Lily is a young entrepreneur that saw a need and filled it to the best of her abilities. Her grandfather was struggling with Parkinson’s disease and she began to notice that every time he went to take a drink he would always be spilling the beverage. Lily raised a little over $6,000 on Kickstarter to put it into production and the startup of her idea. She developed a three-legged cup so that the chances of being able to spill the beverage significantly decreased.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects the movement of the body. This disease can be very aggressive and progress quickly or it could be a mild case and take 15-20 to be to a point of immobility. The people that live with this disease struggle with every little thing that they do and Lily’s cup is eliminating one of those struggles. With her design, it is easier for someone to be able to less carefully place something down on a table and not have to worry about the beverage spilling. With her product, Lily is also spreading awareness of Parkinson’s disease and showing people that there are ways to make life a little easier for those that are battling the disease.
The design of this cup is almost similar to the design of a sippy cup for a child. This is almost done on purpose because the design’s of cups for children are meant to be simple and easy to use. There are a few different colors and/or patterns that are available in Lily’s cups. The Kangaroo cup started out as a ceramic piece, but with enough funding and support they were able to produce the cups in plastic. Overall though, most of Lily’s thoughts went into the actual design of the cup because that was the most important part to her.
This idea of simplicity is very new and unique. Some companies find it concerning. Others, however, are embracing it. They see the benefit of letting another company maintain their infrastructure so they can focus on their business. Facebook, McDonald’s, The Washington Post, Uber, and Tripadvisor are examples of companies that work with Vercel. Raunch also wants to make the development process more collaborative. This can be seen in the Vercel dashboard, which allows teams to see what others are working on and view previews of the changes.
Unlike other companies, Raunch believes anyone should be able to host a site for free. As such, Vercel offers a free tier that allows customers to host unlimited sites within reasonable limits. Paid plans are based on the number of team members a company has. This pricing is perfect for big companies and startups alike. It is also competitive with other platforms. Many have moved their sites to Vercel because of this reason alone. Another attractive feature is Vercel’s global network, which allows customers to distribute their website across the world within seconds. This is a particularly interesting innovation. Before, companies had to choose a single location for their servers. Vercel’s technology allows for multiple locations, each being optimized, updated, and maintained automatically.
gh school senior, and got a $100,000 investment from Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran. He has also started another social enterprise, UProspie. He was able to capitalize on his ideas at a young age which is really inspirational.