Rachel Sumekh is a 26-year-old entrepreneur whose grand entrepreneurship journey began in college, at UCLA. Driven by enormous empathy for the large homeless population of L. A., Rachel and her friends searched for an opportunity for homeless outreach. As college students, the friends had little money or resources, but they did have one thing: college meal plans. Using their unneeded meal points, Rachel and her friends personally delivered dining hall food to the homeless around town. Realizing the opportunity at their fingertips, the students partnered with the college dining services to allow all students on campus to donate meal funds to fee the homeless community. Under Rachel’s leadership, the program has evolved considerably and been named “Swipe Out Hunger.” Operating at campuses across America, “Swipe Out Hunger” allows students with limited resources to help the homeless by donating funds that would have otherwise gone to waste.

The aspect of these young entrepreneurs that I consistently find to be exemplary is how often they start their ventures in the thralls of college. I cannot imagine working on a project of this scale while being a student at the same time. Beyond this, it is amazing to me the skills and courage these entrepreneurs, like Rachel, exhibit in being able to pursue the startup beyond graduation. The idea of “Swipe Out Hunger” is so great firstly because it utilizes an unallocated resource (i.e. extra meal funds) and secondly, it allows each individual student to directly impact and become involved in the mission of the program.

Swipe Out Hunger

Tina Hovsepian is a 29-year-old entrepreneur who has successfully combined her education, skills, and humanitarian passion. As a Los Angeles native, Hovsepian grew up surrounded by the enormous homeless population and grew empathetically towards their struggles. Hovsepian graduated from the University of Southern California in 2009 with a degree in Architecture. While at the college, she was able to begin working on a project for temporary shelters made of folded cardboard. After graduation, Hovsepian continued to develop this idea, turning it into the business “Cardborigami.”

Cardborigami seeks to provide cheap and accessible shelter made from cardboard to support the homeless. As it has developed, Cardborigami has become a non-profit focusing eqully on the product and the mission. As such, Cardborigami is not simply a producer of these structures, but also an avid provider of all around support for the homeless and disaster-stricken. The most exemplary thing about Tina Hovsepian is that she managed to successfully transition a part-time school project into a successful full-time social venture outside of college. Surely, she could not have done this without being driven so intensely by her empathy and compassion for the homeless.

Most interestingly, Cardborigami innovates in its use of construction materials. While cardboard shelters are usually seen as degrading and pitiful, Cardborigami uses principles of design and architecture to differentiate and improve upon the classic refrigerator box. In this way, Cardborigami can shelter the homeless efficiently and cost-effectively, while simultaneously improving the living conditions, beauty, and dignity within the homeless community.

Cardborigami

Working on his MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ricky Ashenfelter stumbled upon a great idea. Within the entrepreneurship program, Ashenfelter studied sustainability, entrepreneurship, and innovation, learning about green technology and the food industry. In this program, he met his future co-founder and CPO Emily Malina. Together, they worked on the idea of Spoiler Alert throughout the MIT program and in their free time, slowly investing their time, energy, and resources to progress the idea into a sound, feasible venture. After graduating, Ashenfelter and Malina brought on a third cofounder as CTO and were able to work full-time on Spoiler Alert. Since that time, June 2015, the company Spoiler Alert has grown tremendously and impacted countless lives.

Spoiler Alert is a self-identified “venture-backed technology startup” that “empowers the world to minimize food waste.” Spoiler Alert’s product is a software package that is split between an analysis and tracking program for food businesses, and an open platform to facilitate food donations and waste recovery. Spoiler Alert works to connect and open communication between all kinds of organizations: food rescues, food banks, homeless shelters, local farms, restaurants, and other food businesses. In this way, they efficiently decrease food waste and charitably promote the donation of food.

The driving motivation behind Ashenfelter is undeniably his desire to decrease waste and contribute to the local, regional, national, and global welfare. Ashenfelter witnessed firsthand the enormous amount of waste within our society and the enormous need in other parts of both our society and of the world. He was then able to utilize his impressive education and skills to help solve this issue and make the world a better, less wasteful place. Beyond this, Spoiler Alert’s genius comes in the fact that it deals with the problem of waste both before and after it occurs. By providing a tracking and analysis program, Spoiler Alert seeks to help food service businesses minimize the amount of waste they currently have. The second part of the company’s software allows the excess that inevitably occurs to be efficiently reallocated and utilized rather than becoming actual waste in a landfill. Overall, Ricky Ashenfelter and Spoiler Alert are doing a fantastic job promoting and sharing an abundance that would otherwise be wasted.

The Daily Free Press

Spoiler Alert

Immediately after earning a BSc in economics at the University of Toronto, Steve El-Hage went on to found his first company, Massdrop. Massdrop serves doubly as a social community for all-kinds of enthusiasts and a niche online retailer for group purchases. Users of the website can vote for, discuss, and review a wide variety of products, mostly those intended for enthusiasts or devoted hobbyists. Then, users can join together to buy certain products they would either unable to buy individually or else at heavily discounted rates.

