Author Archive for Stu Rozendal

Chalk . com

Chalk.com lists their mission as this:

“Giving every child an equal opportunity to participate in the future”

And that is more or less what Chalk.com does. It is a company that saw a disparity between the opportunities given to students in our education system, and their actual abilities. They saw how a child that was given more opportunities in education tended to perform better, and have better opportunities, the later they got in life. More doors opened for them, if you will. As their website says, “the [education] system needs to accommodate your needs to give you the best chance to succeed.” And their goal is to shape the system to do that.

Chalk.com strives to do this by starting at the source: the teachers themselves. They argue that good teaching is not something that is “mass-produced” but cultivated through people who care. Chalk wants to empower teachers in order so that they can better empower their students.

They attempt to do this by teaching teachers about what it means to learn well, to learn and act on knowledge with responsibility, to care about what they teach and who they teach, and to be persistent in all things. Though all of this might sound a little heady and nebulous, they live out these missions by scheduling meetings with teachers, helping them plan out curricula and game plans, developing holistic strategies to meet students and educators wherever they are.

Pela Phone Case

According to Pela Case’s website, they have a “big, hairy, audacious goal” where they want to create a future without waste, and it is that mission that informs their goals and business-practices. The founder of Pela, Jeremy Lang, says that he had the idea for the company when he was in Hawaii with his family and his son dug up a piece of plastic on the beach. This led Lang to think about the impact of plastic and waste on the environment, and from that the impact on human life and community.

Lang decided that he wanted to craft a company that combated this waste, while also raising awareness about it. This led him to found Pela Case, a company that produces eco-friendly recycled phone cases. The idea was to create something environmentally-focused and sound that you would hold in your hand every day. Their phone cases are durable and biodegradable.

The company is founded on and focused around four core values: community, creativity, consciousness, and courage. All of these are reflected in their business’ values and practices, but also in the culture they wish to inspire in their product.

This company interests me because I think it is an awesome example of an entrepreneur seeing a very specific need and finding a way to connect it with something tangible and very “human.” It’s a company that does not ask much of people–everyone needs a phone case, so why not get one that looks nice and also supports environmental causes? The company still seems like it’s pretty small, but I’ve seen a lot of ads for it on social media and I have begun to see more people with their product.

Serengetee

Serengetee is a good example of the way that a company started by young people, especially college students, can grow to be something really cool, big, and impactful.

Serengetee today is a social venture clothing and accessories company that is known mostly for its tee shirts, but also for its hats, scrunchies, and more. Two college guys started it seven years ago when they met traveling abroad for a semester. When exploring local markets in different countries they were intrigued by the different fabrics they saw. They wanted to do something good with these fabrics and wanted to create a clothing company surrounding these fabrics and even though they had no previous experience in fashion they began to experiment with what they could do.

Their mission became this: they would buy fabric from all around the world, supporting local artisans and craftsmen, honoring generations-old traditions, and preserving and sharing these bits of culture and history by attaching the story of each specific fabric to the piece of clothing it became a part of. They then give 10% of their profits to social grassroots ventures across the world.

Serengetee is most known for their “pocket-tees”, which are colorful tee shirts with breast pockets crafted from the fabrics around the world. These tee shirts come with the story of the fabric and craftsmen who made it, raising awareness for that specific area. Sometimes these fabrics were made by people who were at-risk, or who are themselves part of a social venture.

Over the years they have expanded from tee shirts to hats, backpacks, scrunchies, beanies, socks, and even jewelry, but they stay true to their mission in everything they do.

I think that Serengetee is an excellent example of how to do a social venture well. I do not know much about the logistics of their business and how that all works, but from what I can see, they did a good job of starting focused in their mission, their goals, and their methods. In the years of growth since then, they have done what seems to me to be a good act of discernment in expanding certain aspects of their methods and goals by including diverse products, but not diverging too far from their brand, and staying true to their mission. Too many social ventures, especially by young entrepreneurs, are either far too specific or try to diversify themselves much too quickly. But from what I can see, they have avoided this pitfall.

