I am traveling to New York City in February during Grove City’s winter break. As I was researching top things to do in NYC, I stumbled upon Corey Taylor’s Food on Foot Tours. Corey Taylor is a Brooklyn native who was laid off his job at Cablevision. After losing his job, he started giving food tours to his friends. Being a resident of New York City, Taylor knew all the best local places. With his friends’ encouragement, Taylor began his company Food on Foot Tours. On Taylor’s tours, you travel like New Yorkers, so you go by subway and foot. He takes you to places for pizza, pastrami, Chinese, etc. The surprising part of his tour is that all the restaurants are kept secret and each tour is unique. His business began to take off and became #2 out of 828 attractions in NYC on Trip Advisor. The Food on Foot Tour is also the only New York City tour to make Trip Advisor’s top 10 list beating out Ben and Jerry’s ice cream tour in Vermont and Coca-Cola tours in Atlanta. Taylor’s passion has always been food and now he can show off the best of his city’s food every day.
Author Archive for Megan Cotterman
MyLingo was founded in 2012 out of the Harvard Innovation Lab by siblings Adam Polak and Olenka Polak. MyLingo was inspired by the siblings Polish-speaking parents. Adam and Olenka wanted a technology that could help multi-lingual families have the full experience of watching movies together. The brother and sister team began courting Hollywood studies to provide the foreign language audio tracks they already produce for international distribution.
MyLingo is an easy-to-use movie audio synchronization app for iOS and Android mobile devices. It seeks to make the movie going experience more accessible by removing barriers related to language, hearing and audio preference. Movie guests can play an alternative track in their preferred language – including enhanced, controllable English audio – through their smartphones and headphones. The audio tracks are from the movie studios so they are the highest quality and play in perfect synchronization with the movie playing in the theater. MyLingo uses the microphone in the smartphone to “listen” to the audio. Using their own algorithm, MyLingo then matches the unique audio signature to its precise place in the movie. The audio file will only play if it hears the movie.
MyLingo has already raised two million dollars in seed funding. Adam and Olenka are pursuing their passion and solving a problem that they experienced growing up in a multi-lingual family. Adam and Olenka have all the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and I hope they continue to find success with MyLingo.
Last week, Mark Kvamme of Drive Capital came to Grove City. The auditorium was full of students and faculty and everyone was blown away by the passion and success of the entrepreneur. His talk was unlike other lecturers in that he did not come with a list of points to make and specific things we should do a business and entrepreneurship students. Instead, he told stories from his life of past successes and failures. And as we are learning in class, stories are the best and most human way of communicating. Here are three of my main takeaways from the night.
1. Use any experience.
Kvamme got his start at Apple at 19. He is not ashamed to say that his Dad helped get him that job. We should use the networks we have available to us to get where we want to go. Don’t be concerned about using your parents or family friends’ connections. And also, don’t be afraid of the cold call. We are young and have nothing to lose. The worst that could happen is that we get a no or never hear a reply. Kvamme made the point that most people genuinely want to help and we shouldn’t be afraid of reaching out.
2. Solve something your passionate about.
Kvamme said the best and most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who solve their own problems. Kvamme gave us the unique opportunity to hear stories from the early stages of huge internet companies such as Google, YouTube and LinkedIn. Larry Page of Google had the goal to index all of human knowledge. That was his personal goal and he set out to do it. Steve Chen of YouTube wanted an easy way to share videos of his kids to his parents in China. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn wanted a programmed way to network and manage his connections. The best entrepreneurs are solving their own problems.
3. There is good and bad in every entrepreneur’s journey.
Kvamme used an analogy of his dirt racing adventures to make this point. He has had good dirt races where he has almost won, but he has also had horrible crashes. According the Kvamme, the best way to prepare for failure is to know your subject area and believe in your value proposition. Don’t let fear stop you from taking risks, but make sure the risk is worth the reward.
These are just some of my key takeaways. Mark Kvamme was a very interesting speaker and story teller. And I know he left a lasting impact on all in attendance. Do you have any takeaways to add? Leave a comment below!
