Sean Coughlin is the CEO and one of the co-founders of FaithStreet. FaithStreet is a website that allows newcomers to areas to find and connect with the churches around them. It also allows congregations to reach out using the internet. Currently, FaithStreet has over 17,000 churches across America on their website, and their next goal is developing a simple way to give money to the communities their members serve. Sean’s story for the startup of the company is interesting. He graduated from Harvard College and University of Virginia School of Law, and began working for a top law firm. He left his job however because he felt the need to start something big and new. This success story of going from a law background to a tech startup is inspiring to me. It shows his faith and his willingness to take a leap in it to follow his calling.
Archive for Social Entrepreneur – Page 17
Isaac Holeman, Josh Nesbit, and Nadim Mahmud created Medic Mobile a company that connects medical mission organizations in developing countries. Medic Mobile is being used in over twenty countries over 16,000 health workers use the information it provides. Medic mobile is an example of a social entrepreneurship venture that is capable of tracking disease outbreaks, resource levels, emergency or danger broadcasting, and pregnancy registration. This data provides statistical data that allows for trends to be determined, which can effect future action plans. The data is accumulated by many organizations thus creating a network which is more powerful than one organization alone. The three co-founders of Medic Mobile founded the company after conducting pediatric AIDS research in Malawi. They came across a physician that was frustrated with the disorganization of relief efforts. The physician served so many, and felt that treatment plans could be developed from trends. Treatment plans could be orchestrated and alleviate possible outbreaks or redundancies.
Smart phone technology connects the world in so many ways, the three co-founders were able use the networking power modern technology provides to cut down on miscommunication, hopefully preventing future disease outbreaks, and proper allocation of resources.
Before Catherine Cook was an entrepreneur herself it was her brother Dave Cook that was the first entrepreneur in her family. The experience from Dave would end up helping Catherine with her business venture.
Being a new student at her high school Catherine Cook wanted a better way to get to know her classmates. One day Catherine and her brother Dave were flipping through their yearbook and started to brainstorm. After noticing how useless the information was that the yearbook had to offer she decided to do something about it. Catherine looked up to her brother Dave and thought that if he could have a successful start-up company she could to.
Catherine started the online social network website with the name MyYearBook.com. Which today is better known as MeetMe.com. At the time Catherine looked at Facebook and knew that it was a social network for people that you were already friends with. But Catherine’s goal for MeetMe.com was different. Catherine wanted to make a site that was meant for you to make new friends instead of just interacting with the friends you already have.
So through interesting quizzes and games and other aspects of the site Catherine achieved her goal. Catherine Cook is now worth $30 million dollars and MeetMe.com now gains 86,000 new users every day along with 300,000 new photos every day.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, it is pretty exciting to learn that there are ways of receiving funding for your original ideas. Gone are the days where you are forced to venture alone; a new age is here where companies are excited to invest in the next generation.
Every year, Forbes hosts a $1 Million Change the World Competition. It is a competition for young entrepreneurs with social ideas both for-profit and not-for-profit. The winner of the competition takes home $500,000 and the five runners up each get $100,000. This opportunity is an almost unheard of opportunity to jumpstart your business at such a young age. While this competition is open currently only for existing businesses, the opportunity is incredible.
The best part about this competition? It focuses and encourages social entrepreneurship. The tides are changing in innovation these days. Young people not only want to make it big, but they more importantly want to change the world. Forbes recognizes this zeitgeist and fosters it. It is so cool to see current big-wigs responding to the change they are seeing in the tides of innovation.
Personally, I find this to be an extremely encouraging and motivating competition. Not only can you dream big, but there are opportunities already existing to help turn it into reality. Truly now is the easiest time to change the world. The stage is open.
I think this millennial entrepreneur is an appropriate candidate to be blogged about. At the young age of 29 David Karp is the founder of the blogging platform Tumblr. Now I am sure that many of you have at least heard of it because it currently has close to 50 million users. The founder himself is worth close to $200 million.
I would guess that many of you have heard of Twitter and Facebook which can be considered blogging platforms too but only on a micro-blogging level; compared to the tools meant for blogging such as WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad. Tumblr is meant to be a different kind of blogging platform compared to the others.
Karp intends Tumblr to be a place for blogging with a different feel to it. He believes that the other big blogging platforms are perfectly fine; he just thought they were too difficult to use for people who don’t think of themselves as good writers. So Karp created Tumblr as a tool/environment he thinks will make it easier and more meaningful for people to share their thoughts and ideas.
Karp created Tumblr for the people that don’t really enjoy writing but want to share their thoughts and ideas through images, words, and videos in a place they can feel comfortable. A place where people can build an online identity and be proud of what they built.
Catherine Cook’s life is the perfect story of living the American Dream. She is a true millennial entrepreneur and has made millions in her teens! The beginning stages of her entrepreneurial spirit took place when she at a very young age, she sold books in her homemade library to her parents for a small charge. When she turned 15 years old, she started a business called myYearbook with her brother in New Jersey. She partnered up with her brother David, and they were kick started by her older brother, Geoff, who made an investment to get them up-and-running.
