Diego De La Hoz is a young entrepreneur who thought of a more efficient way to travel from city to city especially for college students. As a college student, Diego was aware of the high cost of gas required to  ride home. However, once he noticed that he was not the only one who faced this problem, he decided to come up with a solution.

Diego discovered the answer to this problem when he learned a key fact about many college students. He realized that students with cars tend to travel with empty seats while students without cars tend to use the bus which is expensive and time consuming.

In order to coordinate these two different groups of students to communicate, Diego created Wahi Ride. Wahi Ride is a social mobile app where college students can connect with each other, rideshare, and share the transportation cost.

Wahi Ride saves people money, helps students build relationships, and aids the environment. By splitting the cost of gas between multiple people, the app can greatly reduce the cost of gas for students. And while the app takes people to where they need to go, it also helps build relationships by providing a time for people to connect with each other. Also, the app greatly reduces gas emissions by encouraging students to use fewer cars when traveling from location to destination.

This app caught my attention because at my college, I do not have the luxury of driving to and from my house because I am currently not allowed to have a car on my campus. And even if my car was on campus, the price of gas required in order to journey home is incredibly expensive. And because finding a ride home from other people is often extremely hard, I would benefit greatly from this app which makes ride sharing convenient, efficient, and fun.

Josh Bruno is an inspiring entrepreneur because of his role as the co-founder of Hometeam,  app that pairs home health aides with seniors in need of care. When Josh’s  grandmother died, leaving his 93-year-old grandfather in need of care, Josh realized that in-home caregivers and nursing homes were all inefficient ways of taking care of his elderly grandfather.

So Josh created Hometeam. Hometeam is known today as the most reliable in-home care giving option for seniors and their families, giving a full healthcare team and a preprogrammed iPad to each customer in order to not only provide excellent senior care but also anticipate potential problems before they happen.

Although this idea is hard to grasp for most young people, Josh understood the hardships of looking for a safe and reliable way for an older relative to be taken care of in their old age. Instead of accepting defeat when the nursing homes and in-home care givers were sub par to his expectations, Josh decided to create a more efficient method for people to search for reliable care giving options.

I personally liked this idea a lot because I have seen the lifeless state that many nursing homes are in and I have had a relative that had to go through the experience of living in a nursing home. From my experience with nursing homes, I have been disappointed in the quality of care they supply to elderly people and I am happy that someone has finally come up with a solution to this problem.

While visiting Praxis Academy, I had the opportunity to connect with Kenton Jarvie; the founder of Gomae. He told me that after working in a vegan restaurant called Chau Veggie Express and conversing with the customers there, he discovered that many people face the challenge of finding good vegan restaurants where they can eat socially.

After hearing the same complaint from a great majority of customers, Kenton discovered the market need for a medium which could allow people to easily and quickly find vegan restaurants. As a result, Kenton created the app Gomae. Gomae is an app that allows you to browse, review, and rate restaurants with vegan menu items. You can scroll through feed to discover new vegan restaurants, look at the app’s map to find nearby vegan options, and search the name of a restaurant in order to discover what vegan menu foods it might have to offer. And after you have visited a particular recommended restaurant, you can rate the restaurant in order to signal your opinions to the vegan community.

What I like about this company is that it fills the gap that vegans have begged someone to fill. I also think that this app could be useful for people who want to live out a healthy lifestyle, even if they do not identify as vegans. Because I see our culture shifting toward more healthy life choices, I believe this app is filling a gap that many people beyond the vegan community are demanding. Although this company is still in the process of expanding to various regions, I am very enthusiastic about this company.

Praxis is an organization whose goal is to inspire, guide, and integrate the Christian faith into the education of young entrepreneurs to bring about cultural change. This summer, I had the opportunity to visit a Praxis gathering at Biola University in California. While at Praxis, I met an entrepreneur named Justin Stimpson who started a company called Fathering.me.

Justin Stimpson grew up in a single-family home, where he never had a father figure to guide him through life. After growing up in a fatherless home, he realized the important role that fathers play in a child’s life and the negative effects that a fatherless child often experiences.

People who grow up fatherless are twenty times more likely to be incarcerated, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twice as likely to commit suicide. In addition, eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from fatherless homes and ninety percent of all homeless and runaway children are fatherless. As a result, fatherlessness has become a serious epidemic in our country.

However, unlike many people, Justin understood the fatherless epidemic to a greater extent than most people and thus started a company in order to combat it. As research shows, fatherlessness is often rooted in unplanned pregnancies and many of the fathers of these children are just teenagers who are too afraid to raise a child due to inexperience. Also, many of them have never had a father of their own. To solve this problem, Justin started a website called fathering.me which acts as an online resource center and mentor networking site. The site acts as a robust, engaging, and relevant collective of valuable resources for young men, who want to learn how to be great dads and it provides a national network of local, well-trained, and committed mentors ready to walk alongside young men for a full-year on their journey throughout their unplanned pregnancy and into fatherhood.

What I liked about his idea was that Justin saw one of the world’s greatest needs and fulfilled it by recollecting his own past experience as a fatherless child and created a website that would encourage fathers to stay with their children and be the best fathers they can be. I believe this website will help battle the fatherless epidemic and bring joy back to so many families.