Author Archive for Christian Suceveanu

Tom Bilyeu – Quest Nutrition

Tom Bilyeu is a young entrepreneur from California who co-founded the extremely popular health and wellness food company, Quest Nutrition. Tom Bilyeu’s story to uprising is very inspirational. Instead of creating his company solely for profit making, Tom wanted to create a product that would allow others to live a healthier lifestyle. For a good part of Tom’s early adult life, he was overweight and lived an unhealthy lifestyle. However, he was still motivated to become a successful entrepreneur and wanted to incorporate health into a business idea. Tom ended up having an amazing weight transformation, and simultaneously initiated Quest Nutrition, a health food company that offers a variety of protein snacks, most notably their bars. In the fitness industry, Quest protein bars are one of the most well-known product in their field. Almost every gym, convenience store, and grocery store that I have been to has some form of Quest Nutrition product. Quest Nutrition has a great variety of snack products with very good flavors and a great macro/nutrition label. In 2014, Quest Nutrition ranked No. 2 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing U.S. companies in 2014. A few years ago, Tom and other co-founders of Quest sold the company to Simply Good Foods Co. for $1 billion. Leading up to the acquisition, Quest was generating revenue over $300 million in that year. Tom’s story is a perfect example of a young entrepreneur using a problem and a need of inspiration in his own life to create a product that not only helps himself with that, but countless others.

Eric Rivera, Jeff Emann, and Ben Christensen – FaZe Clan

Eric Rivera, Jeff Emann, and Ben Christensen are three young entrepreneurs who founded the highly reputable and well-known gaming organization, FaZe clan in May of 2010. These three entrepreneurs started FaZe clan through a YouTube channel named FaZe Sniping, where the these three plus others would share videos of their skills on the popular video gaming franchise, Call of Duty. FaZe Sniping would transition into FaZe clan, and at one point, was the most popular video gaming channel and entertainment source on YouTube. As of today, FaZe is regarded as both a professional esports and entertainment organization. FaZe clan has kept its YouTube channel relative all these years, accumulating over 8.5 million subscribers. Countless members of the organization have also found immense success on social media, most notably being FaZe Rug, who currently has 22 million subscribers on YouTube. While the official FaZe clan and members of the organization have mostly transitioned away from video gaming content, FaZe still has high designation in the esports community, consistently making appearances in high ranking and paying tournaments across various gaming franchises. Earlier this year, FaZe clan was ranked the 4th most valuable esports company by Forbes. FaZe is also among the few esports companies that are publicly traded on the NASDAQ. While there are many owners of FaZe clan currently, the success of the company that has accumulated over the last decade has much to do with the entrepreneurial minds of the clan’s three founders.

Luke Economou – Madman Los Angeles

Luke Economou is a Greek/American young entrepreneur who goes to UC Santa Barbara. Luke was born in Connecticut but has lived around half of his life in Santa Monica, California, before moving to Santa Barbara this past year for school. I consider Luke to be one of my closest friends from back home as we have known each other for almost 10 years now (ever since he moved to Los Angeles) and have built a brother-like relationship. Luke has always had a passion for fashion and is one of the most innovative and entrepreneurial-minded individuals I have met. Similar to me, Luke graduated high school right after the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. He was originally planning to attend UCSB right away but instead decided to attend a local community college online. It was during this time that he started his designer/streetwear brand, Madman. Luke’s vision with Madman is to provide extremely stylish and luxury clothing that blends the culture of Los Angeles with our inner “madman.” The moto for his brand is, “What’s done in the dark, must come to light.” Luke wanted to establish a culture around his brand so that when people acquired his fashion pieces, they became part of the Madman family. Luke has been selling his product mostly through his online store, https://madmanlosangeles.com/, but has also initiated multiple pop-up stores in various locations around Los Angeles. Most notably, Luke held pop-up stores and events several times in the renowned shopping mall, The Beverly Center, at the Lost Warhol’s concept store. Madman was featured on the Beverly Center’s main attraction screen and has received overwhelmingly positive feedback on his brand’s design, message, culture, comfortability, uniqueness, and much more.

Fraser Doherty

Fraser Doherty is a young Scottish entrepreneur from Edinburgh. Fraser was just 14 years when he started producing fruit jams from his grandmother’s recipe which eventually turned into his company, SuperJam. Fraser started selling these jams by going door-to-door in his neighbor, setting up stands at his local farmer’s market, and doing bike deliver orders. Fraser’s jam was made from 100% fruit, which brought local appeal to the product. In 2007, Waitrose, a leading supermarket in the U.K., partnered with Fraser and starting selling his jam at various locations. Before he knew it, Fraser’s jam would pick up heavy traction and numerous more stores in the U.K. and around Europe starting carrying the product. Fraser would also expand his product to Japan and Korea, where a million pounds of merchandise would be sold on a Korean shopping site in less than 1 hour. What’s fascinating about Fraser’s story is his upbringing. Fraser was passionate about what he was doing and saw potential in his product but started small and local. Fraser had to build his company from essentially scratch and go through all the selling stages before reaching a national retailer. Fraser’s story can serve as inspiration to always expand your horizon and test potentially murky waters with your product because you never know who or how many people can find liking in it. To conclude, Fraser was also awarded an MBE award by Queen Elizabeth II.

Aaron Krause – Scrub Daddy

Aaron Krause pitched his company, Scrub Daddy, on Shark Tank in 2012. His product is argued as the most successful product to have ever been pitched on Shark Tank. In addition to the wonderful creativity of his product, Aaron’s pitch was extremely thought-through and concise, drawing interest from most if not all of the Sharks. Scrub Daddy is essentially a sponge that is shaped like a smiling face. However, behind the simplicity of its look, the Scrub Daddy uses a technology that changes the sponge’s texture based on the temperature of the water, making it easier to use depending on the cleaning task. Also, the smiling face style of the sponge allows users to handily clean inside tight spaces such as cups, vases, and more.  After his successful pitch to the Sharks, Aaron was able to agree on a deal with Lori, granting her 20% equity in his company in exchange for $200,000. To put his success into perspective, Lori has made at least $20 million from her $200,000 investment in Scrub Daddy since 2012. The company itself is said to be worth around $250 million, generating over $50 million in sales since the notorious Shark Tank pitch. The story of Scrub Daddy shows the power of creativity in capturing investor attention as well as what a complex but intriguing pitch can do for investment worth.

Lasso Gear

Lasso Gear is an athletic apparel company based in Los Angeles, California that specializes in performance socks. Lasso Gear implements scientific research with personal experience to present socks that mimic the technology of ankle taping and ankle braces to provide faster, more easily accessible heightened performance and increased recover. Lasso Gear was started by a young entrepreneur named Partha Unnava, a friend of mine, who had a serious ankle injury playing basketball in his youth. Partha was frustrated with the limited options of recover for his injury so he used his background in biomedical engineering to a create a visually elegant sock that provided very similar benefits to ankle taping or braces. I have spoken to Partha several times during at my previous job, and he has described his upbringing and key points to being successful as a young entrepreneur. The two points that stood out to me the most was the importance of being unique in a very competitive space and implementing one’s own story or background into their product. Partha described the intensive research and trial and error he partook in to finalize his product especially in an extremely competitive space such as sportswear. Partha stresses the need to stick out in one way or another in order to gain any sort of competitive advantage especially as a small business. Furthermore, implementing one’s own life story, upbringing, background, etc. can be used to bring a unique aspect to a product or service. People tend to gravitate towards a product if the meaning behind it is well produced and presents heightened value.