“Aesthetics matter. Attractive things work better,” Pink wrote. Emily Oberg’s creation is one of the best example of this. She created a clothing line “Sporty and Rich” where one of the most important features of her product is design. In all clothing, design has at least some degree of importance. Functionality plays in when it comes to clothing specific for climates and activities. However, even when looking for functionality in clothing, design is at the very least in the back of one’s mind. Most clothing lines make an effort to make their clothing look attractive or trendy, even if the clothing has any functional value other than preventing someone from being naked. Oberg however, took this emphasis on design to another level. As you can probably tell by the name of her clothing line—”Sporty and Rich”—Oberg’s goal was to make her aesthetic sporty and rich. Oberg made her brand expensive for the sake of being expensive. She used athletic and minimalist clothes where she made her brand mean “these clothes are what rich people wear.” Her clothes look normal, but what makes them expensive is that the brand is expensive and it’s a way of showing other people “I have money.”

Pulkit K. Agrawal is the perfect example of someone that combined a skill and a “like” (it’s weird to say “passion” if it’s beer, maybe that term is more applicable for the act of brewing). He has a degree from Harvard and has a talent for computer science and data science. How can this possibly relate to beer?

The name of Agrawal’s company shows this collision of unrelated things very well. He named his business The 5th Ingredient. I did not quite get it at first, so I read the about page of his company’s website. The first two sentences say, “There are four essential ingredients in beer: water, malt, hops, and yeast. There is, however, an equally as important, fifth ingredient, which is crucial for breweries in taking their practices and results to the next level – data.” Agrawal developed a software company that allowed breweries to “improve beer quality, save costs and time, and achieve the perfect brew” (according to Forbes).

As a computer science major who is unsure about her passion for computers as much as just the act of coding, this is very inspiring to watch someone use his coding knowledge and apply it to an outside area of interest. Agrawal made it into Forbes’s 30 Under 30 this year.

The founders of Chirps have a unique story that follows a common model for groups forming to innovate. The entrepreneurs of Chirps all have a shared experience. To understand this experience, you have to understand what Chirps are. Chirps were initially chips but have spread to cookies and protein powder. All of these are made with powdered crickets. These have three times more protein and 40% less fat than a tortilla chip.

Now when I say all of the entrepreneurs had a shared experience of eating a bug, it makes a lot more sense. Chirps describes their story as, “in 2013 three college friends ate bugs at the same time on opposite sides of the planet.” That is a great way to get people to say “what???” It is an interesting story—it includes the “weird factor” that makes people interested and a common value like friendship. How the story goes is that, while studying abroad, someone ate a caterpillar in Tanzania, another a scorpion in China, and the last had worms in New York. The students returned to their home together and shared their experiences and collaboratively created a hunch.

Their hunch took off and they made a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. The founders also made it into Forbes’ 2016 30 under 30.

I thought it was only right to dedicate a blog post to the man who’s app gets me through stressful days. I love at the end of a long day to just scroll through pictures of flower bouquets and fields. Some people use this app for recipes, project inspiration, or even shopping. You probably guessed by now that I am talking about Pinterest. Ben Silbermann, the CEO and cofounder of Pinterest, is one of the richest millennials and self-made billionaires in the world.

Every entrepreneur starts with an interest or a problem (or usually both!). For Silbermann, he enjoyed collecting things as a kid. “Collecting tells a lot about who you are,” he said. He also mentioned that, after looking online, “there wasn’t a place to share that side of who you were.” Silbermann had a hunch to create a virtual pinboard.

He took to this hunch to a liquid network to get other input and help. He did this by entering the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition. “The prize was meeting with venture capitalists First Mark Capital in New York, which gave us half our money.” This was a catalyst for the creation of Pinterest. He now has a net worth of $1.5 billion.

I had the privilege of meeting Severin Hacker, the co-founder of Duolingo, at a technology event in 2018. Just by the way he talked, anyone could tell he was extremely passionate about what he did. This passion started long before 2018 or even when Duolingo was created in 2011. “What originally drew me to computers was video games and the desire to build your own games and understand how those games are built. I was somewhat obsessed,” Hacker said. He was able to take his interest and hobby, and use it as a starting block for his entrepreneurial thinking.

Hacker went to college at Carnegie Mellon University (which was actually my second choice to Grove City) in Pittsburgh. His initial idea was to create an application that could translate internet sites. In fact, Duolingo was what Hacker called a “happy mistake.” This example affirms what we learned in class that the best ideas sometimes come by accident when we put our initial ideas out there for testing and review. This “happy mistake” later led him to be included in the MIT Technology Review’s “Top Innovators under 35” and receive One Young World’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award. If I learned anything from this, it’s to not hold back my incomplete ideas because they might just be a few steps away from being successful.