Jack Bonneau was just a kid who needed some extra money to buy Legos. He ended up opening a Lemonade stand called Jack’s Stands at a local farmers’ market and turning a pretty good profit. He then decided to franchise the lemonade stand and would hire other kids to work them. He went to shark tank at the age of 10. The ability to open a franchise that has an empathy aspect to it and be able to make so much money at such a young age is crazy. His desire to have money to do what he wants and help other kids out in there summers. His ability to see that there was a path forward by franchising and getting more and more stands and using his entrepreneurial mind on how to take his business to the next level. Due to legal changes in Denver requiring all venders to have permits, Jack had to shift to a nonprofit system which allows him to bypass the law and accept donations to help kids in need. This shows he wasn’t only concerned with money and his business model runs on empathy and good lemonade. This model is interesting as it makes people feel guilty almost and makes you want to help them out. It’s easy to say no through a screen but when the outcome is right Infront of you it makes it harder. Jack seems like a shoot first aim later type of Entrepeneur and this gives him the ability to spring into a gap in the market when presented and then be able to pivot when needed to best fit the market. He also shows this in his ability to pivot and be flexible. He is innovating by understanding his project was no longer viable under the law, so he opened a nonprofit which helped him adapt and find a new gap. He demonstrates the ability to use his own business ventures to help kids in need and make a social impact on the world. He could have also changed his vision or went another direction but his pure dedication to the cause and passion and pride for his business allowed him to stay true and stay in the business of lemonade stands even if the government said no at first. I think id there are two things to learn from jack they are: 1. Start small and then expand. and 2. Age shouldn’t stop you. Both of these things are key elements to jacks story and success. His ability to completely master his small market and then expand to others is truly a top-level skill that he mastered at such a young age and is truly inspiring.

Adam D’Angelo always loved technology. In 2002 he earned a silver medal at the International Olympiad in informatics. In school at Phillips Exeter Academy, Adam was friends with his fellow classmate Mark Zukerberg. They even built a Synapse Media Player. This and all his other experience pushed and influenced him to create Quora. Adam is a great problem solver as he found a way to highlight and fix a real-world solution to the internet, which is there isn’t always every answer on the web. Quora solves this by being an open forum where people ask all kinds of questions and get there very specific questions answered by others. A big thing is Adams ability to make his business focus more on needs rather than products. Adams passion and social network drove him to create Quora with his talks with Zuckerburg. He also wants to help others and help himself finding small communities around very specific problems or circumstances. His business model is with add revenue. It sold for its ability to rank users biased on how reliable they are and the ability to reach everyone around the world. It’s a worldwide forum with the idea that if you are having a problem someone else is having one. Adam demonstrates very innovative thinking by taking an already existing idea of making online forums, but he made it very niche. His niche was about reliability and solving problems. He used his environment as he was a CTO at Facebook and learned a lot about running a company allowed him to start his own. Adams best innovation was the use of strategic algorithms to create a formatted page for each user. This really let him stick out and it helped him achieve his niche of catering to specific issues people face or question. Adam is inspiring for his ability to focus on an issue that he holds dear to him and not care about the money but be product first. This is something to learn from as now you can focus on making your product perfect and innovative and you can capture your small niche and then worry about expanding and you don’t need to worry about going back to the drawing board as you already have a finished model.

