Author Archive for Maddie Williams

The Windbelt

There is no doubt that entrepreneurs are changing the world. Shawn Frayne, however, is doing this in a clean energy way. Frayne’s hope is that energy will be harnessed not just on the country side but also in urban environments and cities.

Frayne’s company is the company that designed the Windbelt which is an alternative to a wind turbine and looks similar to a conveyor belt. The design of the product allows for a greater output of energy than the typical wind turbine and has the potential to generate so much more. Founded in Honolulu because of tax credits, then moved to Hong Kong, the company has experienced a lot of change and growth over its lifetime, and it’s future is still unknown.

Frayne stands by the philosophy that everything about this product is new and anything could be possible.

Barley & Birch

Entrepreneurship can mean a lot of work and Kyle Smitley’s business journey is a symbol of this. She is a law student in her second year in San Francisco while also the founder of a popular organic kids clothing line, Barley & Birch. The model for her business operates on the idea of giving back. She has donated over half of her profits to the charity organizations that she feels connected with personally. Not only does her story show how successful a venture can be with the passion and drive required has been put into it, it also shows that you do not necessarily have to be well known or even as experienced as others in the field you decide to direct your drive towards. After an internship in Washington, D.C. doing research on companies that claimed to have organic products, she decided that she was going to create a brand that really stood for what it believed in, and Barley & Birch was born.

Smitley’s business has grown a lot since it started, and has gained recognition in the world of fashion. Through it all, however, she has maintained the original mission of the company: to stay 100% organic, and to help others through the company’s nonprofit work.

Hype Machine

Many entrepreneurs get their start from solving an everyday problem that can benefit vast numbers of people. Anthony Volodkin is one of those entrepreneurs. The idea of Hype Machine originated in Volodkin’s desire for a better way of finding cool new music.

Volodkin was really solving his own problem with the music industry. He would constantly travel to Philadelphia or Boston attempting to find new music. There wasn’t a reliable print source available due to marketing bias, and it just meet his standards. Hype Machine was born in this distress. In between classes at college, Volodkin started building a website that showed recent posts from a selection of music blogs. He would sample songs and let people know what was popular and what was good. The result was a way to find new music by crowd-sourcing. In its most basic form, Hype Machine shows music to users that they might like but may not have ever found.

Hype Machine took off after getting attention from industry leaders, but Volodkin learned from the mistakes of Napster.  He made sure that his site was not competing with artists by linking to iTunes or other sites to purchase the songs. This well thought out business plan is what made Hype Machine well known in the internet community and its start up story can inspire young entrepreneurs today. Anthony Volodkin’s entrepreneurial journey shows us that it is never too early to start making our ideas reality.

Michael Nardy: The Business Man

Michael Nardy has always been the businessman. From a young age he was always wanting to work, and was one of the first adopters of computer technology. He showed his entrepreneurial spirit as young as 12, when he channeled his passion for tennis into a profit by stinging racquets. His interests shifted towards medicine but then quickly shifted away after a few months of experience in the field. He attended Boston College in the 90’s and graduated with a double major in English and History. He says now, looking back, that his education was fare from the merchant services industry, but that he always “felt that you should do what you want that the pieces of your career will fall into place as they may.”

Nardy started EPI, an IT company doing Web programming and database development, in his dorm room that gained quite a few international clients. When he closed deals, clients would often think it was a huge business and no idea that Nardy was still in college. After Nardy graduated, EPI moved into his own house then into a sublet office then into an office building down the road from that.

Nardy is quick to act and admits that it is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness. Because of this he is always trying to keep EPI ahead of his competition. He strives to keep the small company atmosphere in the office and works alongside his employees. “The more accessible to your staff, the more cohesive the vision for your company can remain,” he says. “So being accessible is integral to the operation of my company.”

He is always looking for ways to grow the company. Nardy wants the company to earn more, sign more deals, and build a better business. It is this drive that always keeps EPI ahead of the game.

Looking at all that Nardy has accomplished should be proof to all entrepreneurs that you don’t have to be a veteran of an industry to be an industry leader.

Thinking Outside the Box

Dropbox is a program that we are all familiar with in one way or another. The birth story of this company, however, is not as common knowledge.

 DB

Drew Huston, founder and CEO of Dropbox, has been given the title of Internet entrepreneur for his achievements in his field. The creation story of the company, Huston claims, was based upon an idea that came to him after having had to deal with constantly forgetting his USB flash drive during his studies at MIT. While he was a student he found an abundance of problems with already existing storage services and set out to solve this problem for himself before realizing that his solution could benefit others as well. In 2007, he and his co-founder Arash Ferdowsi were able to secure funding to begin the development of the program, and by 2008 they were ready to launch. Dropbox had an enormous success rate, and, after officially being introduced at TechCrunch50, broke records gaining 50 million users in just under three years. By the end of 2013 Dropbox had gained over 200 million users.

Huston’s success did not go unnoticed, however, especially by some of the executives in extremely high positions at the time including none other than Steve Jobs. In 2009, Huston was personally invited to a meeting in the Apple office in California to discuss this new startup, Dropbox, with the CEO himself. Job’s did his best to persuade Huston to partner Dropbox as a new Apple program, but Huston was determined to build this online storage system into a big company. He adamantly refused Job’s offer, disregarding the huge sum being offered for program. Not long after, Apple released its latest addition, the iCloud in a successful attempt at connecting all devices for better file sharing.

With this attack from such a major player Huston was shaken with the fear that Dropbox would fall alongside other names such as MySpace, Netscape, or Palm. This is the fear that drove him and quite possibly the deciding factor between his success instead of his failure. The company grew, reaching an even larger user basis while still remaining reliable and keeping its staff relatively small (fewer than 200 employees for its millions of customers). Huston is to this day still incredibly invested in his company personally, his share making up 15% of the company as $600 million on paper, and believes whole heartedly in its growth and success.

ideapaint

Collaboration is a crucial part to success in a business. When teaming up with a group of people there is nothing more important than the space you utilize in the process. IdeaPaint solves this space problem. IdeaPaint not just improves the way people work but the way they work together; how people think, explore, and turn ideas into action. IdeaPaint is a limitless erasable canvas that can unlock your biggest ideas.

Founded in 2002 by Morgan Newman, Jeff Avallon, and John Goscha (all 25 years old) while attending Babson College, IdeaPaint was first born as a solution to the students’ problem of a space shortage when taking notes for project ideas. They would cover an entire wall with sheets of paper to brainstorm ideas only to tear them down to make more space for fresh ideas. It was during these study sessions that the idea for IdeaPaint was created.

Goscha received funding from Babson College to begin trial attempts of creating the product. After only a year the lab he was working at concluded that the product was impossible to make. He began his work again in 2005 with the encouragement of friends, and in 2008 he succeeded and IdeaPaint first launched at NeoCon Trade Show in Chicago.

The product comes in two different formulas: “PRO” and “CREATE”. Both are roller applied directly to any smooth surface to create a new dry-erase surface.

The company also promotes their philosophy of “bigger space leads to bigger ideas” by committedly giving away over 1 million square feet of their product to schools all across the United States.

They are a company consisting of 18 employees  but with a world encompassing reach all based upon the idea “How can you think big when you write small?”