Harold Hughes

Why organisations work with Harold Hughes

• He has built a venture-backed company on blockchain infrastructure, raised more than four million dollars, and survived past the cohort year that kills most peers. The lessons are operating lessons, not theory.
• His Catalyst Labs curriculum has been adopted by Benedict College, the University of Texas, and Furman University, which means his programme has been pressure-tested by institutions that do not run on hype.
• He has a published book, A Kids Book About Blockchain, that translates Web3 into language a non-technical audience can act on. Few speakers in this space can do that without losing the substance.
• He is one of the few operators who has both written about social capital and used it to raise capital from inside underrepresented networks. Senior buyers get an inclusion conversation grounded in revenue, not rhetoric.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO, Bandwagon, a venture-backed live-experience identity and analytics company applying blockchain to ticketing and fan data
• Founder of NFNTE Capital and co-founder of Catalyst Labs, a 12-week accelerator for emerging founders
• Author, A Kids Book About Blockchain, published by A Kids Co. and distributed by Penguin Random House
• Inaugural cohort, IBM Blockchain Accelerator; finalist in the Smart Dubai Office Global Blockchain Challenge
• BA in Economics and Political Science and MBA, Clemson University; named to Clemson’s “Roaring 10” young alumni list
• Angel investor with a portfolio that includes Partake Foods, Liquid Death, Athletic Greens, and Broadway productions including Stereophonic and Hell’s Kitchen

Biography

Bandwagon began with a simple operating problem in live entertainment. Teams and venues knew almost nothing about the people sitting in their seats, and ticket fraud was eating into the relationship. Harold Hughes built a venture-backed company that uses blockchain infrastructure to give organisers verifiable identity and analytics. Bandwagon has raised more than four million dollars from investors including Backstage Capital and the State of South Carolina, was part of the inaugural IBM Blockchain Accelerator, and acquired Seattle-based IdealSeat in 2020.

The work outside Bandwagon is what gives Hughes range. As founder of NFNTE Capital and co-founder of Catalyst Labs, he runs a twelve-week accelerator for emerging entrepreneurs whose curriculum has been adopted by Benedict College, the University of Texas, and Furman University. He wrote A Kids Book About Blockchain, published by A Kids Co. and distributed by Penguin Random House, because he saw that most explanation of Web3 had been written for people who already understood it.

Hughes is a serious angel investor as well as an operator. His portfolio includes Partake Foods, Liquid Death, Athletic Greens, and Broadway productions such as Stereophonic and Hell’s Kitchen. The thesis behind that activity, and behind his programmes, is that social capital is a measurable input into commercial outcomes, and that founders from under-represented backgrounds have been systematically priced out of it. That is the point he made before the diversity conversation hardened, and it is the point he can still make commercially.

He holds a bachelor’s in Economics and Political Science and an MBA from Clemson University, where he was named to the “Roaring 10” young alumni list in 2019. The credentials are useful context. The argument he brings to a senior audience is that early-stage discipline, operating clarity about new technology, and access to networks are the same problem, and the people who solve all three are the ones who scale.

Key speaking topics

• Entrepreneurship and scale-up discipline
• Blockchain and Web3 in the enterprise
• Social capital as a commercial asset
• Diversity in venture and founder access to capital
• Customer identity and data in live experience
• Future of technology in consumer industries

Ideal for

• Founders, CEOs, and leadership teams of growth-stage companies looking to build durable advantage from technology and network strategy
• Corporate innovation, brand, and partnership leaders working with sport, music, and live-experience platforms
• Diversity, talent, and people leaders who want a substantive operator voice on under-represented founder economics
• Universities, accelerators, and entrepreneurship programmes designing curricula for first-generation and emerging founders

Audience outcomes

• A working understanding of how blockchain creates verifiable identity and ownership in consumer settings, beyond cryptocurrency
• A specific method for mapping personal and organisational networks as commercial inputs, taken from the Catalyst Labs and NFNTE programmes
• A frank account of what it took to raise capital and survive as a Black founder in venture markets, with implications for corporate inclusion strategy
• A scale-up operator’s view of the decisions that separate companies that get funded from those that get acquired or close