If you live in a big city like Los Angeles, chances are you’ve seen someone riding a Boosted board, usually zipping through traffic and looking like a total stud while doing it. Launching one of the most successful kick starter campaigns to date, the founders of Boosted had the idea to put a motor on a skateboard and have that motor be controlled by a remote…eliminating the need to push like on a conventional skateboard. Founders John Ulmen, Sanjay Dastoor, and Matt Tran all met at Stanford University’s engineering programming, all with hopes to invent something that would change the world. Together they envisioned a future where people would opt for an alternative form of transportation that would actually add joy to people’s daily lives. John Ulmen loved cruising around campus on his long board skateboard, but he was tired of pushing around and being all sweaty by the time he got to class each day. On top of that, for Ulmen to get places in a timely manner, he would have to push constantly, even up hills, thus tiring him out even more. Being the creative engineer Ulmen was, he built a motor for his long board skateboard that was controlled by a handheld remote control used for RC cars. Now with a working prototype, Ulmen constantly got stopped on the side walk by people wondering what the heck he was riding. He would always tell them his problem, but after awhile, all the hype his prototype got in the streets gave him an idea. Noticing its success, Ulmen teamed up with the other founders to make this product a real thing. With an inspiring promotional video, they were able to launch an extremely successful kick starter campaign, and are now selling out of boosted boards left and right. With advances in their product’s design and performance, Boosted is slowly changing the way pedestrians travel.

If you’re at all into sneaker culture, the app GOAT is essential to keeping up with the latest sneaker prices. GOAT is an app where sneakerheads can buy and sell their shoes, similar to eBay. Its valuation is huge, the last public record has it at worth over 250 million dollars, but for the founders of this app this success is new. Co-founder and CEO Eddy Lu is the brainchild of the GOAT app, but he is also the brainchild of many other failures in his career. After the release of the iPhone, Eddy Lu and his business partner Daishin Sugano decided to quit their respected jobs at Lehman Brothers and pursue making iPhone games and small 99 cent apps. After this endeavor, they decided to pursue a golf apparel company, which failed. After this, they decided to start a high-end Tea company, which failed. It was not until the failure of their next idea of Japanese cream puffs that they decided to pursue the idea of GOAT, an online marketplace where people could buy and sell sneakers. 

With an emerging high-end fashion trend, GOAT along with only a few others is among the front runners to this rapidly growing market.

Eddy Lu has an inspiring story not only for his amazing success, but because of his consistent attempts of persistence through times of failure. Failure can be something that depresses and discourages people to stop pursuing their dreams and ideas, and Eddy Lu’s story helps inspire young entrepreneurs to never give up, even when you are at rock bottom.

If you’ve opened Instagram in the past few months, chances are that you’ve seen an ad for the latest informational company, Morning Brew. Riding off of a very clever name, Morning Brew’s mission is to give millennials a daily newsletter that delivers a stock market recap, a few short briefs on the most important business news of the day and a small section with lifestyle content. The content provides a unique mix of stock and business essentials, thus giving young people striving to know everything in the business world the tools they need to do so.

The newsletter was founded by two University of Michigan students Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief in 2015. With over 200,000 subscribers, Morning Brew is coming up and now competing with big news outlets like Bloomberg Business in the target market of 18 to 30 year olds. To come up with the perfect mix of information, the two interviewed there target market to see what they really wanted out of a business newsletter. “We worked with more than 75 students to help them prepare for interviews and internships and we’d always ask the question, “How do you keep up with the business world?” It was like every student had rehearsed their answers together beforehand, saying something to the effect of “I read the WSJ…and I read it because it’s a prerequisite to say you’re well-read in business and it’s what my parents do, but it’s dense, dry, and too long to read cover-to-cover,” explains the duo to TechCrunch.com

Most of the success with the target stems from heavy advertising on social media, which is primarily consumed by 18 to 30 year olds. With a long term goal to expand the newsletter to everyone interested in business, Morning Brew is well on their way to becoming a staple in the business community, and demonstrates two millennial entrepreneurs working hard to satisfy a market lots of people thought didn’t needed innovation.

Taking 80’s short shorts and creating an entire brand around them, Chubbies designs and markets very unique and vintage styles of shorts, keeping the inseams shorter than 7 inches. A Fraternity brother’s dream, Chubbies embodies the entirety of Greek life across America. Whether they are running not so traditional ads via social media, or ranting about the latest cultural development, founders Kyle Hency, Rainer Castillo, Preston Rutherford, and Tom Montgomery like to run their company differently from other fashion retailers, and ultimately, this business model has worked extremely well for them.

All graduates from Stanford University Kyle Hency, Rainer Castillo, Preston Rutherford, and Tom Montgomery it felt like most natural thing in the world to start a company revolving around retro-inspired shorts. During their college career, they all had similar tastes in styles, all wearing these retro short shorts they found in thrift stores around the Stanford area. Using this tradition as inspiration, they decided to start a fashion company. The entire endeavor started when the four when to a fourth of July party beach party at Lake Tahoe. They decided to make several test pairs, about 20. They wore them to the party, and passed out a few pairs. The shorts were a hit, but not because they were anything special, but because of the culture the founders brought with them.

“That was immediately where we saw how impactful the shorts were and also how polarizing the shorts were,” Montgomery says. Reactions ranged from “‘Good lord, those shorts are the greatest things I’ve ever seen,’ to ‘Get off of my beach, men’s legs belong under layers of fabric,'” Montgomery told Business Insider.

After the success of the fourth of July party, the four went back to their Stanford Apartments and immediately started selling the shorts on a newly created website. They had the perfect concept down, but they wanted to find easy and cheap ways to market. They decided to fully embody the fraternity culture by recruiting fellow “Frat Bros” around the country, offering students free merchandise in return for social media advertising, via posting on Facebook and Instagram.

Regardless of their unconventional business methods, the company is worth millions, and in the process of buying out companies copying their business model.

Ok, maybe the title is a bit misleading, but in a way, it is kind of like a real life Robinhood story.

Many millennials have probably heard the mobile trading app called RobinHood, and everything it tries to accomplish. If you aren’t familiar with what RobinHood does, they provide a commission-free stock brokerage service, something that had never been done before 2011. Robinhood makes money  “from its margin trading service, Robinhood Gold, which starts at $6 a month. Additionally, Robinhood earns revenue by collecting interest on the cash and stocks in customer accounts, much like a bank collects interest on cash deposits.” That’s taken directly from their site. But for the big question, how did the company start?

Amid the 2008 financial crisis, founders Baiju Bhatt and Vladimir Tenev met at Stanford university as math majors. They both went their separate ways, Tenev going on to pursue a PHD, and Bhatt going on to work in finance. During the recession Bhatt was able to see the future of stock trading, using electronics and algorithms. They developed their own trading system while living out of a small apartment in San Francisco (they insisted on being near silicone valley).

The two, now starting to slowly build their team, would then go on to pitch their prototypes and software in New York. Realizing that lots of hedge funds and banks were using extremely antiquated technologies,  they would realize that there was an opportunity to create a business. Vladimir and Baiju put together a team of mathematicians and computer scientists to create software products that made it easier for banks to write trading strategies.

Their goal was to create a platform in which people could buy and sell stocks easily, without the complexity of most platforms. They succesfully did this, their product has won tons of awards for its innovation.