Benelab is a search engine created by Jack Kim that donates 100% of its revenue to charity. Kim transformed an everyday task like web search into a vehicle for good. Kim learned HTML and website design as a freshman in high school and enjoyed it so much he began designing his own websites. His first website was a search engine that averaged around 2,000 visitors per month. And Kim made around 200-300 dollars per month with this elementary search engine. That is when Kim realized how easy it was to make money on search engines with relatively few visitors. From this experience, Kim realized he could use a search engine to generate money for charity. Benesearch.com was launched and it simply rerouted searches to Google and generated revenue, or in this case donations, on a CPM basis.
The summer after creating the website, Kim attended a business program at Stanford where he learned the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and he decided to take another shot at his search engine idea. He relaunched the website as Benelab.org and routed the searches through Bing this time. He created his team from friends at his high school. Kim wanted the company to have a young entrepreneurial feel with all young business partners.
Jack Kim innovated in an industry that is dominated by Google, Yahoo and Bing. And the idea of a charity search engine isn’t knew. But Benelab is the first search engine to donate 100% of its revenue to charity. If only 1 in 1 million people switched to Benelab, the non-profit would be able to donate $250,000 a month to charity.
The idea of She Reads Truth began in 2012 with a few godly women who wanted to help girls get into God’s word daily. In 2014, She Reads Truth became more official and launched a website and an app. They wanted to help foster a community of women committed to growing closer to Jesus by reading His Word. She Reads Truth is a daily blog of devotionals that are either written on one book of the Bible or on a topic, such as Advent or Lent. She Reads Truth is also an e-commerce store selling beautiful devotional books that mirror the daily blog, creative prints and other merchandise that help bring women closer to the Bible.
I discovered She Reads Truth on Instagram with their lovely images of daily Scripture verses and other truths. I was intrigued by their social media, so I visited their website and was drawn in by the clean design and by the truth they were sharing in their devotionals. She Reads Truth is the first model I have seen that merged a website, an app and social media to get women studying the Bible and interacting with each other. She Reads Truth is able to offer free devotionals because of the support they receive in their e-commerce store which supplements their blog. Each time I scroll down to the comment section, I feel like I am a part of a vast community of fellow believers.
She Reads Truth is a high touch entrepreneurial business. It is more than a website and an app, it is helping women all over the world pursue meaning and purpose in their lives. I would encourage you to check out their website and start exploring what they offer. And if you are a guy, you are in luck, they just launched He Reads Truth this past month, so go check it out!
In my search for young entrepreneurs, I came across the website of an Oakland-based start-up called Cleff. Clef is a two-factor authentication with no passwords or tokens. This start-up interested me with their simple approach to solving a big problem affecting anyone in this technological age, online security. We all know we should have more complicated passwords than old pet names or birthdays, but we can’t remember anything more sophisticated.
After entering login information in an app on the web, the app shows an animated wave form generated for this session. On your phone, you open the Clef app and after verifying it’s you with your PIN number, you point your phone’s camera at the screen. By scanning the wave pattern, Clef knows that you’re actually sitting there in front of the app. And all of this happens in a matter of seconds. Clef is already being used by over 50,000 sites. It eliminates the need to remember long complicated passwords and makes all your logins more secure.
Clef was started by Brennen Byrne, Mark Hudnall and Jesse Pollak. After some searching on their site, I found their about page with their core values listed and explained. They listed five values that are very important to them, their company and their employees. The values are very telling of the type of entrepreneurs they are and aspire to be. Their first value is to fight the default of exclusion. In Silicon Valley, inequality and exclusion are the norm. Clef recognizes the need for diversity and inclusion in order to generate better ideas. Second, we succeed together. I think it is a common fault of entrepreneurs to think they can do everything on their own. But success is more easily found when people work together. Third, build trust with truth. Clef is committed to transparency and open communication and believe that openness will make them all better entrepreneurs. Fourth, be better today than yesterday. Entrepreneurs must keep innovating and never reach complacency. Clef is constantly looking inward and analyzing their mistakes because they believe improvement requires reflection. And lastly, treat others the way they’d like to be treated. The founders of Clef recognize that everyone has different needs and in order to solve problems and help others, they must see things from many different perspectives.
Clef keeps identities safe online and is a genius idea in its simplicity. However, I think I learned more about great entrepreneurship from their strong values listed on their webpage. Those 5 values give the reader a glimpse into how Byrne, Hudnall and Pollak operate and interact with their customers. Entrepreneurs who are team players and embrace the diversity of perspectives and ideas will be much more successful in business and relationships.