It all started at a community outreach event. Langston Whitlock was a tech-obsessed teen who coded his first app in JavaScript at age 12, and Ja’Nese Jean was an opera singer. While talking to homeless veterans at the event, Jean began to piece together a pervasive problem around the Atlanta community: people across the city had no transportation to get to their medical appointments. Jean asked Whitlock if he could make an app to fix that, and the longtime coder found himself up to the challenge.

SafeTrip is a ride-sharing app geared to the homeless and elderly that accepts various forms of insurance or credit cards, allowing users to book NEMT (non-emergency medical transport) or EMT (emergency medical transport) to or from wherever they need to go. The company has raised $2 million, with $3.4 million in revenue last year, but perhaps the best part of the company is its redemptive work resulting from its founder’s desire to do good in the community. Whitlock instituted a feeder program at high schools that allows them to become CPR-certified, devensive-driving-trained SafeTrip drivers straight after graduation.

Whitlock finished high school in 2020 and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. Though he had ambitions to attend college even after he started the SafeTrip app, in recent years he has flown mostly under the radar and may or may not have made good on that particular dream. Today he works as the company’s CIO instead of the executive. Whitlock’s story is a great example of what happens when pain points and ideas are allowed to collide with one another in networks and can be manipulated into actionable solutions by unlikely teams of people.

The prospect of man made rain sounds a bit ludicrous. Do humans really have the power to change the weather and turn clouds into floods? As it turns out, this concept doesn’t belong in science fiction anymore: it was invented in 1947, but with so little success that the attempts were soon forgotten. Today, Augustus Doricko, a Thiel Fellowship member of the latest class, intends to use his company to develop cloud seeding technology to provide rain in areas of the world that desperately need it on a time-sensitive schedule.

The first rainmaker was Charles Hatfield, a Quaker from Kansas who was hired by the city of San Diego after seeing success using early methods of cloud seeding to produce rain for small farms. In 1915 following a long drought, he promised to fill the city reservoir with rain and charge nothing if it didn’t work. Except, it worked a little too well. The Californians rejoiced at first as rain finally fell in their notoriously dry city, but by the second week, the reservoir was full and they were ready for it to stop. The rain kept falling. By the time the clouds moved on, 30 inches of rain had fallen and 20 people were dead. Hatfield decided to skip town instead of asking for his money.

It’s possible that Charles Hatfield was a great con man who was just ahead of his time at predicting the weather – he took his cloud seeding mixture formula with him to his grave, so it’s impossible to determine if he used chemicals that scientists could retest for effectiveness today. But today in a different Southern California town, another young man is also working toward being able to modify the weather. This time, he has $6.3 million in capital funding and his HQ in El Segundo, an LA neighborhood. Augustus Doricko is a Thiel Fellow, meaning he won a hefty sum of cash to develop his startup in place of going to college, and his company Rainmaker is taking off after being founded a year ago in 2023.

The most interesting thing about Augustus Doricko is his view on weather modification, which is influenced by the cultural mandate. In interviews, Doricko has said he’s tried every religion he can find, and says that now he’s a Christian. In his perspective, allowing droughts to occur – especially in his home region – when he knows he can put an end to them with his technology would be a failure to responsibly steward our God-given dominion of the earth. He wants to see people and nature both flourish in the desert, and hates that droughts are causing water wars and extinction of flora and fauna.

What’s next for Rainmaker? Doricko wants to set the focus of the company on the American West first and foremost: southern California, Arizona, dry parts of Colorado, and other states out west. Currently, the company is expanding their team (degrees of any kind are not required for their roles, only the necessary skills/knowledge and a willingness to do hard work ) and further developing their technology with the seed funding they’ve secured. They market themselves as the only scalable, immediate solution to create freshwater. If their mission can succeed in regions out west, Rainmaker could be a hugely profitable startup operation in the years to come as they expand worldwide.

Making Earth Habitable

LA Hard Tech Spotlight: Rainmaker | Upfront Ventures

Cloud seeding startup Rainmaker raises $6.3 million

Would you be surprised to learn that one of Gen Z’s most popular social media apps was founded in France and based in Paris? Facebook/Instagram came out of Silicon Valley, and Snapchat is also based in California, but one of the top social media apps today was created by a 25-year-old French mountain biking guru who worked for GoPro and used his expertise in tech visuals to a create a chart-topping app drop.

