22-year-old Hogoé Kpessou was born in the West African nation of Togo before moving to the US as a child. While in the States, peers made fun of her name, a name that she soon grew to dislike due to the ridicule it brought. However, her dislike of this name would change when she took the leap from being an Uber Eats driver to starting a company making luxury bags, which she eventually named “Kpessou”.

Hogoé was granted $10,000 from her mother to start her business, and now is nearing seven figure worth of revenue from her company before the end of 2023. Her bags are crafted with skill and have an iconic emblem of a golden bee. Currently, Hogoé runs the company alone, but plans on hiring a handful of people soon to help relieve the stress that comes with single-handedly running a luxury brand.

It is estimated that the brand is “seeing a 3,900% transaction increase… [while] social traffic has grown 31,000% and direct site traffic climbed 50,000%” (www.businessinsider.com). Hogoé Kpessou used her skill of making bags to make her name, which she was once ridiculed for, a name of luxury and inspiration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a mental health crisis arose: a crisis that Gen-Z entrepreneurs Travis Chen and Brian Femminella would rise to meet. This duo created an app called SoundMind. This app both produces and releases music that is made specifically to help reduce anxiety. The music is made by people that work specifically for the company, and soon the company plans on launching a creator platform to start partnering with independent music artists that would like to create music for the app.

Chen and Femminella faced the challenge of getting investors and support due to their young age. However, through hard work and perseverance, this team of entrepreneurs proved themselves worthy and has since raised six figures in pre-seed funding.

SoundMind is a clever and useful way to help people around the world better manage their anxiety through the avenue of music. This company is living proof that no matter the age, you can make a difference in people’s lives by utilizing those around you and putting your heads together to make something impactful.

Born in 2001, my brother Tommy Serritella created a brand, “TS Edits”. Growing up, our parents took us to Motocross and Supercross events every year and my brother took a particular interest in the dangerous and thrilling sport of dirt bike racing. Little did he know that what started out as a hobby of film and photography of local dirt bike tracks would eventually become a thriving business.

Tommy would regularly go to the tracks with camera in hand and a vision. Rain or shine, he would take beautiful pictures and clips of local riders, edit them to perfection and post them on YouTube and, eventually, TikTok. Inevitably, the riders came to know my brother as he tagged them in his videos. As his skills were honed and his name was familiar, riders were soon paying him to take pictures and make videos of them. Tommy’s internet following grew, loyal customers spread his name and he expanded his reach to different racetracks. He made merchandise that both family, friends, and clients alike bought, ranging from sweatshirts to car stickers.

After two years of college for a video editing major, his New York based business took a turn for the better when he got an email from a company all the way in California. The company running the YouTube channels of two of the biggest names in Motocross racing, the Reed family and the Deagan family, wanted to hire him as an editor and videographer. Within a month, his housing, car, and job were set up, and he moved to California. While simultaneously working for this new company, in his free time he grew his own business, networking and even getting close with the Reed and Deagan families themselves. Now, he plans on making a move to North Carolina with the company and the families to continue growing his skills and following.

This self-taught and creative entrepreneur saw the opening for use of his talents in the Motocross community, a community he holds a passion for.

Currently the most popular music streaming platform on the market, Spotify changed the world by making audio accessible. Founded in 2006 and launched in 2008, the company was started by millennial and GenX entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, respectively. The company is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and was created as a way to combat music piracy.

Ek, the current CEO and Chairman of Spotify, begun his journey as an entrepreneur when he was 13 years old as a website designer. Before creating Spotify, Ek worked for multiple companies and even started an advertising company called Advertigo, which he later sold to his future business partner Lorentzon.

Spotify marks its mission as wanting “to unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it”. The service is considered a “freemium” service, providing special features to those that pay for a better account.

As of January of 2022, Spotify had made over $2.1 billion. Over the course of the years Spotify has acquired many small businesses in order to enhance their own, ranging from music tech companies to data science consulting firms to music marketplaces and studios. The company continues to expand, finding untapped niches such as podcasts and small-artist discovery. (https://startuptalky.com/spotify_success_story/)

Spotify’s story is a wonderful example of the necessity of networking, whether that be through people or through companies as a whole. By integrating so many different outlets and company types, Spotify has been able to make their platform stand out from all other music streaming platforms, most notably in the department of music recommendations and introducing listeners to songs, artists, and genres that they may have never heard before by making custom playlists for each listener as well as making others’ playlists easily accessible. Spotify is a testament to the notion that all ideas can be expanded upon and explored, something vital to the heart of entrepreneurship.

Whether you are well-versed in global travel or someone just looking for a place to crash overnight during a road trip, chances are you have heard of Airbnb.

Millennials Brian Chesky and his roommate Joe Gebbia were living in a San Francisco apartment in 2007, when the Industrial Designers’ Conference was coming to town.  Both men were unemployed and thought to capitalize on the shortage of hotel rooms and accommodations by offering an air mattress and breakfast for $80 per night to designers looking to stay for the conference (hence the name Airbed and Breakfast). They set up a simple website and welcomed three people to stay that showed up at their door.

While this sounded like a great new business opportunity to Brian and Joe, everyone they spoke to would tell them what a bad idea this was, and how no one would rent a room in their home to complete strangers. They invited a friend, Nathan Blecharczyk to help with a business plan, and the months that followed would prove difficult until they were drowning in debt and desperate for a win. After a number of creative yet failed attempts to get the business going, the founders’ spirit and passion caught the eye of Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator program.  They were able to procure $20,000 in funding and headed to New York to build relationships with hosts and guide them on how to create the best experience for their guests. (Airbnb Startup Story: The Journey of Airbnb Founder Brian Chesky (boldbusiness.com)

What set the Airbnb site apart from other vacation rental sites, is that it was urban. It was for the adventurous travelers who were also millennials, as opposed to the families renting vacation homes at the Jersey Shore. At the start, it was renting a room while the hosts were still in the home. It offered a millennial college grad a way to make some money on their loft apartment while they crashed on the couch of a friend. People began to feel like real estate moguls without owning real estate. The Inside Story Behind the Unlikely Rise of Airbnb – Knowledge at Wharton (upenn.edu)  And while the intent wasn’t to compete with the hotel industry, Airbnb’s exponential growth year over year, began to get the attention of hotels.

Now, with over 4 million hosts around the world, Airbnb is a publicly traded company with the founders being worth over $9B each. “We had a saying that you would do everything by hand until it was painful.  So Joe and I would photograph homes until it was painful, then we’d get other photographers. Then we’d manage them with spreadsheets until it was painful. Then we got an intern.” (Brian Chesky (forbes.com)

While the idea of renting space isn’t unique, and the desire to make one’s stay enjoyable is a tale as old as time, what makes this entrepreneurial story interesting to me is that the founders never fully understood how big their idea could get. They never dreamed of becoming billionaires, and I can appreciate their naivete. Upon learning of the many business plan modifications they made as each one failed, from air mattresses to cereal boxes, the principles that can be applied here are the importance of persistence and creativity. Entrepreneurship is not for the weak, for those who cower at every “no”.

Airbnb’s mission is built around making people around the world feel like they could “belong anywhere”. Even the logo is a squiggly shape that symbolizes “Belonging”. It’s a combination of a heart, a location pin and the “A” in Airbnb. They want travelers to feel like they belong when they land in a place far from home, after a long day’s journey. The company’s culture is one of caring and showing humanity. How Airbnb Found a Mission—and a Brand | Fortune.  It is inspiring to be part of a generation that forms businesses around showing compassion to those around us.