I held on when I arrived at Yale at 18, with the faith that my journey from Oak Cliff, Texas was a chance to leave behind all the challenges I had known, the broken dreams and broken bodies I had seen.

But when I found myself back home one winter break, with my face planted in the floor, my hands tied behind my back and a burglar's gun pressed to my head, I knew that even the best education couldn't save me.

I held on when I showed up at Lehman Brothers as an intern in 2008.

So hopeful that I called home to inform my family that we'd never be poor again.

But as I witnessed this temple of finance come crashing down before my eyes, I knew that even the best job couldn't save me.

I held on when I showed up in Washington DC as a young staffer,

who had heard a voice call out from Illinois, saying, "It's been a long time coming, but in this election, change has come to America."

But as the Congress ground to a halt and the country ripped at the seams and hope and change began to feel like a cruel joke, I knew that even the political second coming could not save me.

I had knelt faithfully at the altar of the American Dream, praying to the gods of my time of success, and money, and power.

But?over and over again, midnight struck, and I opened my eyes to see that all of these gods were dead.

And from that graveyard, I began the search once more, not because I was brave, but because I knew that I would either believe or I would die.

So I took a pilgrimage to yet another mecca, Harvard Business School --

this time, knowing that I could not simply accept the salvation that it claimed to offer.

No, I knew there'd be more work to do.

The work began in the dark corner of a crowded party, in the late night of an early, miserable Cambridge winter,

when three friends and I asked a question that young folks searching for something real have asked for a very long time: "What if we took a road trip?"

We didn't know where we'd go or how we'd get there, but we knew we had to do it.

Because all our lives we yearned, as Jack Kerouac wrote, to "sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere," and go find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

So even though there were other voices who said that the risk was too great and the proof too thin, we went on anyhow.

We went on 8,000 miles across America in the summer of 2013, through the cow pastures of Montana, through the desolation of Detroit, through the swamps of New Orleans,

where we found and worked with men and women who were building small businesses that made purpose their bottom line.

And having been trained at the West Point of capitalism, this struck us as a revolutionary idea.

And this idea spread, growing into a nonprofit called MBAs Across America, a movement that landed me here on this stage today.

It spread because we found a great hunger in our generation for purpose, for meaning.

It spread because we found countless entrepreneurs in the nooks and crannies of America who were creating jobs and changing lives and who needed a little help.

But if I'm being honest, it also spread because I fought to spread it.

There was no length to which I?would not go to?preach this gospel, to get more people to?believe that we?could bind the wounds of a?broken?country,one social business at a time.

But it was this journey of evangelism that led me to the rather different gospel that I've come to share with you today.