It’s BeReal, and it was founded in 2019, becoming publicly available in early 2020. It was insanely popular by 2022, spreading over college campuses through a paid ambassador program and then trickling down to the masses of Gen Z smartphone owners. It finished 2022 as the iPhone App of the Year. The app sends a notification to all its users every day simultaneously, although the time is unpredictable, and users have 2 minutes to take a picture to upload to their network of friends. The app format has become increasingly clogged with extra features, celebrity and brand accounts, and ads, but the product idea was brilliant and saw widespread success. The creation and diffusion of the app seemed to follow the 1/1 rule that YouTube experienced: 1 year to develop the product and 1 for it to be adopted by the general public.

As the app began to gain momentum 18 months after it was founded, Accel led a $30 million round in the company, and growth spiked soon after. However, since this event, Alexis Barreyat and BeReal’s cofounder (Kevin Perreau, a chief project officer) have declined all media requests. Little is known about either of them, and nothing has been said about the details of BeReal’s creation. The app was acquired by Voodoo for about $537 million USD, and no reporter has been able to reach Barreyat since. He maintains a private Instagram account with a faceless profile photo of him on a dirt bike and less than 3,000 followers, which is amusingly unusual for a young entrepreneur with a nine-figure net worth. Currently BeReal is valued at about $630 million and shows no indication of going public soon.

Barreyat’s elusivity is an interesting example of how different entrepreneurs handle the possibility of fame when a product like a social media app goes viral and begins to make big money. It’s very possible that Barreyat saw the pressure and eyes on globally-known entrepreneurs especially in the tech space, and decided to do everything possible to avoid that. His LinkedIn profile doesn’t even have a headshot. It also demonstrates that it’s possible to design an innovative product and operate the business over it without needing a mile-wide digital footprint. Although entrepreneurial opportunities exist today for people who want to feature and promote themselves extensively on the internet, with an innovative enough idea, opportunities are also abundant for those who aren’t willing to.

If you’re a lacrosse player who’s ever used a rebounder to practice, chances are you’ve benefited from the solution a 13-year-old girl found to a frustrating problem: a lack of good lacrosse training equipment. In 2012, Rachel Zietz left a gaping hole in her backyard rebounder while practicing, and decided she would put a better option of the product on the market if no one else would. The idea led her to create Gladiator Lacrosse, a lacrosse practice equipment company whose core product was a sturdy rebounder.

When Rachel was 15, she went on Shark Tank with Gladiator. While she didn’t find a deal there, Dick’s Sporting Goods flew her out to the company HQ, and later began carrying Gladiator lacrosse products in their stores. Rachel graduated high school in 2018 and continued to develop the company from there: that year, an acquisition by Whirlpool Corporation allowed her to hone in on the professional rebounder space. These are now sold to colleges across the country, and can be purchased by schools anywhere.

Rachel went on to attend Princeton College and captained an undefeated club lacrosse team there. As an all-state and national team member at 16 years old, she could have played D1, but decided to prioritize education. Today, Rachel Zietz makes steady revenue from her original product, but she also works for a venture capital firm (Lightyear) based in New York. It has assets under management of $5 billion. 

Zietz has experienced every side of entrepreneurship, from her own idea at 13 years old and subsequently developing her company, going on Shark Tank and walking away from unsatisfactory offers, to her current work in venture capital where she helps fund the great ideas of the next generation of young entrepreneurs.

Yelitsa Jean-Charles is a young entrepreneur who filled a personal market gap in a very efficient manner. As a girl, Yelitsa couldn’t find many dolls who looked like her, and so at Rhode Island School of Design she made mockups for a Black doll with hair that stayed curly. She took the project one step further and worked on turning it into a business with a social innovation fellowship. Once done with undergrad, Jean-Charles developed Zoe, the first Healthy Roots Doll, and raised enough capital from Backstage Capital and others to launch the company in 2019. Healthy Roots’ flagship doll featured washable and stylable hair made of special fibers that would bounce back to natural-looking curls, and this summer the business took off. The technology used to make realistic hair coils is an example of a 0 to 1 idea; it hadn’t been done before. Jean-Charles has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30, and hopes her dolls can contribute to the Haitian economy as well (she is Haitian-American, and plans to return to Haiti and sell Healthy Roots Dolls there).

