On a hot LA summer day in 2012, nine-year-old Caine started working at his father’s used auto parts store. While working there, Caine noticed that there were a lot of empty boxes in the back room that weren’t being used. He decided that it would be fun to make arcade games out of them. He set up the games in his father’s shop and began charging people a nickel to play them. He used his old toys, which were mostly hot wheels, and some toys that he bought at the dollar store.
Caine used arcade tickets that came out of a ticket slot- just like a real arcade. His business grew and eventually, it took up the whole store. Caine’s pricing system was simple. He said, “For one dollar, you get four turns. For two dollars, you get a fun pass. A fun pass gives you 500 turns.”
Because his father’s shop is located on an industrial street, initially Caine didn’t have any customers. Then on one fateful day, Nirvan Mullick visited the auto parts shop to buy a new door handle for his car. He met Caine and decided to try out his arcade. He bought a fun pass. He was impressed that Caine made his own games with simple materials that he found around the shop. For example, Caine was able to make a claw machine using just a string and a hook. Though Caine hadn’t had a single customer before Mullick, he didn’t give up. He kept making games and looking for new ways to improve the arcade.
A few weeks after playing, Mullick came back and asked if he could make a documentary on Caine’s arcade. To bring in some more customers, Mullick advertised a flash mob at Caine’s Arcade on Facebook. The page went viral, gaining over 23,000 fans. It continued to grow and ended up making the front page of Reddit. On the day of the event, NBC news showed up, along with a whole crowd of people, all calling out “We came to play.”
After the documentary was released, Caine had the arcade open every Saturday for all his new customers. Though Caine later decided to retire from the arcade when he turned 11, his arcade was not forgotten. Mullick created a college fund for Caine, and viewers raised $240,000. Caine’s idea inspired Mullick to start the Imagination Foundation, which is a non-profit organization that worked to inspire innovation in kids. It hosted the cardboard challenge, which inspired 100 schools in 9 different countries to make their own cardboard arcades.
Caine ended up starting a bicycle shop where he repaired and remade new bikes. He now has a college fund and was offered a full scholarship at Colorado State University after speaking at the Colorado Innovation Network Summit. In whatever Caine decides to do next, he can look back at his first success, one summer, some cardboard boxes, and a fun idea to make something of it.
other taught her to cook when she was five years old. In 2008, her father was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Since then, she and her family became devoted to living a healthy life, in their eating and lifestyle choices. Since then, they have been able to reverse her father’s diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.
ky, buzzing, and can cause a pretty painful sting. Lemonade, it’s a tasty, cool, refreshing drink on a summer’s day. The two don’t have much in common but, Mikaila Ulmer decided to bring these ideas together with her business Me and the Bees Lemonade. Mikalia Ulmer was born in Austin, Texas to parents who inspired her to be innovative.
A billion. It’s a number that seems impossible to picture in our minds. It’s one that counts our population, our galaxy, and it could make up seemingly infinite lifetimes. For most people, this idea of the billion exists only in the hypothetical or in the things beyond this world. So, when someone achieves it, it leaves the world wondering how.
e with an idea for a product. You come up with an idea for an app. That’s the story of how Snapchat was founded. Evan Spiegel was a product design major at Stanford University when he and his friends Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown came up with the idea for Picaboo, an app that shared messages and videos that would disappear shortly after they were sent. It distinguished itself from other messaging apps, because, unlike them, the pictures would be deleted within a short time frame after they were sent. The creators of Snapchat observed that people didn’t need these pictures saved forever, and how sometimes people preferred to show others a picture for a little while.