Archive for Communication

Catherine Cook

The concept that Catherine Cook and her brother came up with is very neat. For a better way to get to know her classmates they developed myYearbook.com. At the age of 15 and 16 the siblings got their older brother, Geoff, to develop the site for them. It was said to have been like “Facebook for high school.” What really drove her innovative thinking was seeing her older brother develop his own business out of his dorm room. By seeing him excel and succeed she knew it was possible for her too. She knew that even the smallest of ideas could make a big difference. The site now has over 32 million members. Since Facebook at the time was becoming bigger and seemed very similar to it, Catherine and Geoff came up with their websites message. myYearbook.com was about making new friends whereas Facebook was about the friends you already had. This helped shape their basis of their website. They started developing different features and apps to define their message. Users now had the ability to find people they would want to get to know based on the apps and features provided. myYearbook later became sold to QuePasa since yearbooks became less popular. Now came the new development of MeetMe in 2011, it was time for it to become global. Now people had the opportunity to meet people all over the world.

Adelle Archer by Anna Ortiz

Adelle Archer, CEO and co-founder of Eterneva, is on both the Inc and Forbes 30 Under 30 lists. In addition, Mark Cuban invested in her business when she went on Shark Tank in 2019. Eterneva is a business that Archer created after her friend and mentor Tracy Kaufman died from pancreatic cancer. The company produces diamonds out of loved ones’ ashes; Archer conceived of Eterneva because at the time, there were not many options for memorializing passed loved ones. Although cremation is at an all-time high popularity, the ashes get thrown away after about one generation. More lasting, however, would be diamonds made by Eterneva. Diamonds, Archer believed, not only allow people to mourn, but they also allow people to celebrate. I love Archer’s view that people should both mourn and celebrate. The idea is one that Christians should take to heart, as we recognize that death is not part of how the world should (and will) work, and yet hold that it is a gateway to the sweet next life with our loving Savior. Archer knows that the seven to eight month process for making the diamonds is not a drawback but a strength because it gives people time to mourn and process the death. The Eterneva team sends videos, pictures, and updates to mourning clients as they wait for the diamonds, which I believe is an innovative way to care for people. On the celebration side, the Archer counts on the diamonds to encourage people to share stories about the people who died. According to Archer, the diamonds help people to lean into the subject of death instead of turning away from it. Archer believes, and I wholly agree, that our culture hides death too much, and that communication about death is vital to caring for grieving neighbors.

Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp-Pinterest

Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp created Pinterest as a way for people to share their ideas, interests, and inspirations with other people around the world.  Pinterest was launched in 2010 as an upgrade to their previous app Tote, which was an online store for buying virtual catalogs.  After experiencing problems with Tote, they decided to create a new app that instead of being focused primarily as an e-commerce store, focused more on the social media aspects such as the sharing of ideas and projects that the users of Tote were enjoying the most.  As time went on they added quality of life updates such as business accounts and ads that are targeted to peoples interests and searches in the app.

Although Pinterest started out with a very small amount of users in 2010, by 2011 the app was receiving around 11 million visits per week and in 2020 had around 400 million active monthly users.  Also, as of 2021 Pinterest reported that they made around $1.7 billion in ad revenue which was a 48% increase from the previous year.

Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp demonstrate their entrepreneurial skills by taking the feed back and lessons learned from their previous project and use it to create something bigger and better.

 

Zev Shapiro – The Social Activist Entrepreneur

      Zev Shapiro is no ordinary college student. His childhood was unlike his peers. Born and raised in Cambridge Massachusetts, he is currently a sophomore at Harvard University. At the age of 10, he helped manage Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. In 2014, he was invited to the State of the Union Address as Elizabeth Warren’s guest. He enjoys reading academic law and public policy journals for fun and discussing politics. He always has had an entrepreneurial spirit, especially with his visionary personality; he often looks ahead as to what can be solved and improved in our society. Before graduating high school at Cambridge Rindge and Latin in 2020, he launched TurnUp (in 2019), a non profit application dedicated for young activists to increase voter turnout. TurnUp targets Generation Z progressives by having the capability to connect with other progressive individuals for specific causes. Zev wants to provide his peers with a network to organize events, marches, and protests for teenage activists. He specifically focuses on increasing voter turnout in all U.S elections but there are some other causes such as social justice, racial inequality and educational rights issues. The use of TurnUp proved to increase 36 million young voters nationally in 2020. Additionally, TurnUp made it possible for 17,000 people to make connections with one another and attend progressive events and it has over $2,000 individual donors. This new progressive activism app has grown in such a short amount of time. Through TurnUp, Zev Shapiro brings together a new generation of young activists for leftist causes. 

      Despite Zev Shapiro’s political beliefs, as Christian entrepreneurs we should be inspired by his entrepreneurial spirit and dedication so that we can create some kind of innovation which spreads Biblical Truth, the Word of God, and conservative thought to Generation Z.  So what are we waiting for? 

 

To Learn more about Zev:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zevshapiro 

https://www.turnup.us/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zev_Shapiro

Bridgit Solutions by Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake

Bridgit Solutions is a Canada based company founded by Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake. The two founders both have backgrounds in construction, so Bridgit Solutions – a company that creates software to make project management simpler for contractors and developers – came from personal experiences turned commercial. The company has launched several tech platforms that aim to make networking and organizing easier for construction teams. While the company’s home base is Kitchener-Waterloo, the company has also expanded to the Toronto area, where there’s a thriving condo construction market.