Yelitsa’s entrepreneurial concept for Black and Brown dolls with natural and stylable hair is impressive because it directly resulted in making a small improvement on the lives of some kids who will come after and potentially walk in her footsteps. Her entrepreneurship journey is interesting because although she didn’t know she wanted to design a product and become an entrepreneur before college, RISD helped her learn it was what she wanted to do, and she was able to wholeheartedly pursue it fresh out of undergrad with a fellowship before seeking venture capital.

Sources:

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=869ec0d20dd679bfJmltdHM9MTcyNzMwODgwMCZpZ3VpZD0wOGQ2NDA3Mi0xOWM4LTZjZjgtMzQ0ZS01NDkxMThkYTZkNGMmaW5zaWQ9NTMxOA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=3&fclid=08d64072-19c8-6cf8-344e-549118da6d4c&psq=yelitsa+jean-charles&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueWFob28uY29tL25ld3Mva25vdy15ZWxpdHNhLWplYW4tY2hhcmxlcy1mb3VuZGVyLTE1MTgwNjE1My5odG1sIzp-OnRleHQ9TWVldCBZZWxpdHNhIEplYW4tQ2hhcmxlcywgdGhlIGZvdW5kZXIsIENFTywgYW5kIGNyZWF0aXZl&ntb=1

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=271cfd69f4e31121JmltdHM9MTcyNzMwODgwMCZpZ3VpZD0wOGQ2NDA3Mi0xOWM4LTZjZjgtMzQ0ZS01NDkxMThkYTZkNGMmaW5zaWQ9NTIyOA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=3&fclid=08d64072-19c8-6cf8-344e-549118da6d4c&psq=yelitsa+jean-charles&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZm9yYmVzLmNvbS9wcm9maWxlL3llbGl0c2EtamVhbi1jaGFybGVzLyM6fjp0ZXh0PVdoaWxlIHN0dWR5aW5nIGlsbHVzdHJhdGlvbiBhdCB0aGUgUmhvZGUgSXNsYW5kIFNjaG9vbCBvZg&ntb=1

If you were a year into MIT’s aerospace engineering program and were offered $100,000 to drop out and put your entrepreneurial skills to the test, would you take the risk?
This is the decision 19-year-old Ethan Thornton faced when he received the Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded to young adults with brilliant venture ideas who will work on building new things instead of attending college. Thornton co-founded Mach Industries, which has captured the interest of the Department of Defense with its hydrogen-powered military systems. Mach Industries develops weapons modeled after bullets rather than missiles, using hydrogen as a simpler and more flexible fuel. Concerns about sustainability have apparently made it all the way to the defense technology sector.
In June 2023, the company landed $5.7 million from a seed funding round. Soon after, venture capitalists invested enough to put their startup valuation at $335 million. What could go wrong?
A lot, apparently – being a successful entrepreneurial CEO as a teenager requires more skill than just engineering knowledge. One of Thornton’s colleagues was hospitalized in an accident with shrapnel all over his body when a hydrogen-powered gun exploded. They had to scrap exciting projects in favor of more economical decisions, and though Mach Industries paved a bridge between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, soon they had big competitors. Military defense systems have seen $100 billion of venture capital in the past few years, and companies like Thornton’s are stealing contracts from giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Mach Industries’ current focus is expanding production processes in order to increase output and be able to deliver systems to the military within a year, a goal they certainly need to meet to see success. Thornton’s hydrogen-powered defense ideas are groundbreaking, but his management abilities will ultimately decide whether Mach Industries will become the face of the future or another buried startup.

Sources:
19-Year-Old MIT Drop-Out Is Making Waves in Defense Technology (techtimes.com)

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=17ab2b4197f5c753JmltdHM9MTcyNjc5MDQwMCZpZ3VpZD0wOGQ2NDA3Mi0xOWM4LTZjZjgtMzQ0ZS01NDkxMThkYTZkNGMmaW5zaWQ9NTI2OQ&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=3&fclid=08d64072-19c8-6cf8-344e-549118da6d4c&psq=mach+industries&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly9maW5hbmNlLnlhaG9vLmNvbS9uZXdzL2ludmVzdG9ycy1nYXZlLXRlZW5hZ2VyLTg1LW1pbGxpb24tMTQzMDE2NTkwLmh0bWw&ntb=1