WHO IS SHE? Liza Koshy is a current Youtuber, influence, and entrepreneur. She Has over 6 million subscribers, who watch her funny, random videos she creates each week. By the time she was 21, her net worth is more than 4 million. She was born and raised in Texas, and moved to LA a couple years back.

HOW DID SHE BECOME FAMOUS? Liza began utilizing the Vine application to make videos here and there and people loved her humor. Then after the Vine app was gone, she went to YouTube to create content. From there, she has had the opportunity to star on some shows and have her own YouTube Red show.

HOW IS SHE CHANGING THE WORLD? Liza Koshy not only uses her huge following to share love, but also she is a Christian. She doesn’t shove it down people’s throats, but she always is living out her faith with her interactions with others. She also is a brand ambassador for The Giving Keys, which is an incredible company that sells key jewelry to support homelessness. She has been able to make thousands through merchandise and millions off of just her YouTube Channel. She supports great organizations as well. She does all of this by using clean humor and welcoming personality.

It all started in 2006. The idea was born.

It started with just a simple class David Brown and David Cohen lead in hopes to help other entrepreneurs scale their business.

In 2007, Andrew Hyde started the very first Start-Up Weekend. Start-up weekend is a heightened environment for entrepreneurs to come together, idealize, and create solutions to problems in the world through businesses.

As they continued to grow, so did the Startup Weekend, and ultimately their funds came in to create Ventures and Accelerators to help new businesses get on their feet.

Diversity and inclusion is one of the largest pieces of Techstars– “Our mission is to foster inclusion and diversity throughout our entrepreneurial ecosystem. We break down barriers to entrepreneurship worldwide by collaborating with nonprofit organizations, corporations, and individuals in a variety of ways.” This allows them to promote and encourage diversity in ideas and problems that are around the world. If we, as entrepreneurs, don’t seek out different perspectives, cultures, and societies, then we will be extremely narrow minded in seeing the problems of the world. This then causes us to overlook the current needs that will be the most beneficial.

Their slogan is

Techstars is the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed.

The word I want to focus on is “network” it is a program that provides opportunities to entrepreneurs to create relationships with other like minded and motivated people. Just in the weekend I attended this year in Pittsburgh, I was able to get insight and inspiration from mentors and other people there. It was also an awesome time to hear about others ideas in order to help shape yours. Ultimately, the relationships built and networking done creates a web of motivated, encouraging people that will be able to utilize each other to create an incredible world.

Brandless says most of it’s idea in its name. They are essential items that have no brand name on it. Why? How does this help/solve anything? Well Brandless started all because they wanted to solve a problem they believed in.

Their problem with the current market for essential home goods was:

“The system by which goods are made, distributed, sold, and brought home is long overdue for a makeover. When products are manufactured today, they don’t go straight to the store.

Traditional brands have a lot of markups built into their retail pricing; like distribution costs, wholesale to retail markups, and shelf stocking. They’ll pay breakage fees and face settlement costs. In fact, brands are often asked to pay retailers’ in-store marketing costs, end-capping, and more.

And YOU, the customer, end up covering the cost of these additional markups!”

They want to provide good quality, that doesn’t break the bank. How they do it, is by building genuine, direct relationships with both the suppliers and customers to eliminate unnecessary markup and extra charges. Having good customer service and deep connections with the companies they were working with can cause better ethical basis especially dealing with cost.

They also saw many issues with the way these “trusted brands” used unhealthy and unnatural means of making their products, so Brandless tried to focus on safety, quality, and social ethics with each product they made. The social ethics is represented in their testing, research, and how they give back every day. They wanted to make sure they were impacting others. They wanted a tangible act of kindness. In order to do so they work to help fight hunger with feeding America. They have donated over 1,500,000 meals so far!

Seeing that Brandless was only started in 2017, and they are super successful it is obvious they had a very focused. They had a clear problem, a specific way of fixing the problem, and the impact they wanted to have.

This media company isn’t here to just create media and produce it to the masses, but it is a company “that in spires, educates and entertains real women with a creative spirit.” It is a database of DIY projects and ideas where women can go to discover new ideas and DIY crafts/projects.

