YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Wayne Mackey began his path to becoming a tech founder in a way that would not inspire confidence in most investors.
He graduated last in his class at Warren Christian with a 1.9 GPA. He spent years drifting between jobs, getting fired from Applebee’s and Olive Garden along the way.
College did not come until he was 26.
“Are people really smarter than me? For sure,” he said. “But I know some that aren’t that go as well.”
He asked himself, “Why not me? What’s the worst that can happen? They kick me out?”
“So I went to Kent State,” Mackey told a crowd at YBI’s Tech Block Building 5. “And they kicked me out.”
The audience laughed. Mackey did too.
It was a fitting opening to a talk that focused less on startup strategy and more on how failure, rejection and a fair amount of stubbornness can shape an unlikely road to success.
Mackey, founder and CEO of Statespace, spoke during an event hosted by YBI and Code Youngstown. The group regularly brings together developers, entrepreneurs and job seekers to connect and learn, said Nick Serraser of Code Youngstown.
“Networking is the key for finding your next job in software,” Serraser said. “You have to come and meet your fellow software developers.”
Mackey acknowledged that his story did not match the typical image of a tech founder.
“I’m not very cool,” he said, pointing to an image used in promotional materials.
The photo showed him as a skinny kid with an awkward look on his face, sitting and playing video games. The awkwardness of the photo was the point.
Today Mackey looks exactly like the type of person a venture capital firm wouldn’t give money to. His tattooed arms make him look more like a member of a heavy metal band, which he is.
His backstory includes a stint as a mixed martial arts fighter and an identity crisis that forced a change in appearance.
“I got mistaken three different times for a member of Hanson,” he said.
He’s been shaving his head ever since.
Long before founding a company, Mackey said he spent nearly a decade working jobs he did not enjoy. Telemarketing, in particular, left an impression.
“Ninety-nine percent of the job all day, every day, is just hearing people tell you no,” he said.
That constant rejection, he later realized, was training he would use when he began pitching investors years later.
“I literally had people tell me, to my face, I was an idiot,” he said.
Instead of discouraging him, it became fuel.
Motivations
Mackey described two major motivations that carried him forward. The first was belief from others.
After Kent State dismissed him, a professor wrote a letter to the dean defending him and arguing he belonged there. Mackey said that moment changed how he saw himself.
“There’s one thing in having belief in yourself,” he said. “I discovered an entirely new type of fuel – other people’s belief in you.”
Years later, after achieving success, he created a scholarship named after that professor.
The second motivation was less sentimental and more blunt: spite.
“I had a list,” Mackey said, referring to a record of people who told him his ideas would not work.
That list became a source of motivation as his company began to grow. When some of the same venture capital firms later showed interest, he declined to meet with them again.
“They told me they don’t invest in companies – they invest in people,” he said. “Well, I’m still the same person.”
Mackey said his goal during the talk was to challenge common misconceptions about startups. One of the biggest, he said, is the idea that success looks glamorous.
He described a meme of a founder appearing to sit on a private jet, only to reveal that the image is staged.
“It looks amazing,” he said. “I promise you, it’s like garbage down inside.”
He also pushed back on the idea that founders need a perfect plan or exceptional intelligence.
“You don’t need a grand plan. You probably shouldn’t have one,” he said.
And while he joked that founders are “kind of stupid,” he said that quality reflects a willingness to pursue ideas despite long odds.
Mackey’s path eventually took a sharp turn into academia. After leaving Kent State, he continued his education, discovered a passion for neuroscience and went on to earn a Ph.D. and conduct research. During that time, he even discovered and got to name two parts of the brain.
“The superior precentral sulcus one and the superior precentral sulcus two,” he said.
He later combined that background with his long-standing interest in video games to launch Statespace.
Startup Breakthrough
Mackey said the idea for his company did not begin as a business plan but as a side project he thought was interesting.
That changed when he entered a startup competition on a whim.
“I entered a startup competition 24 hours before the deadline,” he said.
At the time, he had little understanding of how startups or venture capital worked. He simply wanted an excuse to work on the idea.
Still, his idea stood out.
Mackey and his team went on to win the competition, even though, as he later learned, they were not initially supposed to be included.
“They were like, ‘You’re not even supposed to be here,’” he said, telling the audience that organizers had manually boosted his score because faculty reviewers did not understand the concept.
“We look like geniuses because you won,” he recalled them saying.
The win marked a turning point. It was the first signal the idea might have value beyond his own curiosity.
Eventually, he and Statespace developed Aimlabs, a platform that analyzes player performance and helps users improve, eventually reaching tens of millions of users.
That growth, he said, did not come easily.
“Every startup is this,” Mackey said, tracing a jagged path of highs and lows with his finger.
He estimates the company “probably almost died 100 times.”
One of the most difficult parts of building the company was learning how to communicate with investors. Early on, he tried to provide as much information as possible, sending long emails and detailed presentations.
It didn’t work.
Eventually, he learned “the point of emailing a VC is not to get them to invest,” he said. “The point is to get a meeting. The point of that meeting isn’t to get them to invest. The point of that meeting is to get a second meeting,” he said.
Ultimately, he said, founders are trying to create something memorable.
“You need to give them a hook that they want to hear again,” he said, comparing the process to writing a pop song.
Despite the challenges, Mackey said his background in places like Youngstown helped shape his approach.
“Being from Youngstown gives you superpowers,” he said.
Rob Miller, a software engineer for 13 years, said he didn’t know anything about Mackey before attending.
“It’s just great to hear insights from somebody who’s actually been in the field before.”
For the audience, the takeaway was less about credentials and more about attitude.
Mackey’s path was not built on a master plan. It was built on a series of decisions that, by his own description, sounded a lot like “why not?”
Why not try college at 26? Why not apply to a startup competition 24 hours before the deadline? Why not keep going after being told no, repeatedly, and sometimes loudly?
It was, in many ways, a sustained commitment to seeing what would happen next.
“There’s no perfect road to anything,” Mackey said.
“If I can do this, you can totally do this.”
Pictured at top: Wayne Mackey, founder and CEO of Statespace, speaks at YBI’s Tech Block Building 5.