Grand prize Alston won at the first HBCU Pitch Competition, held in Times Square during New York Tech Week.
Under the billboards of Times Square, on a stage set up in the middle of one of the busiest public spaces in the world, five founders from historically Black colleges and universities pitched their companies to a crowd of tourists, investors, and passersby. When it was over, the grand prize went to Carolyn Alston, a Bowie State University graduate, for a product with no app, no hardware, and no code. A deck of cards.
Alston is the founder of Communic8 It!, a conversational card game designed to get people talking to each other again, and actually listening. The game runs on guided prompts that push players toward reflection and honest exchange, the kind of conversation that has quietly gone missing in a feed-first world. It is a low-tech answer to a very current problem.
The event was the inaugural HBCU Pitch Competition, hosted by Venture for T.H.E.M. with The DM Firm and the Times Square Alliance as part of Activate LIVE! during New York Tech Week on June 6. Alston competed against founders from Morgan State, Hampton, North Carolina A&T, and Howard, pitching to a panel that included judges from Moet Hennessy, the NBA Foundation, the Milken Institute, and Base 11. She walked away with the top prize.
"Winning this competition affirms the value of creating tools that bring people closer together."
"I am proud to represent Bowie State and HBCU entrepreneurs on this stage," Alston said after the win. She holds a Master of Arts in Organizational Communications from Bowie State, and the company is already a proven pitch: earlier this year Communic8 It! took first place in the Revenue Non-Tech category at the university's 2026 Bulldog Pitch Competition. Times Square was the bigger stage, not the first one.
One of the judges, Genisha Metcalf of the NBA Foundation, named the thing the competition was really built to fix. There is a brand visibility gap, she noted, that comes up again and again for HBCU students. Talent is not the shortage. The stage is. Putting five of these founders on a platform that thousands of people walk past is the whole point, because you never know who in that crowd is a customer, a mentor, or an investor.
Alston plans to put the money to work, increasing inventory, expanding branding, building out a mock mobile app, and growing the educational workshops she runs around the game. She also wants to deepen partnerships with schools, community organizations, and businesses. "This investment allows us to scale our impact while continuing to develop innovative resources that help people communicate more effectively in their personal and professional lives," she said.
This is the builder ANF exists to spotlight. Alston did not chase the loudest idea in the room. She looked at what everyone is quietly losing, the ability to sit across from another person and really talk, and she turned it into a business, then carried it onto a national stage and won. In a season where every pitch wants to bolt AI onto something, she bet on cardboard, prompts, and the oldest technology there is, which is one person actually hearing another.
She built a tool to make people talk. It just did the talking for her, in the middle of Times Square.