In 2011, Brit Morin founded the company with living by the quote of: “Turn your passion into your career and you’ll never work a day in your life.” She grew up in love with creating whether that was art, decorating, or even just experimenting.

She saw a problem within the women she was surrounded by saying and depicting themselves as NOT creative people. She hated this concept and hearing this. — This is exactly the basis in which she created Brit + Co. It was “born as a destination where real women could go to get inspired and educated on how to be creative.”

Since 2011, Brit + Co has become one of the largest digital media companies for women. The incredible aspect is their grip on technology as a positive tool and impact. They know the insides and outsides of how “the online connects to the offline.”

This entire story is based upon a girl having a passion, seeing a need, and acting on it to create impact.

This media company isn’t here to just create media and produce it to the masses, but it is a company “that in spires, educates and entertains real women with a creative spirit.” It is a database of DIY projects and ideas where women can go to discover new ideas and DIY crafts/projects.

In 2011, Brit Morin founded the company with living by the quote of: “Turn your passion into your career and you’ll never work a day in your life.” She grew up in love with creating whether that was art, decorating, or even just experimenting.

She saw a problem within the women she was surrounded by saying and depicting themselves as NOT creative people. She hated this concept and hearing this. — This is exactly the basis in which she created Brit + Co. It was “born as a destination where real women could go to get inspired and educated on how to be creative.”

Since 2011, Brit + Co has become one of the largest digital media companies for women. The incredible aspect is their grip on technology as a positive tool and impact. They know the insides and outsides of how “the online connects to the offline.”

This entire story is based upon a girl having a passion, seeing a need, and acting on it to create impact.

Chubbies

Yes, Chubbies is a company that sells short-shorts for guys, BUT many people don’t know the intriguing story behind how they started. The idea of Chubbies was reminding people of their dad’s and of the weekend. The founders would find retro shorts in thrift stores are wear them around.

It all started at a 4th of July party.

To test out the interest in their short-shorts they decided to bring a couple of pairs to Lake Tahoe. They ended up selling out – which proved to them that something they loved was also loved by others. Not only that, but people were open to spending 65 dollars on them. How did they come to this number? – you may ask. They wanted to see how much people would spend so they started at 10 dollars, then each pair after that they increased by 5 to 15 dollars. The last pair they sold was around $65, so they priced their shorts at that. That is an in action example of surveying your target market to see what customers are willing to pay for your product.

After discovering the interest of people, they went to their roots to use the people they know in order to promote. They connected with their past fraternity brothers to get to their target market of college age kids. In Greek life trends spread like wildfire, so it was a perfect way to go about it. Most of their sales were through word of mouth or social media.

Most stories of a company starts with a conversation of a certain passion or mission. For Jeff and Ryan, they met on a semester at sea study abroad program. During this time, the collected different fabrics from the different countries they visited. They wanted to make a positive change in the world while using the fabric they collected.  This is what ignited Serengetee.

Beginning the company, they were absolutely clueless with anything involved in sewing, BUT they knew they wanted to improve the lives of the communities they interacted with. So that ignited their perseverance and passion in creating these tshirts. This illustrates how if used in the redemptive way two people can come together to ignite a fire of change in this world, just through something as simple as fabric pockets onto a shirt. Since then, they have grown in enormous ways. They now have several different lines of clothing and items. They also have tons of different pocket tshirts all surrounding the idea and passion for travel and discovering new cultures.

It is quite a hot commodity, especially because the “wanderlust” persona is very in right now. They discovered a very prominent market and pinpointed an easy, quick, and relatively cheap way to enter it. (AND did it successfully). Now a days having a story and purpose behind your company is necessary to succeed. If people know they are supporting something positive while spending money to benefit themselves, they are much more likely to purchase it. Knowing that, they can feel less guilt/ buyers remorse because they helped out something that is good and “selfless.” It is always nice to feel like you impacted people even in purchasing a hat. It feels great to feel like a good person.

Not only do they give 10% of their profit to help benefit these communities, but they want to help spread the story of the communities as well. Who knew that a travel abroad experience could grow to a huge business that is impacting the world.