FOR THE SHUFORD PROGRAM IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP — UNC CHAPEL HILL
Bernard Bell
Six hundred and seventy-five students in the minor. Two thousand graduates. And a man who still teaches high schoolers how to shake hands.
Why I Built This Page Before We Ever Spoke
On June 17, 2026, Justin Sonnenreich introduced me to Bernard Bell. Justin called Bernard “a mentor of mine and one of the real drivers of the entrepreneurship ecosystem at UNC.” Bernard wrote back calling Justin “my boy.” That is what a real mentorship looks like from the outside, and it is the entire reason this page exists.
We live by example and teach openly. So rather than show up to a thirty-minute Zoom and describe what we do, I did the work first. Everything below was researched, measured, and written before our first conversation — because the fastest way to show someone you take them seriously is to have already started.
What Makes Bernard Bell Unusual
Two decades in media — IBM, Discovery, HGTV and Food Network, ICTV, the Chicago Tribune Media Group — then TV One, where he helped take the network from a $130 million investment to a $600 million valuation in 54 months. He teaches entrepreneurship because he did it, not because he read about it.
Economics ’82, MBA ’91, both from Carolina. He joined UNC as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2015 and became Executive Director in 2017, the same year the Shuford family’s $18 million gift transformed the program. He runs the thing he came up in.
His first job, at IBM in Winston-Salem, came through a Divine Nine connection he made as a student at Carolina. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi, and he now creates job opportunities for Divine Nine students himself. That loop is closed on purpose.
When high schoolers visit the Shuford Suite, he practices greetings and handshakes with them. Not a pitch deck. Not a cap table. The human part. His own line, on his own website: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
The Program, By The Numbers
The Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship sits inside the Department of Economics in UNC’s College of Arts & Sciences. It grew out of the Minor in Entrepreneurship that Buck Goldstein, John Akin and Jack Kasarda launched in 2004 on a Kauffman Foundation grant, and was renamed in 2017 after a gift from Jim Shuford ’88, Stephen Shuford MBA ’97 and Dorothy Shuford Lanier ’93.
Every student in the minor moves through the same ladder: an intro course, principles, one track section, a real internship of 280 hours or more, and then Bernard’s own capstone — ECON 393, Practicum in Entrepreneurship — which he teaches to more than two hundred students a year. Around it he has built Shuford Launch (entrepreneurship workshops in North Carolina high schools, 250+ students since spring 2023), the Shuford Innovators-in-Residence series he created in 2019 to widen the range of founders students actually meet, Student-Made UNC, Shuford Away, and the student-run Entrepreneurship Club at Carolina.
The Opportunity We Measured
We frame every gap as an opportunity, because that is what a gap is. Here is the one worth talking about, and we measured it on July 31, 2026 rather than assuming it.
Ask ChatGPT, with live web search turned on, “Who runs entrepreneurship at UNC Chapel Hill?” The answer that comes back names two other units on the same campus. It does not name the Shuford Program. Ask it “What is the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship?” and you get a genuinely good, accurate answer — that never names the person who runs it. Perplexity does the same thing.
That is not a criticism of the program. It is the opposite. It means the substance is already there and the machines simply have not been told. The Shuford Program is the largest, oldest and most student-facing entrepreneurship engine at Carolina, and it is the one an AI is least likely to hand to a prospective student, a donor, or a journalist who asks.
What I’m Offering — Free, To Students
My company exists to create a million jobs by training young people. We are about a quarter of the way there, and every step of it has come through partnerships with universities, associations and agencies. So the student side of anything we do at Carolina is free. Specifically:
- A guest session in the capstone. Not a talk about marketing. A working session where students leave with agents running on their own machines.
- An AI agent starter pack for every Shuford student. Installable skill packs, no login, no cost, no IT ticket. The same packs we hand out at blitzmetrics.com/skill-packs — downloaded, installed and used by entrepreneurs in a dozen industries.
- Internships that count. The minor already requires 280 hours of real work. We train young people on real client accounts with real budgets, which is the only way anyone actually learns this. We would like to take some of those students.
- A findability audit for the program, quarterly, at no charge. What Google and the AI models say about Shuford, tracked over time, so the gap above closes on purpose instead of by luck.
Why Justin Is The Proof
Justin Sonnenreich came out of Carolina having already sold two companies — Boosted Notify to COOKLAB Group, and Mission: Mentor, which served more than ten thousand students, to Crimson in 2022. He now runs MarkitAds, a campus activation network operating across universities. He is exactly the outcome Bernard’s program exists to produce.
On July 24, 2026, we stood up an AI agent system on his accounts. The next day it wrote its own status report and sent it to me — a second brain in Drive, a weekly network review that fires Friday mornings, a daily sweep that caught four slipping commitments on its first run, a revenue model with every assumption sourced, a pilot proposal iterated three times. It also listed its own five gaps and asked for direction, which is the part I care about most.
That is one student, forty-eight hours, no engineering team. Multiply it by six hundred and seventy-five.
The Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship
Students, alumni and partners — go straight to the source.
Built July 31, 2026 by Dennis Yu with Claude, before my first conversation with Bernard Bell — researched against shuford.unc.edu, unc.edu, bernardbell.com and live search and AI-model queries run the same morning. We teach openly and transparently; that is how community gets built. Introduced by Justin Sonnenreich. Scheduling by Hope Oathout, who made it painless.