I found Brodie and Lake’s company to be inspirational for several reasons. For one, they came up with it by using their own personal experiences and skills. In addition, while this company may not be the most radical innovation out there, it’s still taking something and making it better and simpler than it was before, and in the process they’re helping other people, which is the aim of entrepreneurship.

Bridgit builds simplicity into construction project management platform

Read more about Bridgit Solutions at: https://www.feddevontario.gc.ca/eic/site/723.nsf/eng/02516.html?OpenDocument

Hey it’s WordPress!

Matthew Mullenweg grew up with hobbies like coding, art and economics. A fun mix. One of the main founders of WordPress, his hobbies and skills throughout his life led to many amazing web related ideas. In 2005 Matt left school at Houston and a consulting job to start his overhead business, Automattic. This later led to a slew of other companies that used Automattic as a launch pad, including WordPress. He was just nineteen when he decided to change the way people use the internet to publish.

Automattic and all of its resulting companies has turned into a completely virtual company of over 1,100 employees in more than 62 countries.

WordPress, which is used by many authors and writers to publish blogs, was started because of the closure of b2, the only other open source platform option at the time. Having used b2 throughout his life, its end was a pain for Matt. The idea and plan for WordPress started when Matt was approached online by a fellow coder after he had talked about the lack of a publishing space.

Using b2 as a starting base and template, the two entrepreneurs proceeded to build upon the main idea while improving any faults. A classic mash up of ideas and innovation, WordPress is now used by over 31 percent of the web. It is only one of many successes Matt made for himself, but it very much added to the open source world of the web.

He works on it constantly and takes joy from the benefit people receive.

From educational to professional, WordPress has added levels of simplicity, convenience, and efficiency to the way people work. Matt has an entrepreneur’s  spirit, and from his career history so far, it is easy to see he looks for problems to solve and thrives in finding solutions.

Knoq. Knoq. Who’s There?

Kendall Tucker. Kendall Tucker who?

Kendall Tucker, the founder of Knoq, a community outreach technology company. Knoq, which was launched in 2018 and has its headquarters in Boston, Mass uses representatives of the neighborhood to reach their own neighbors. The Knoqers, as they are called, canvas their own neighborhoods forming relationships and discussing products that can make homeowner’s lives easier, from scheduling a MassSave Evaluation to teaching people about home security systems.

Knoq, trains and recruits people on canvasing and door-to-door sales before sending them out into their own neighborhoods. The focus being on their own neighborhoods, because Knoq wants to reemphasize and encourage people to connect with their neighbors, as was commonplace in the past century. Google Fiber, NRG, Fluent Home Security, and Inspire Energy all use the services Knoq provides.

Prior to founding Knoq, Kendall Tucker worked in the political realm, managing a State Senate race, and working for political campaigns. After she graduated, Tucker worked at a management consulting company where she gained important skills in analyzing data. She then founded the company, Polis Politics, where she was CEO for three years. Polis was also a Massachusetts start-up, founded in 2015, it is also a door-to-door outreach platform. This company sells data to political campaigns in order to help them canvas for voters much easier. The data from Polis creates profiles for citizens regarding their political history. After it launched over 150 organizations used Polis.

Tucker has valuable skills is community outreach (a very important aspect of her companies), data analysis, and research. She was a finalist for the Entrepreneur of the Year in New England, as well as being featured in CNBC’s Upstart 100: World’s Most Promising.

I have learned from Kendall Tucker that sometimes you know you want to achieve something, but in order to do that you need to gain skills and take sometime before you start your dream. This was from her job at the consulting company where she learned data analysis in order to create Polis with the best system to benefit political campaigns.

 

Jon Wheatley

Jon Wheatley is the creator of DailyBooth, a blogging site that allows users to share pictures, videos, and posts about their daily lives. He was able to raise around $8 million to create the highly successful site. Due to the success of the website, his net worth went up to $1 million and Wheatley is now able to focus on more ventures and projects

Cites:

https://www.lifehack.org/588440/16-young-and-successful-entrepreneurs-who-prove-that-age-is-nothing-but-a-number

https://www.bing.com/search?q=jon-paul%20wheatley%20bio&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&pq=jon-paul%20wheatley%20bio&sc=2-21&sk=&cvid=967375C5C0A246A98691EDF59468FA1D

Catherine Cook

Catherine Cook is the Founder of MyYearBook.com which focused on putting high school year books online instead of having hard copies. She founded the company with her brother Dave Cook when she was 15, and with the help of her eldest brother Geoff Cook as the main investor, they were able to launch.

Catherine’s reasoning for creating the website was that she had just moved to Skillman NJ and started school with no friends. She looked through the year books to see if there was anyone that she knew and then had the thought why not put all this information online for easy access to all. After asking the help of her brother Geoff and Dave, she was able to put the website together and it was an instant success

Cites:

https://www.lifehack.org/588440/16-young-and-successful-entrepreneurs-who-prove-that-age-is-nothing-but-a-number

https://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/liz-welch/catherine-cook-and-geoff-cook-myyearbook.html

Pete Cashmore

Pete Cashmore is the founder Mashable, a media blog that provides news on celebrities, trends, and general gossip. Cashmore founded Mashable when he was just 20 years old back in 2005. In the beginning it was just a blog that became incredibly popular, fast forward to today and it is now one of the most popular news cites that people get their daily gossip and more from.

Due to the success of the website, Cashmore as accumulated a net worth of $95 million. Because of the success of the cite, he was able to sell the company to a gentleman by the name of Ziff Davis for a total of $50 million dollars. So in short, he’s a pretty successful guy