Tag: fotw

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Founder of the Week: Nestor Solari

If you only learn one thing from Nestor, it should be that…

Unlike many traditional jobs, entrepreneurship doesn’t have a “set playbook.” So be ready for all the hurdles, the good and the bad, and know to not take hardships personally but rather that everyone’s journey is unique.

Today, millions of Americans are obtaining their insurance through brick and mortar industries. Not only is it generally an unpleasant experience, but the process is filled with extra fees. Founder Nestor Solari strives to bring these customers online, lowering the cost and getting rid of all of those extra fees. Nestor’s company, Sigo Seguros, focuses on non-standard or high risk auto insurance space, giving people an easy transparent way to get their auto insurance.

As a child, Nestor always remembered looking up to his teachers, and thought that he wanted to be a teacher growing up. Now that he’s gotten a taste of being an entrepreneur, the likelihood of that childhood goal is smaller, but he is devoted to the excitement of entrepreneurship. To him, no two days are the same. Everyday, he feels that he gets a new challenge and a new experience. The thing that is currently on top of Nestor’s mind is integrating with a new insurance partner and giving insurance access to millions of more people.

One thing that most people don’t tell you about starting a new company is the emotional roller coaster that comes with it. While a strong work ethic and diligence is undoubtedly important, Nestor believes that what really makes a difference is being able to handle your emotions. Making time to recuperate before tackling the next challenge is just as crucial as having those skills.

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Founder of the Week: Smita Mukherjee

This week’s #FOTW is a special edition summer post. You can get to know more about the founder of Nimbus Care Hub, Smita Mukherjee, first-hand from the email interview we conducted this summer.

 

Tell us a little bit about yourself. (Name, major, school, age)

My name is Smita Mukherjee, a second year MBA student at Wharton majoring in Healthcare Management and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. I also did my PhD at Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences in Biophysical Chemistry.

 

Can you tell us a bit about your startup?

Currently in the USA more than 16.1 million family members provided 18.2 billion hours of unpaid care to people with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD), at an economic value of over $232 billion. Nearly 60 percent of those caregivers rate their emotional stress of caregiving as high and report symptoms of depression. To reduce caregiver burden, Nimbus Care Hub provides accessible, affordable and holistic services to caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD).

 

What inspired you to create this company?

I got interested in entrepreneurship when as a postdoc scientist I was chosen to take two extensive courses on innovation commercialization. I learned about the entire process of getting a medical product from the laboratory bench to the bedside. This was a rare opportunity for a hard-core scientist to be exposed to the business and entrepreneurial aspects of scientific discoveries and I was absolutely fascinated! After those courses, I was motivated to sign up for an online Coursera course on Social Entrepreneurship from Wharton where I came up with the idea for Nimbus Care Hub, a platform to provide support services to caregivers for people with ADRD, a disease area I researched during my PhD and postdoctoral training. As a postdoc student, I got introduced to the human and clinical aspects of Alzheimer’s Disease and through numerous personal interactions and firsthand experience concluded that in the global dementia epidemic, the caregivers are the neglected population who have very little personalized or community level support regarding how to take care of their loved one and themselves. I wanted to make a positive impact on the lives of the dementia caregivers and that is when Nimbus Care Hub was born. Fast forward a few years, and I found myself applying to Wharton for my MBA. I started working on Nimbus from my very first semester and continued refining my business model and reached out to friends and faculty on campus for advice and help to execute on the business plan for Nimbus. As my time at Wharton is coming to an end, I am filled with immense gratitude for more than 40 people on campus who contributed towards making Nimbus Care Hub a reality. I sincerely could not have done it without their feedback, support, and motivation.

 

What advice would you give to budding student entrepreneurs?

