Garrett Gee was a 21 year old student attending Brigham Young University in Utah when he saw that there was a new iPad launching back in 2011.  Gee had already been thinking about how bad the current QR code scanning apps were and saw this as an opportunity to be one of the first people to create an app for the iPad 2 that was compatible and useful. Garrett did this under the assumption that Apple would post their top 10 apps for the new device like they had in the past and, when it came out, he spent two sleepless nights in a row to make a properly functioning QR code scanner and titled it “Scan”. Sure enough, quickly after the iPad was out, he made it onto that list of apps. Gee then took this to Shark Tank where he quickly was rejected, however, he did not stop there. Garrett kept developing the app and soon after the rejection of the Sharks, he was offered 54 million dollars to sell his app to snapchat.  Garrett Gee is a great example of a risk taking entrepreneur that didn’t give up, but rather, found ways to pivot until he succeeded!

Hart Main was 13 years old when he saw his sister selling “girly scented” candles for a school fundraiser and decided to tease her about candles being so girly, however, that sparked an idea. He very quickly developed the idea of a candle that has scents catered to men and called it the Man Can. Main and his parents didn’t have too much money to put into the idea, so they started using soup cans to fit the candle inside and still uses them to this day. Harts business quickly blew up and, at age 17, has now been making 6 digit figures annually for the past 3 years and the numbers are only going up. Main has not been keeping all of this money for himself though, rather, he donates a portion of it to community kitchens in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Michigan. Hart Main is a great example of an entrepreneur that didn’t just let an idea sit in the back of his mind, but rather, he acted upon it and the payoff of that action was much more than he ever could have anticipated!

Nick D’Aloisio, a computer programmer, decided that he had enough of scrolling through large articles trying to look for simple summaries at the age of 16. Nicholas decided to use his passion for programming to fulfill the need he saw by creating Summly. Summly is an app that takes news articles and summarizes them concisely and quickly. Little did D’Aloisio know, Yahoo loved his idea. Yahoo loved it so much that they offered him approximately thirty million dollars for it! Nick happily took this offer and quickly became a millionaire at the young age of 16. He now owns a new startup called Sphere and is attending Oxford University to pursue his PhD in Philosophy. Clearly, Nicholas D’Aloisio has a rich future ahead of him.

The name George Bailey may remind you of an old Christmas movie but I assure you that the co-founder of Coral Eyewear is much more. George, born in Manchester England in 2000, saw the detrimental cost that plastic fishing nets lost in the ocean, as well as landfills full of plastic has on the environment. He sought to get rid of this problem while also creating a product that is marketable and thus, Coral Eyewear was created. Coral Eyewear is a company that takes recycled fishing nets and old plastic in landfills and repurposes it to make stylish, comfortable, and environmentally beneficial sunglasses. Bailey saw the problem of this wasted plastic for a long time and spent multiple years putting this problem on the backburner of his mind until the solution popped out at him. George was shocked to find that the idea didn’t exist already and, seeking to not just be environmentally friendly, but rather, “planet-positive”, he immediately jumped on the idea after receiving a £50,000 donation from his colleges entrepreneurship department to get it started. George Bailey currently has his Coral Eyewear product line in over 100 stores in the U.K. and plans to continue making large planet-positive strides as long as he can.