Jonathan Wagner has been around the food industry his whole life. His father founded the Johnsonville Sausage Company and Wagner has been involved with that as far as he can remember. Dain Pool has been around the restaurant business his whole life. His father, Dan, is the CEO of Pool Restaurant Groups. As Pool was working in restaurant consulting, Wagner approached him with the idea for a food truck business that would branch off of the Johnsonville product line.

Pool was reluctant at first, stating the potential “anti-corporate” chic. The duo suggest strongly that they are not corporate, and the Johnsonville product line is merely a base for their current trucks. Part of their effort to do so has been a strong social networking campaign pre-launch, revealing menu items and letting customers pick the final two menu items. Eventually, The Butcher’s Son plans to have 200 trucks across the country, from the original Johnsonville line to Asian, dessert, and burritos.

Why so ambitious? Pool sees the food truck industry exploding the way that the fast-food industry did. There has been virtually no halt in the growing market and sales of food trucks nationwide and now is the time to jump on that. Further, with this combination of food-service savvy and food-making moxie the trucks plan to feature high-quality food at affordable prices. The Butcher’s Son debuted their first two trucks in Dallas and are currently working through the up-scaling phase of the business.

Dhairya Pujara was your average, high-achieving, millennial, Indian male. Pujara went to Drexel University and earned his engineering degree, excited to use his skills in the real world. However, when he went Mozambique to try and help the healthcare system he was disheartened. Many people think of the developing world as seriously lacking high-tech medical equipment. Pujara found the opposite – an overabundance of unusable equipment. Parts were missing, ultrasounds had no gel, the socket did not configure to Mozambique’s wall sockets. Donated equipment was wasting away because the manuals where in English and Spanish.

Pujara hit rock bottom when a patient died choking on his own blood in front of him because, despite his engineering degree from a good school, he didn’t actually know how to fix a generator that could have saved this man’s life. It was through this experience of his and the lack of knowledge within hospital employees that helped him find the idea for his start-up. Each member of the staff knew various bits and pieces about the different technology within the hospital, and long lectures from Pujara weren’t helping very much since he didn’t know Portuguese. This cooperative, informal, peer-to-peer training was the most effective form.

Pujara had a plan. To educate the world through “non-formal learning.” Thus, Ycenter was born. This company aims to “[offer] non-formal learning experiences that creates an impact in the world.” Through brief 3-5 day learning experiences to extensive 3-6 month immersions Ycenter aims to provide this brand of practical learning to anyone who will take it. And through recent events such as the TedX Summit in Philadelphia based around the Big 5 colleges Pujara aims to spread this kind of learning to the world at large, making individuals, communites, and nations more knowledgeable and successful.

http://y-center.org/

Two brothers – Mehdi and Reza Farsi – and longtime friend Eric Ferguson were not going to send out resumes to corporate entities and hope for a job coming out of college. Instead, the three decided to create their own company; however, many would think they had chosen the wrong industry. Bicycle sales are traditionally dominated by giants within that sector and to break in with a start-up company seemed a monumental task. Yet for these three it was as simple as putting all the pieces together.

Coming out of Arizona State the Farsi brothers and Ferguson decided that if they were going to go forward with this company, they were going to make a different, unique, slick bike that would appeal to younger males and especially those who do bicycling in urban environments. They went back to a simpler one-gear design that would be sleek, light, and maneuverable. These “fixies” are all personalized and will only sell for a few months before new models are made and replace them. And so far, it has been a hit.

One of the biggest innovations that the company used was to sell exclusively on Amazon when it began. This let millions of customers be able to see their products without having to pay for that kind of exposure. Sales have skyrocketed due to this and the organically funded business now even has three retail stores. Their bikes sell for around $300 instead of the typical mid $400 range that most bikes of this quality go for, and people have responded and really enjoy the experience that these three millennial entrepreneurs are selling.

