Instead of a resume

Someone wants to contract with me to do some work

They asked for a resume. I’ve never made one; Rosa Lee and I have done ten startups and turnarounds and never needed one. I wrote this instead.

Kevin Jones

Serial Entrepreneur · Community Economist · Platform Builder

What follows is not a resume. It is a business history — a record of nine ventures built in partnership with my wife and business partner Rosa Lee Harden, beginning in rural Mississippi and ending, so far, in the community economics movement we lead today. The through-line in all of it is the same: find where a market is broken, understand the community it lives inside, build something that works, and know when to move on.

The Weekly Newspaper — Itawamba County, Mississippi

Late 1970s – Mid 1980s

Rosa Lee’s father, Delmus Harden, was preparing to sell the family’s weekly newspaper in Itawamba County — then the poorest county in the country’s poorest state. We were in seminary in Mill Valley, California. I said: let’s get married and go see what we can do with it.

What followed was my ten thousand hours. Itawamba County was as far from the Bay Area as a place can be. I had to learn the idiom, the history, the body language, the unspoken codes of an Appalachian Mississippi community before I could understand a city council meeting. Delmus became my second father and mentor. His core lesson: you have to build the community where your business can survive.

During those years, my investigative reporting put a county sheriff in Parchman Prison on 53 counts of fraud. After seven years, there was nothing more of value for me to learn there. We moved to Jackson, the state capital.

The Catfish Industry Trade Journal — Mississippi Delta

Mid 1980s

Mississippi agriculture was commodity — soybeans at three cents on the retail dollar, cotton at seven. But farm-raised catfish were different. A farmer could recover 86 cents on the retail dollar from an individually quick-frozen glazed fillet. That kind of value capture meant the Delta’s entrenched, racially stratified landowning class suddenly had to listen to the people doing the processing — and honor their contribution. The economics were quietly subversive.

In the wild, a catfish is a bottom feeder. Its cultural image — deeply fried, associated with poverty — was the primary obstacle. But a catfish raised on the surface of an aerated pond, fed on nutritious grain, is transformed: a flaky white fish that can substitute for Dover sole.

We hired Willard Scott — the beloved Today Show weatherman — to travel the watershed cities of the Mississippi, appearing on local NBC morning shows alongside local chefs who had begun serving catfish at the best restaurants in town. We built a recipe book. We changed the image city by city, from Salina, Kansas to Peoria to Chicago to Detroit to Milwaukee. The industry grew to $300 million as demand shifted market by market.

The Mississippi Business Journal — Jackson, Mississippi

Late 1980s – Early 1990s

After three and a half years, we had done what we came to do in the catfish trade. We bought the Mississippi Business Journal — a statewide publication that had failed five times and was losing money, with two stronger competitors in the market.

Within three years, both competitors were out of business. We acquired a local business trade show. I built a syndicated radio program carried on 37 Mississippi stations, repackaging our reporting and editorial voice. We added a weekly television show on the dominant Jackson station, carried across 12 cable outlets statewide.

I became, effectively, the voice of Mississippi business. And in that position I confronted something I couldn’t sustain: the structural and blatant racism embedded in that business culture was among the most extreme anywhere in the country — and the primary engine of the state’s continued poverty. Alongside our commercial work, following Rosa Lee’s lead, we built the largest Habitat for Humanity chapter in the country, constructing 30 houses a year.

Tired of being the face of a culture I could not endorse, we sold the publication.

The Legislative Monitoring Service — Jackson, Mississippi

1994 – Late 1990s

We sold the Business Journal, our last print publication, in 1994 — the year of the Netscape browser. That same year, we acquired a legislative monitoring service serving lobbyists, lawyers, and industry associations. Every other state had been online for years, running expensive Digital Alpha systems that cost $100,000 or more. Arkansas, the last holdout, had gone online five years earlier.

We leapfrogged all of them. By putting the service directly on the internet, we came on the web two years ahead of any other state-level equivalent. We built what amounted to a miniature Bloomberg for state government: daily legislative action, court opinions, regulatory hearings, appointments — all the information that lobbyists and attorneys had previously sent runners to collect throughout the week. For several years, we held a private online monopoly.

After three years, the state began giving away the base legislative data. But the service remained a cash cow — and it gave Rosa Lee and me the financial freedom to move to Berkeley, where she entered seminary to become an Episcopal priest.

B2B E-Commerce Conferences — Silicon Valley

1997 – 2000

Berkeley put us at the center of what was about to become the dot-com explosion. Rather than launch another startup immediately, I took a position with a Ziff Davis national magazine — one of only two publications focused on the business of the internet. I became the first beat writer covering intranets, then the first to cover extranets.

As B2B marketplaces emerged — platforms connecting many buyers to many sellers — I saw the next wave. I wrote a newsletter that developed a substantial following, then we created the first B2B e-commerce conference in May 1999, followed by a second in November of the same year. The second was, by any measure, nearly perfect: every CEO of every significant B2B e-commerce company in attendance, with Mary Meeker present to provide validation.

