great experience. She continued, “The highs were wonderful and the lows were terrible.” She told the audience about accelerator companies and encouraged entrepreneurs to “Go pitch your idea to them!” Accelerator companies are not well known in to the general public, Prilliman added, but successful ventures like Reddit, Airbnb, and Instacart started by pitching their ideas to an accelerator company.
In her tech start-up journey, Prilliman noticed that capital investment was skewed toward people who already had a lot of resources. She predicted that if she and her friends could take a business idea from start-up to success, other regular people could do the same. Economic prosperity is part of Prilliman’s platform, and that includes finding ways to make capital available for Texas entrepreneurs.
Prilliman was inspired to help others by her grandmother, Pauline Gasca Valenciano. Valenciano advocated for workers’ and women’s rights, and worked to get out the vote. Prilliman said she wants to expand access to the ballot in Texas, and to “Get the money out of politics!”