The most exemplary aspect about El-Hage is both his quick move to begin the company, but also his enormous success within that company. El-Hage was certainly skilled to be able to found a company immediately after leaving university, and then continue to make the company profitable, leading tremendous growth. Often, it takes a different person and set of talents between the startup phase and large business phase of a company, but for El-Hage, accomplishing both with guile was no issue.

Steve El-Hage and his cofounder Nelson Wu conceived of the idea when noticing the enormous quantity and popularity of a vast amount of enthusiast forums. Specifically, they explored the forums with enough depth to notice a trend of users collaborating to buy and share a certain product. Massdrop’s combination of social interaction with large group purchases of niche items is what makes the idea so great. It concentrates enthusiasts and gathers traffic from the enormous userbase of forums, while providing a convenient, hassle-free, and intuitive system for buying products as a group. Their innovation comes from the interesting mashup of social forums and group buying, integrating the two ideas together and increasing the overall ease and functionality of the entire process.

Forbes El-Hage Profile

Forbes Massdrop Article (2015)

LinkedIn El-Hage

Caitlin Crosby began her career not with direct entrepreneurship, but with the fame of being an actress, singer, and songwriter. At 27 years old, Caitlin collaborated with actress Brie Larson to start the LoveYourFlawz campaign, supporting women struggling with body image issues. While promoting LoveYourFlawz and touring as a singer, Caitlin stayed at a hotel using traditional metal keys and was fascinated. Intrigued by the uniqueness of the key, she stamped it with “LoveYourFlawz” and wore it around her neck. She began to experiment with the idea, creating and selling keys on her tour stamped with words of encouragement like “love, strength, and let go.” Caitlin wanted to support people dealing with all sorts of issues, encouraging them to eventually pass the key forward to someone who needed it more.

Caitlin’s business quickly grew and became too much for her to handle alone. Soon, Caitlin met homeless couple Rob and Cera, employing them in the business and giving them a means to exit homelessness. Thus, The Giving Keys company was formed, spreading encouragement through a unique product with the mission to “create employment opportunities for people transitioning out of homelessness.”

Both Caitlin’s business and her entrepreneurial journey are outstanding. Caitlin is particularly exemplary in her desire and passion for entrepreneurship. Even with a busy life of singing and touring her music, Caitlin found time and energy to personally make the giving keys. This is a testament to the immense motivation and drive behind her pursuits. She was not driven by the money, which was likely very little in comparison to her primary jobs, but rather she was motivated and impassioned by the social aspect of the business. Caitlin didn’t want to sell to people, she wanted to inspire people; selling her keys was simply a means to inspire. In that task, I believe Caitlin has been enormously successful. The idea is brilliant because Caitlin did not preclude the social venture at the point of selling inspirational keys. She went above and beyond the social call of her venture, seeking to provide inspiration doubly, to both the makers and the buyers of the keys. Employing the homeless was a masterful technique to expand the social venture and widen her business’s social and cultural impact.

Personally, I’m inspired by Caitlin’s tenacity, wisdom, and drive. Not only did she build the business as a hobby while working full-time, but she was continually and profoundly motivated by positively affecting the world. First with LoveYourFlaws, and now with The Giving Keys, Caitlin’s encouragement, inspiration and love has been spread throughout the world. I yearn to be driven by my faith and passion for others as much as Caitlin is. I aspire to impact the world in my own unique way, having the tenacity and wisdom to carry out my ideas in a meaningful way. The Giving Keys, both its journey and its current impact, inspires me.

Source

Alain Nteff, a 25-year-old, has tackled a huge problem facing his home country of Cameroon: high maternal and infant mortality rates. Nteff noticed the high mortality rates while visiting a hospital in Cameroon, recognizing situations that could have been prevented with prior information and cheap prenatal care. A few years after first identifying the problem, Nteff was able to develop a smart and effective solution, Gifted Mom.

Gifted Mom is an SMS service that provides mothers with health advice and information, both during and after pregnancy. For a minimal fee, mothers can sign up for the service to receive regular advice and even ask doctors personal questions relating to their pregnancies.  The brilliance of this idea is its low cost and effectiveness. Rather than expensively and slowly developing a mobile application, Nteff chose to provide information through SMS messages. This keeps costs down for the entrepreneurial venture and allows Nteff to connect with more expectant mothers that may not have smartphones, for a fraction of the price.

Nteff’s innovation is genius in its cleverness and simplicity. By identifying a major source of maternal and infant mortality, lack of information, Nteff could innovate without developing any new technology or handling any complex logistics complications. The solution allowed Nteff to reach a large number of mothers as a small-scale venture, without requiring significant built-up capital or investment. This means that Nteff’s solution in a poverty-stricken Africa actually came to light, saving lives with a few text messages. Gifted Mom is enormously inspiring, reminding entrepreneurs that not all problems require a complex, richly-funded solution. World problems can be solved with the specific identification of the problem, clever thinking, and the reapplication of a long-established technology.

Source – CNN