Have you ever watched a movie and marveled as a character searches through a screen using only their hands in the air to quickly sort through massive amounts of data and information instantly? Well marvel no more. Entrepreneurs David Holz and Michael Buckwald are leading the charge into the future with their start-up Leap Motion.

In 2008 David Holz was a student at UNC Chapel Hill, working towards a Ph.D. in mathematics. However, as he worked through the arduous work he would need to complete his program he became entirely fed up with the bulkiness and restrictiveness of a keyboard and mouse. By the time he had joined forces with friend Michael Buckwald he had a prototype that would eliminate wires and tactile devices forever. But there was a problem: although accurate and useful, the device was still the size of a keyboard. But investor Bill Warner was impressed and helped them get their product down to an $80 dollar device the size of a USB.

Leap Motion is not without its flaws. You still want a keyboard. Most of all people do miss the ability to know that they have grabbed and item or distinctly clicked something. But the accuracy and compactness of the device – already in Best Buys across the nation – is making headlines and money. Investors have poured in over $45 million to Holz and Buckwald in an effort to make Leap Motion the new normal. Leap Motion as a whole has over 80 employees. With almost no advertising the company received over $10 million in pre-sales before the launch of Leap Motion in July. Soon enough we will all be perusing our computers with a simple twitch of our finger.

Leap Motion in Action

Shama Kabani is your typical overachiever. She covered her entire tuition at the University of Texas through applying for scholarships far and wide. She went on to earn her master’s degree and started her own business straight out of graduate school. Yet this final step was not always in the plan. Ms. Kabani had hoped to take her social media savy – her own blog and a master’s thesis on Twitter – into a corporate position. However, she found that big firms like McKinsey and Bain were not interested in social media at the time.

At this point Kabani decided it was time to take matters into her own hands and enlighten the world to what she knew was a profitable way to conduct marketing. She started a blog to give small business tips about using social media. She soon found that her site was booming and her knowledge was legitimately in demand. So she did something incredibly difficult yet simply logical – she wrote a definitive book on the prudence of social media marketing called The Zen of Social Media Marketing. 

Now it was time to get down to business – literally. With a bestseller on what she could offer to businesses Kabani started the Marketing Zen Group which consults businesses in ways to increase leads, get offers out to clients, and generally use social media to their advantage in growing their business. With a team of over 40 spread throughout the globe, this decentralized service team is booming, estimated to bring in over $2 million in revenue this year. The employees are free to work on their own in their location and simply connect and help clients. Clients have seen dramatic increases in revenue and particularly leads, with one client stating an increase in that number by over ten-fold.

All the while Kabani has never taken money from eager investors, doing this all by herself. All growth has been organic and she intends to keep it that way while the influence and scope of the company grows. For now, Ms. Kabani is content to “focus on bottom-line numbers” and let her book and work take care of the rest.

Andrew Grauer was your average over-achieving student at Cornell University. When he tore his meniscus and couldn’t get to some of his classes in hilly, icy Ithaca he was worried about his performance dropping off. He reasoned that if he had the notes from class there’s no harm in missing – a phenomenon most teenagers have figured out at one point or another. But in Andrew’s case an idea was born with his older brother Jared – a Cornell Law student at the time – to mass produce notes and other study materials in an effort to make money off of disabled, but mostly, lazy college students.

For only $39.95 a month a student can have access to notes, study guides, past exams, flash cards, and more. Over 7 million resources from more than 4,500 universities across the nation are available now via Course Hero. And if you are an uploader then you get free access to all the other resources available. Close to a decade of work has paid off, as Course Hero is scheduled to gross approximately $10 million this year. Tutoring services in the United States have been estimated to exceed $100 billion over the next few years and Grauer has tapped strongly into that market.

Andrew is the CEO and co-founder Jared plays a large role in the company as well as engineer Gregor Carrigan. The Grauer’s father, Fred, is also on the board. He brings valuable experience as the former chairman and CEO of Barclays. Suffice it to say as the database of Course Hero grows, the sky is the limit.