But my Mississippi experience had taught me a durable lesson: things don’t go up forever, and when they come down, they can stay down for a long time. I began partnering and learning with a merchant bank, knowing that the most likely exit was a sale to a public company. We prepared our books and launched an analytics research division — a deliberate move that, given our leading brand position, would register as a competitive threat to the likely buyers.

Three companies wanted to acquire us. I insisted on the most cash, the least stock, and the shortest earn-out. One offer came in $10 million higher — with a three-year earn-out attached. I declined. We closed our sale ten days before the NASDAQ peak, and seventeen days before it fell off a cliff.

SOCAP — Social Capital Markets

2008 – 2019

After the dot-com exit, I spent two years trying to solve malaria in Swaziland and Mozambique. I learned something important about myself: I am not a community organizer. I cannot move at the pace of community change, and the solution was not going to be delivered by someone who looked like me.

What pulled me back in was a friend who had created the community investment notes for Calvert. He believed the impact investing field needed a social enterprise expansion fund, venture capital — that didn’t yet exist. Founders of social enterprises were spending two to three years finding investors who believed in them, and suffering serious mission creep in the process.

We tried first to simply change how individual investors thought about their money. We got into Bill Gates’s office. Sixteen seconds in, he stood up and said, stop. ‘I have two pockets,’ he told us. ‘One I want to put all the money in the world into. And a smaller one where I want to put some money to do good. If you’re suggesting there’s a connection between those two pockets, you have to leave.’ We were shown the door. The same thing happened at three other billionaires’ offices.

We concluded that we couldn’t talk people into thinking differently about capital. But we might be able to design an experience where they would act their way into thinking differently.

SOCAP was built to be too much to grasp — like drinking from a fire hose. We didn’t aim at the prefrontal cortex. We aimed at the amygdala. Attendees would leave with the visceral sense that impact investing was real, large, and growing — but not reducible to a simple taxonomy that contrasted it neatly with traditional investing. The rational parsing — the MBAs, the metrics, the asset class definitions — could come later, once people were engaged.

It worked. SOCAP became the largest impact investing conference in the world by its third year. It eventually reached 3,700 attendees from 65 countries. Rosa Lee built the business operations and the attendee experience; I generated the ideas and the energy.

Large investment conglomerates became our biggest sponsors. The conference was highly profitable. But something had shifted in the field: the dominant ethos had moved toward scale and market-rate returns. We had created SOCAP as the market at the intersection of money and meaning. Money had become a highway. Meaning had been kicked to the curb.

We sold SOCAP the year before the pandemic.

Neighborhood Economics

2020 – Present

What we learned from three decades of building, selling, and watching is this: venture capital is inherently extractive. It counts success by how fast you can take out as much capital as possible. We had built a fund that defied the pattern — our deals included what I called mission insurance, provisions ensuring that when, say, Ben Cohen sold Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever, the mission stayed intact. We achieved an 11% IRR with a top impact rating from GIIRS. But that kind of outcome required constant vigilance against the grain of the system. Replicating it would be increasingly going up stream, against the flow.

Real impact, we concluded, has to be multi-dimensional and local. It requires public sector, community, philanthropic, and catalytic investor dollars in genuine relationship with the communities they’re meant to serve — working alongside innovators who are creating assets for the people in neighborhoods where life expectancy is ten years shorter than in the affluent part of town.

Neighborhood Economics is a convening and connecting platform for the practitioners doing that work. Our conference ticket price is 80% lower than SOCAP’s — deliberately so. SOCAP helped affluent people try to do good with their money. Neighborhood Economics works with the intermediaries and innovators working directly with people who don’t yet have assets.

It is working. The innovators and practitioners who present at our conferences report receiving catalytic investments, grants, and other funding from the funders we bring to the table. We are in demand. Rosa Lee and I are joined by younger colleagues who handle the wrangling and logistics I no longer want to manage.

I do the research on the big structural issues in each host city. In Galveston — our September 2026 conference — the defining issue is workforce housing: more than 20% of the city’s housing stock has been converted to short-term rentals, and the medical school on the island is struggling to recruit students and staff who can’t afford to live there. Climate resilience is the second lens: every fifty years, a major hurricane reshapes Galveston, and the people most at risk are those in the lowest-lying neighborhoods. We connect their challenges to national examples of what works. I can continue to do that a long time. Younger people wrangle the panels and details.

Things change after our conferences. That is what we’re here for.

Kevin Jones is the co-founder of Neighborhood Economics and co-author, with Rosa Lee Harden, of the forthcoming book This Shit Works — And Why It Matters. He previously co-founded SOCAP (Social Capital Markets), which grew to 3,700 attendees across 65 countries before its sale. He lives with Rosa Lee on a 15-acre riparian property along the Swannanoa River in Swannanoa, North Carolina.Kevin Jones