  1. Entrepreneurs are not risk takers but risk mitigators. Successful entrepreneurs understand the core issues that threaten their business and they take very calculated steps to minimize or eliminate those risks.
  2. You know you are ready to become an entrepreneur when the solution you are working on to solve a problem is so meaningful, exciting, and inspiring that you cannot sleep at night.
  3. Entrepreneurship is hard, so surround yourself with family, friends, and advisors that will guide, mentor, motivate, and push you to hustle relentlessly. Every time you get rejected, analyze why it happened but also know that one person’s rejection does not mean the end of the world.
  4. Be resilient and persevere, but also know when to pivot. Be mentally and financially prepared to fail early and fail fast and move on when there is no product-market fit.
  5. Always have an entrepreneurial mindset, which means that you are creative and resourceful, and you get things done. This type of mindset is useful whether you are building your own company, working at a big corporation, solving personal issues or hanging out with friends!

 

Tell us one fun fact about yourself!

I am a mother of a 4-year-old son!

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Founder of the Week: Zhuoroui Fu

This month’s #FOTW is a special edition! Hear first hand from Zhuorui Fu, a current student at Penn who has created a recipe sharing platform.

Tell us a bit about yourself (Name, school, major).

Name: Zhuorui Fu
School: SAS
Major: Behavioural Science & Decision-Making

 

What is your start-up?

Recipicious is a recipe-sharing community for pro food-lovers and cooks to help them find out how to cook unforgettable dishes from their favourite restaurants. Pro users can upload their version or interpretation of a recipe, and modify the recipes according to a double-vote & comment system. Aggregating wisdom of the professional crowd, Recipicious finds the recipe that’s closest to the restaurant’s original. Recipicious is restaurant based and location based. It links the virtual experience of viewing the recipe to the actual location or cooking experience.

 

What inspired Recipicious?

My mum really likes cooking. She went home and often tinkered how to make a specific dish from her favourite restaurant at home, too. (Recipicious comes from this concept, although now it is quite different from just replicating restaurants’ recipes. At a high level, it meant to unite the English-speaking recipe world, as the recipe-sharing sites are quite scattered apart now.)

 

What advancements have you seen with your platform?

We sent out surveys and obtained 30 interests, and 20 people left their email address for us up keep them updated. We made changes to the double-vote system and identified competitors according to the comments potential users left us. We have the full UX design, and now we are applying for funds to support us to hire a front-end engineer to code the prototype per our instruction. Meanwhile, we are taking the time to look for a front-end engineer equity business partner. (My tech co-founder is a back-end & UX engineer).

 

What challenges have you faced in the development of your product?

Coding the product.

 

How has Penn helped you succeed in your entrepreneurial venture?

Through my engagement with Wharton and Wharton entrepreneurial activities in general, I obtained kind helps & advice from Wharton angel invesotrs, interested students, and resources from entrepreneurial centre.

 

What advice do you have for young entreprenuers?

Keep on. Persistence. Tweading your products.

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Founder of the Week: Derrius Quarles

Derrius Quarles (M.S. Ed ’18) is the CTO and founder of BREAUX Capital, the first fintech company created to enhance the financial health of black male millenials. BREAUX Capital is a software program that combines community with automation and savings, as well as peer-to-peer investing.

 

Derrius is a serial entrepreneur: BREAUX Capital is his third company. When he was developing his first company, he realized how difficult it was for him to raise capital, especially with no family or friend resources, despite having shown traction and post-revenue post-capital success. Loaners often told him to obtain capital from his friends and family, and he wondered what factors contributed to why the people in his life didn’t have those resources.

 

5 out of 10 people could not afford a $1000 emergency if they needed to tomorrow- and that number raises to 7 out of 10 if you’re black. These financial emergencies can be debilitating to families, and Derrius had seen it operate in his own community and life. One factor that contributes to these stats is peer accountability.

 

Derrius aimed to make financial services and banking more social and transparent. In his financial health and education research here at Penn, he learned that black males are doing the worst in America in terms of financial health. He also learned that you are 30% more likely to complete a goal, such as saving a lump sum of money, if you do it with a friend. Combining these findings, he developed BREAUX Capital’s unique social aspect. By connecting with your friends over the platform, you can hold each other accountable to your savings goals and ensure the financial health of your family and friends.

 

Derrius advises new student entrepreneurs to remember that “fundraising is not entrepreneurship,” and that you should be prepared to build a company that can survive off its own revenues and doesn’t need outside capital to remain viable.

 

To learn more about BREAUX Capital, check out their website here. To watch the full interview, click here.

