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.

Imagine destroying Angry Birds in the competition with just learning to code one month ago. Robert Nay, a 14 year old had no coding experience. He decided he wanted to learn so he went to the public library and started to teach himself. 4,000 lines of code later he came out with Bubble Ball. A physicals game that had users create the track to get a bubble to a end point goal. Its a very simple game, but ended up beating Angry Birds for the top downloaded free game on the app store. The simplest game turned out to be the biggest.

As a computer science major I love coding. I taught myself to build my own websites using html. It is really something anyone can do if they have a brain and a computer. This kid decided to teach himself to code and turned a passion and something fun into a company that makes a pretty big profit. I love the idea of apps. It opens a whole new market and allows people to connect to more consumers. I think before anyone graduates college, take a summer to learn how to code. Create a cheesy app. I think it is a skill everyone should know and it can possibly lead to some surprises, like beating out the most popular apps on the app store.