Built by a first-generation Bulldog who wished this existed
Terence Williams grew up in Oakland, Mississippi — a small town that gave its name, years later, to the software company he'd go on to found. He arrived at Mississippi State University as a first-generation college student and an electrical engineering major, and like most freshmen, spent his first weeks turned around on a campus that felt enormous.
During a First Year Experience course built to teach incoming students the basics of iPhone programming, Williams found the fix he'd been looking for. He kept building after the class ended, and by his senior year he'd shipped Bully Walk: a simple, fast way for students, parents, and visitors to find their way around Mississippi State.
The path to Bully Walk ran through Trensek, a Jackson, Mississippi mobile app studio founded by eight Black entrepreneurs from the metro-Jackson area with a mission to close the tech industry's racial gap. Williams built several early apps there — including a trivia app for The CW's "The Originals" — before turning his attention to the navigation problem on his own campus, under the mentorship of MSU management-information-systems professor Dr. Rodney Pearson, who'd taught him iPhone development in that freshman "iProgram" course.
The recognition came quickly and kept coming. Apple selected Williams for one of 350 scholarships to its 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference. Judges at MSU's College of Business awarded Bully Walk $1,250 combined between two E-Week growth-startup prizes, and students voted it the People's Choice winner. By that fall, Mississippi State's own official account announced that, with more than 75,000 users on his MSU-born app, Williams had been invited to the White House Frontiers Conference — a national innovation summit President Obama hosted in Pittsburgh that October with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. By his own account at the time, he was the only innovator from Mississippi invited that year.
Williams didn't stop at graduation. He founded Nobility Tech, kept rebuilding the product through a decade of iOS updates, a pandemic, and two rebrands, and today runs it through his company, Oakland Software Co. — named, fittingly, for the town where the whole idea started.