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Founders of the Week: Jeriann Gumilla and Coco Wang

It all started with an eyelash curler. Coco Wang (W ’21) had purchased 4-5 different brands, with no success from any of them. Later on, she discovered that those brands made their curlers to fit the Caucasian eye shape. After wasting both her money and her time, Coco finally found a brand that made curlers targeted to Asian women.

 

This experience inspired Candid Beauty, a synthesized beauty platform that provides users personalized information on beauty products and suggestions. In the app, you create a beauty profile with your preferences and characteristics, and Candid Beauty does the rest. You can see reviews from customers with similar profiles and preferences, ingredient lists, and more.

 

Candid Beauty was founded by Jeriann Gumilla (W ’21) and Coco Wang (W ’21). Jeriann is studying Finance and Management-Entrepreneurship, and Coco is studying Finance and Statistics with a minor in Spanish.  They hope to tackle the lack of transparency in the makeup industry, which is filled with inaccurate reviews, false advertisements, and inconsistent information. Candid Beauty has already received multiple awards and recognition across campus, and the young founders say that it has been a humbling experience, but that they are always moving forward.

 

What should the rest of us entrepreneurs strive for if we want to succeed like the Candid Beauty team has? Jeriann says to take risks, and that “you have to believe in your idea when no one else does.” Coco says not to give up just because one person challenges your product, and urges that entrepreneurs take feedback objectively and as constructive criticism to help grow and improve.

 

Fun fact: Coco can speak six languages, and Jeriann taught herself how to play the ukulele, guitar, and yoga!

 

To learn more about Candid Beauty, visit their website here. To watch the full interview, click here.

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Founder of the Week: Thomas Cavett

This week, meet Thomas Cavett (WG ’18), an army veteran who (fun fact!) spent some time protecting Obama in his motorcade in Asia. Thomas Cavett is co-founder of POWTI Innovations, a company building wearable devices that detect when a traumatic injury has occurred and notifiy emergency personnel.

 

POWTI stands for Point of Wounding Trauma Indicator. The goal of this device is to increase response time to emergency traumatic events, both in the military and in civilian life. POWTI was inspired by Cavett’s time in the military as an Army Green Beret, where he had learned skills to treat his teammates and allies. Sadly, he saw many traumatic injuries where the response time just wasn’t fast enough, and he sought to alleviate this problem.

 

The device is still prototyping, and has undergone several iterations. However, Cavett says a launch will hopefully occur by the end of 2018.

 

Cavett’s most important advice to new entrepreneurs is to “find something you’re passionate about.” He says that entrepreneurship is complicated and chaotic, and working with something you’re passionate about will keep you committed even when things get tough.

 

To learn more about POWTI Innovations, visit their website here. To watch the full interview, visit our YouTube here.

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Founder of the Week: Nestor Solari

Being a Latinx student, I love meeting people who strive to make an impact in my community in innovative ways. Here at Weiss Labs, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting someone revolutionizing the insurance industry while aiming to “make being Latino in the U.S. a little bit easier.”

Meet Nestor Solari, a first year MBA student from New Jersey. Solari is a first generation student whose parents immigrated from Uruguay. He has worked in 20 different countries across Latin America and Asia in his previous work experience in micro-finance. His company, Sigos Seguros, is a tech enabled insurance brokerage start-up that hopes to make buying insurance, specifically auto insurance, easier for Hispanic Americans.

His goal goes past impacting the Latinx community, though. He noticed the insurance industry was “antiquated” and that a lot of people went through the process with difficulty. Through his start-up, he hopes to bring the insurance industry to a new age of technology.

Weiss Labs has allowed  him to bounce ideas off other entrepreneurs, directors, and mentors, as well as build a community. Solari advises new entrepreneurs to “have a bias for action.” In this industry, ideas are cheap, and Solari says those interested should move past the analysis stage and jump into the field.

Watch the full interview here, and click here to visit Sigos Seguros website.

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Founder of the Week: Adarsh Kulkarni

Adarsh Kulkarni (SEAS ’21), Founder of Growthfolio

Who said freshmen can’t have their own start-ups? Adarsh Kulkarni defies the norm: him and his co-founders have been developing their app, Growthfolio, since middle school.