I have followed the growth of Serengetee for the past three years or so and I am interested to see where they go from here, and what we can continue to learn from them.

BuzzFeed

Today BuzzFeed is known as a source of “news”, pop-culture, entertainment, and YouTube video series. It exploded into popularity with its listicles (list-articles) which still remain one of its more popular features, though it has since expanded into other forms of online media, including web comics, web video series, and–more recently–serious news.

But BuzzFeed started as something much smaller. In 2006 Jonah Peretti, then working for HuffingtonPost, started BuzzFeed. Back then it was a place that curated web content that algorithms predicted would become viral. Gradually it expanded into articles, first simply posts describing viral web content, and then their famous listicles, and eventually longer entertainment-based pieces and news. In 2016 they split their brand between BuzzFeed (entertainment) and BuzzFeed news (news-based content). Its online video presence also grew in popularity as web series it produced grew popular on YouTube.

From its inception as a viral curator to its modern identity as a source of pop culture content and “serious” news, BuzzFeed, and its millennial founders, have demonstrated a desire to remain ahead of the curve when it comes to producing, distributing, and cultivating content in the twenty-first century. Their strategy seems to involve jumping on trends to see which ones will pay off. Over the past thirteen years they have experimented in many areas of content creation, with varying success. This demonstrates an entrepreneurial spirit of a willingness to experiment and an understanding of the purpose of failure in innovation.

Though far from a perfect company (it has weathered criticism for plagiarism and false-reporting and poor work environments), BuzzFeed will remain a thoughtful example of an entrepreneurial spirit in a decades old medium (the news and entertainment). No doubt, it will continue to innovate and experiment in the years to come.

Warby Parker: A New Way to Look at a Problem

Nine years ago, Jeffrey Raider, Andrew Hunt, Neil Blumenthal, and David Gilboa founded a company called Warby Parker, a company which they hoped would address the need for eyeglasses in a different way.

A simple issue that eyeglass customers often face is a cosmetic one: they do not know if they will like the eyeglasses they purchase, or if the glasses will look good on them. When trying on glasses at the eye doctor, or at an eyeglass store, it can be hard to tell what the glasses will look like when you where them out. It can also be hard to even know where to start with glasses. There are so many options but a customer does not always know what will look good on him or her.

Warby Parker wanted to address those issues. What if there was a company that allowed you to try on the glasses before you had to commit to them? What if the company helped you figure out what glasses would look best on your face? The Warby Parker business model was born. The company is primarily an online business, doing most of its business through its website. The website in its current iteration begins with a short quiz of sorts that asks the customer various questions from face shape to their preferred material of glasses. From there it will give the customer a series of suggested eyeglasses and from that list, the customer can select five different eyeglasses that they would like to try on. A few days later in the mail they will receive a box in the mail. This box will contain those five eyeglasses, and they have a week to try the eyeglasses on and then return them.

This model allows the customer to get a feel for the glasses, to decide if they like the look, the feel, and the function of each pair. There is no pressure to make a quick decision with Warby Parker, unlike at an eyeglass store. Customers are encouraged to take their time before committing to a pair.

Though Warby Parker is primarily online, they have begun to recently add some brick-and-mortar stores, with these popping up in the United States and in Canada, though they still strive to adhere to the same business methods.

The founders of Warby Parker did not want to simply create a business that helped people with figuring out which pair of glasses to wear. Though this is an important niche and they have found a smart way of addressing it, they wanted to add something deeper to their business: an element of social entrepreneurship–entrepreneurship that gives back. With that, they began this model: for every pair of glasses sold, they would donate a pair to a company that distributes eyeglasses in developing countries to encourage forward-thinking for individuals and startups there. This way they would not just be giving something away in the form of charity, but they are empowering individuals by providing certain resources (eyeglasses and reading glasses) that promote an individual towards autonomy and self-direction.

Warby Parker is a good example of a business that saw a problem–in their case, an insufficient method of trying on and fitting eyeglasses–and established a new and thoughtful solution. They are also a good example of then taking that new business model and making it into something that gives back to communities in need, in a way that does not harm these communities more.