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Nothing worth doing is easy. Do what you love. Maryssa Barron had Post-it notes of those quotes on her dorm room wall at Stanford Law School for motivation as she created her own tech startup in 2024 while studying for the bar exam.
The Las Vegas entrepreneur posted the quotes above a handwritten timesheet on which she tracked the hours she worked on BuildQ, an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to help streamline the development of energy projects.
“I wanted the reminder that I chose this,” said Barron, 31. “Instead of taking the rational path of working at a law firm after graduating, I chose to build something I truly believed in. I chose uncertainty. I chose risk. I chose doing something I loved over doing something I wouldn’t.
“Building a startup is hard, so you have to be mentally prepared to break through walls and just keep going. It’s about having grit and being willing to tackle every challenge that’s thrown your way with the belief that it’s worthwhile.” From growing up in Section 8 housing in rural Texas to graduating from Harvard University and Stanford Law School, Barron is quite familiar with breaking through walls and having grit.
She said she learned those traits from her mother, Dr. Candace Barron, a United Methodist Church minister in Arkansas, whom she considers her inspiration. “I grew up with a single mom who went to school all through my childhood. She really served as that North Star for what it looked like to break the cycle of generational poverty through education,” Barron said. “It was never a question of whether or not I would go to college, just how. We certainly couldn’t pay for my education without scholarships.
“A lot of my childhood, even from early on, was spent working to be the best candidate for scholarships. … Striving for academic excellence, volunteerism, being very involved in my community, excelling in one or two key extracurriculars. … I was always striving to do more and had a belief that I could, in large part informed by my upbringing and background.”
For six years of Barron’s childhood, her mother made only $6,000 a year working part-time as a church secretary while putting herself through college.
“It’s been me and her against the world since she was 2,” Candace Barron said. “It was pretty rough there for a few years. We were on Medicaid and food stamps and Section 8 housing. I figured the only way to get out of this hole of my life was to go to college and get a degree.
“So I started working and going to school, and once I got started, I said I’m never stopping until I reach the top, so I got my doctorate at the end of it all.
“I had to do it for her. I didn’t want her to have to live in that situation anymore.” They moved to Arkansas when Barron was in eighth grade. After graduating from Little Rock Central High School, she received the equivalent of a full scholarship to Harvard in the form of financial aid.
Barron said her childhood dream and ultimate goal has always been to make the world a better place. “For me today, that looks like solving the energy crisis driven by AI power demand and electrification,” she said. “Helping power the world and the future of the grid in a cleaner and more sustainable way.
“Over the next decade, energy is going to be one of the defining buildouts of our lifetime, and the team doing that work deserves software that’s been built for them.”
The BuildQ founder and CEO came up with the idea for her company — “Think TurboTax for project finance,” she said — while working in the energy industry for nearly a decade after earning her bachelor’s degree from Harvard.
“The idea for BuildQ really came out of firsthand experience working in the renewable energy development sector and project finance,” she said. “I saw just how fragmented the process of getting energy projects built was.
“BuildQ solves a pain that I have actually lived and the industry needed.” Project finance is a method of funding a capital intensive project or asset. Unlike traditional corporate loans, which are secured by a company’s overall balance sheet, project finance relies solely on the future cash flows generated by the project to repay debt.
BuildQ won the 2025 AngelNV “Shark Tank”-style competition created by StartUpNV founder Jeff Saling, and the company has received a total of more than $1 million in investments from affiliated funds.
“Maryssa went to Harvard and Stanford. She had the perfect pedigree to start BuildQ in Silicon Valley. But she decided this was a better place to get it started,” Saling said. “I feel fortunate that shortly after she moved here, she found us, and as soon as I saw what she was doing and the capabilities she had, we were the first check in.”
AI runs in data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity, and Saling said the country probably needs five times the amount it currently produces to continue to power AI, electric cars and more in the future.
Todd Dewey, Tribune News Service