 

Adarsh Kulkarni (SEAS ’21) is aiming to create a mobile service for college students to learn about investing and practice so they can gather the confidence to work with real money. His co-founders attend the University of Michigan and Virginia Tech, and they have been developing this idea since middle school.

 

Growthfolio’s first iteration, when the founders were younger and first starting out, did not succeed. Adarsh attributes this to a classic “engineering mistake”: developing a product and hoping an audience will follow. Their original product focused more on making money through investing than the actual process of what goes on in investing and the educational aspect of it. Adarsh and his team learned from their mistakes, and conducted 40-50 customer interviews with their target audience to get an idea of what they needed to pinpoint for their new iteration. Their audience wanted to learn more about the process, and Growthfolio went forward and reiterated their design.

 

The current application is over 6 months in progress and is now in the product development stage. They hope to enter the app store early this year, and gather consumer feedback to keep iterating and creating a better product.

 

According to Adarsh, Weiss Tech House has provided his team access to experienced speakers who have helped them address the core set of problems that all entrepreneurs, no matter what industry, face. He also has connected with his mentor, who has been an invaluable source of advice for him.

 

 

 

To learn more about Growthfolio, watch the full interview here.

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Founders of the Week: Michael Wong and Dayo Adewole

Dayo Adewole and Michael Wong, Co-Founders of InstaHub

In a world leaning towards eco-friendly trends, our actions and energy use are more important than ever. Something as simple as forgetting to turn the lights out can kill tons of energy and increase our bills, and many places have moved to automated light switches. However, the installation of these projects is typically 60-80% of the total cost. Michael Wong (W’18) and Dayo Adewole, a Bio-engineering Ph. D. student, have developed a solution: InstaHub.

 

Instahub is a snap on automation solution which aims to simplify light automation to make it more affordable to everyone. This product simply snaps on to light switches and turns the lights on when people enter and off when people leave, and starts to learn occupant’s habits to operate according to their needs. InstaHub requires no external connectivity or phone and is a simple, fast solution to our automation problem.

 

InstaHub is currently working on a large-scale pilot in Harnwell, Dubois, Stouffer, and Mayor to test the product through a partnership with Residential Services. They are also partnering with Wharton Operations and hoping to reach out to boutique hotels for pilots, and then eventually will begin selling the product.

 

Michael and Dayo have utilized many on-campus resources, such as Weiss Labs, VIP, and Youth Hack. They’ve been able to accumulate grants, funding, and support through these resources. Michael also has concentrations in OID, Finance, and Entrepreneurial Management, and he says his course-work has contributed to his success in his venture. They are also a Green Fund Project here on-campus.

 

 

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Founder of the Week: Chris Hanson

Chris Hanson (SAS ’17), founder and CEO of Eager, Inc.

When we hear “Canvas” or “Blackboard” we automatically shiver in disgust. The bleak platform, the reminder of the depressing grades we have to face on its interface… none of it excites or motivates us. Luckily, Chris Hanson (SAS ’17), founder and CEO of Eager, Inc., is using his expertise in cognitive science to reimagine educational interfaces in a more engaging, gamified way.

 

Eager is an educational interface for secondary and higher-ed students that works with other platforms such as Canvas and Blackboard to display course data in a more user-friendly way and allows for students to access support networks. It aims to make academic life more engaging, such as by allowing students to set goals for grades and check their progress, or log in with their Facebook account to compete on “arbitrary, but influential” benchmarks. The goal is to help change student behavior in a more positive manner, and the platform is even testing an algorithm to predict student risk, allowing for both academic and mental preventative support by suggesting when students need to reach out to teachers, counselors, or parents.

 

Eager is currently demoing in secondary education, and is about to pilot at Penn and other higher-ed institutions. Hanson’s company was involved in several Penn incubators, and he believes Weiss Labs has been an invaluable resource. Hanson tells us that “being an entrepreneur can be a lonely job,” and Weiss Labs enables entrepreneurs to get to know each other and connect over a common challenge.

 

To learn more about Chris Hanson and Eager, Inc. check out the website here and the full interview (with a demo!) here.

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