Ryan Trahan created a YouTube channel at an extremely young age. He has always been an influencer and an innovator. What sets Ryan apart is his ability to create a space for his community and then make a deep connection with them for his authentic personal experiences into his entrepreneurial ventures. His product was The Neptune Bottle, which is a sleek and clean looking water bottle. His model also focused on sustainability and all together his product reflected his vision for blending functionality and style. Trahan is driven with his strong desire to create products that relate to his online content. He is doing what he loves and is just trying to make a profit on doing what he loves. His focus is on sustainability and eco-friendliness with his passion for cleaning up the environment. He wanted to use his platform to make a difference in the world and do what he loves for a living. Ryan’s ability to tell stories and form relationships with his massive community, makes his business model unique and interesting. No one, but him could sell his product because it was tied directly to his fans and internet presence.  He is able to use his following to expand his product and he always shuts out his brands and is a great short-term model to make a lot of profit. I think that Ryan demonstrates his ability of Creativity. His creativity in his skits and storytelling, really retain and convince his audience. Developing new branding strategies that integrate humor, his own stories, and challenges to captivate his following. Trahan’s new innovations come with his merging of content and product, mixing it with other creators in order to connect to their following and then sell to them. What inspires me is his ability to do what he loves and help a cause while still making a profit. With his vision of being ecofriendly is an issue, and people may start a nonprofit, but Ryan found a way to make a lot of profit from doing something he loves. This teaches me his true authenticity and he is always very upfront and tells you everything and this just makes him feel more like a normal person. It also helps build his following and is a great skill to use in order to make loyal buyers.

Ben is an intelligent teen as he spent most of his high school days building games to later add on the app store. He would create games that he found to be fun, and he would play them with his friends. Then one of his friends thought that it would be a good idea to publish the game so it could gain more of a following. From this “Ninia Jump” and “Impossible Rush” were born. With his tech background he began to build and develop a social media in the mid 2010’s (which seemed to be quite popular during this time). This social media was called, Flogg. Flogg, is a peer-to-peer app that utilizes the social aspects of social media and the profit from e-commerce to make an app for teenagers to buy and sell items. The main market strategy for this was to target young people, and this helped it stand out compared to the rest of the competition. With the target towards younger people the format could be more informal and focus on accessible marketplaces and ability to easily communicate with each other’s. His personal drive came not only from his love of creating things electronically, but also for his own personal need. This need was for a convent platform for teenagers to buy and sell safely and target gaps in markets. As younger people tend to heavily sway the trends and other factors. Ben’s entrepreneurial traits like resilience and innovation, are evident in how he continuously evolved his programming to find his niche and he eventually found it with his social media ecommerce program. His innovation continued to expand and eventually he created Monkey which is another social media. His journey is inspiring as he found a need for something and he created a solution, not just for monetary gain but to help address an issue he was facing. This is very admirable and his focus on the younger people is also good as that audience can easily be underrepresented. He also shows the importance of fearless experimentation, and impact of a highly volatile market. His works shows that by remaining in the loop of real needs and trends, young entrepreneurs can create groundbreaking solutions and thrive. Age doesn’t affect how innovative you are.

George Matus is one of the biggest innovators of commercial and military Drone use. He created his first drone at only the age of 12, and by 16 he founded Teal Drones, which is a multimillion-dollar company which was the first of its kind to develop a stable flying quadcopter which could fly 70+mph. George is driven by his love for drones and seeing a gap in technology. He has a vision for the future, and he believes he can fix it and be a part of the future. This can be seen by his decision to start building drones for the military. His business model capitalizes on different wants than what current technology can provide. He focuses on making fast and inexpensive drones. So, he has a small section he works in, but this section is one of the biggest and most important as the military is interested in this sector. This makes him a great entrepreneur, because he recognized that on a consumer level he was outmatched by other companies and would be stomped out. So, he shifted and found a new niche in the military and unmanned drones. This shows his ability to adapt to new circumstances and to flow with the market. He focuses on finding ways to mass produce his drones while maintaining the quality. Teal Drones are innovating by working on cheap IR drones in order to spot and identify targets from a remote location for the military. This would benefit the military by allowing them to avoid using large, bulky, and slow drones that could alert the enemy to their presence, thereby minimizing the risk of escalating tensions. Smaller, more agile drones can enhance stealth and improve reconnaissance capabilities, making operations more efficient and less detectable. Personally, his ability to adapt and find his niche is my favorite part of George Matus. Even though his invention is similar to others he modified it to fit the specific need of the military and now has a multimillion-dollar contract with them for only altering minute details. This is inspiring as my own idea has its own unique field and I can draw a lot of parallels from his struggles of big corporations to his niche search. I have learned a lot about the ability to adapt and to find your own spot in the market. This is the most valuable advice I’ve received surrounding entrepreneurship as it makes me be flexible and listen to many different ideas.