Her business, myYearbook, which was started in 2005 with 400 members that went to school at her local high school. She grew her business immensely through great marketing strategies and a true passion. In 2012 it grew to an astounding 32.7 million users, which is the same year she sold their family business for 150 million dollars…
The success and the money were a byproduct of love and passion. Her brilliance in social networking led her to be on of the youngest self-made millionaires in the world. MyYearbook makes most of their revenue through online advertising. High school and college graduates go on myYearbook to reunite and touch base with old classmates.
Through Catherine, lessons can be taught to all of us, especially young entrepreneurs like ourselves. It starts with a simple idea, and having the ambition and passion to get out there and act on it. At a young age of 15 years old, she saw a problem that could be solved by herself. We are the millennial age and have the strongest position ever in human history. We have so many tools and resources at our disposal. Catherine, herself, proved you are never to young to start a business. Now is our time, let’s go out and conquer the world.
A few years ago, Chase Adam was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when a woman boarded the bus and began asking for donations for her child’s medical treatment. Because panhandling is so prevalent in that area of the world, Adam was shocked to see all of the natives give the women money for her child. He realized the natives believed this woman because she had the child’s information and had established a sense of trust with them. Inspired, Adam returned to the United States with the goal of starting a non-profit to provide healthcare around the world.
However, when Adam returned home, he realized that many non-profits weren’t very efficient and were underfunded. Adam decided to start a company that was built with an emphasis on impact, efficiency, and transparency. Watsi, launched in August 2012, is a “global crowdfunding platform for healthcare” – basically a Kickstarter for medical treatments. People can donate any amount of money to fund medical treatment and care around the world. Once a patient’s funding goal is met, the patient receives the treatment. Watsi then updates all of the donors with the patient’s treatment outcome.
Watsi is different from most non-profits because 100% of the money donated goes directly to people in need. All of Watsi’s operating expenses are paid for by optional tips or other philanthropists. Watsi prides itself on being “radically transparent”. In fact, all of their financial information in public knowledge and can be seen on their Transparency Document on their website (check if out here!). That way, you can see exactly where your money is going.
After a slow start, Watsi was the first nonprofit to received funding from Y Combinator, a tech company incubator program. Watsi took off and, within 2 years, raised more than $2 million, all of which went to patients in need. In 2014, Adam was listed on Forbes list of 30 Under 30: Social Entrepreneurs. Inspired by the woman on the bus, Adam was able to take an idea he was passionate about and use it to help thousands of people about the world.
Gregory Spencer is the 29 year old co-founder of The Paradigm Project. They are a non-profit organization that distributes clean, efficient cook stoves to developing countries. If you’re wondering why this is even important, it is because of a few main reasons. First, pneumonia is the biggest killer of children globally, and is often linked to indoor cooking smoke. Four million women and children die from it each year according to Paradigm Project’s website. Developing countries often either have to burn fuels that create a lot of emissions, or use non efficient stoves, or even open fires which create more smoke than a quality stove would. This is not their choice, but what they have to do to survive. Second, the stoves that Paradigm Project distributes make less smoke, so they are better for the environment since they help lower CO2 emissions. Their stoves also use less fuel, which means less trees need cut down. The stoves also save the impoverished families in fuel cost, allowing them to have money for other things.
Spencer is interesting to me since he is not a traditional entrepreneur, but a highly successful social entrepreneur. Social entrepreneurs can’t be ranked by the money they make, but instead by the impact they make on society. The statistics on their webpage of how their efforts are changing the world is very impressive. From the roughly 50,000 stoves provided since 2008, $23 million has been saved by families in reduced fuel bills, about 1.4 million trees have been saved, and an estimated 400,000 tons of CO2 have been offset. From the extra money from donations, they have also invested roughly $7 million into developing countries. His achievements are impressive, and why he was chosen to be in Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneurs in 2012. Another impressive thing to me is that as successful as his organization is, he is still highly involved. Management, strategic planning, communications, and being in the field are a few to name. Instead of hiring people to take on some of his responsibilities when his organization made it big, his passion for making the world a better place keeps him working hard, and strongly involved.
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.
Angaza Design is a company that seeks to eradicate darkness from African homes by selling solar power lighting systems that are cheaper than traditional lighting sources and function like a pre paid cell phone.
The Problem
The Founder, Lesley Silverthorn, started researching the concept for Angaza in her senior year in the Design School at Stanford. She found a huge problem for energy distribution in East Africa, as many families are located off the grid and use Kerosene to light their home at night. Additionally, the other energy options, which include solar power were effective, but too expensive.
The Solution
Angaza combines “pay-as-you-go” technology with solar power generation. This technology allows families to pay in small increments to pay for the solar power energy. The first product Angaza has is called the SoLite which is a 3 watt LED light that doubles as a cell phone charging station. The technology works when a family sends a payment to Angaza for their lighting, Angaza voice calls the cell phone of the family and the cellphone (through sound) transmits data to “tell” the unit to illuminate for the allotted prepaid amount. When the payment time is completed the light shuts off.
The biggest problem Angaza faces is sales and distribution as the customer base is off the grid rural African families and businesses. They are overcoming this challenge by having local sales representatives in Africa that believe Africa needs to be illuminated.
In Africa, the lights are now switched on, as Angaza is creating new products and embedding their technology into other products, as well.