Tag: Startups

This is part of an occasional series of articles spotlighting students who are juggling their studies with starting a new business or social enterprise.

Software Pivots
Kim Cabot, MBA 14
Co-founder, Brandizi

As a marketing director at a big company, Kim Cabot used to think about all the ways she could improve communication. The company worked in silos, with everyone running their own email and social media campaigns. “Things were inefficient and (software) tools were expensive,” she says.

Cabot’s idea for Brandizi slowly took shape.

By the time she started at Haas, Cabot had co-founded Brandizi with her husband, who earned his MBA at Babson College, and was a half-million lines of code into building new software.

Yet during Sara Beckman’s Problem Finding, Problem Solving class, Cabot realized that her product, designed without potential users’ feedback, “was not going to happen the way we were building it.” Cabot was accepted into the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Program overseen by the Haas School’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship.

“We told Lester Center Director Andre Marquis, ‘We’re a little backward. We have something built and now we have to figure out if anyone wants it and for what,” she says. That wasn’t all that unusual among entrepreneurs, she discovered.

During the I-Corps Program, the Brandizi team found the product wasn’t a perfect fit with marketing managers. They told the team to take it to sales managers, who rely heavily on email and social media. “Sales managers said, ‘This is great. It helps me sell,’” she recalls.

The product automates and improves email, social media, and other communication streams between a company and client during the sales cycle and ongoing company relationship.

“We’re adding customers all the time now,” Cabot says, “and learning that the customer discovery process never ends—we have I-Corps to thank for that.”

Brandizi currently has 25 customers, who typically have about 10 users each, and has raised $1 million in angel funding.

Now Cabot is working with entrepreneurship lecturer Dave Charron, MBA 95, in independent study. “He’s been amazing,” she says. “He’s super smart. He can listen to anyone talk about their company in any industry, and he just gets the weak link.”

The best advice Cabot received from Charron: "Don’t be afraid to ask for more money for your product. And think big.”

A Real Gem
Alastair Trueger, MBA 15
Co-founder, Teaman & Company

Alastair Trueger co-founded Teaman & Company to bring fine gemstones and luxury, custom-made jewelry to a market beyond the very wealthy.

Based in San Francisco, Teaman & Company was recently accepted into 500 Startups, an incubator program in Silicon Valley that provides early-stage companies with up to $250,000 in funding. “It’s exciting,” Trueger says. “It shows that we have traction and we’re doing interesting stuff.”

Teaman’s products range from $30 gemstones like the aquamarine to a $17,500 raspberry-pink Tourmaline ring from Brazil. “There’s an entire world of stunning gemstones beyond diamonds that most people have never heard about,” says Trueger, who stresses that Teaman sells only ethically sourced and conflict-free jewelry.

The company is tapping the cutting-edge technology to introduce the world to these gems. Customers worldwide can create their own jewelry designs, and Teaman then sends them a model created using a 3D printer to review before the final product is created.

Trueger began working on the company last July with his co-founder, Chloe Alpert, a certified gemologist who was raised in the jewelry industry. The two met in London, where Trueger previously lived. (He’s American and British and has worked in India and the Philippines.)

A vast support network at Haas has helped Trueger navigate his job at Teaman, he says, citing classes in leadership and operations and valuable feedback from Professor Toby Stewart, faculty director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, and Haas Lecturer Rob Chandra, a senior adviser to Bessemer Partners.

The company’s first sale? An engagement ring for a classmate. “She’s been a fantastic evangelist for us,” Trueger says.

Helping Volunteers Abroad
Kelly Ling and Steve Weddle, both MBA 15, Co-founders
Volunteer Forever

Like many startups, Volunteer Forever emerged to solve the pain points of its co-founders. Both Steven Weddle and Kelly Ling had volunteered abroad, Weddle in India and Ling in Costa Rica, and found the experience expensive and a bit unnerving.

“I was more nervous landing in New Delhi than when I landed in Afghanistan with the Air Force a few years back,” says Weddle, who served in the Air Force for seven years.

After paying $2,000 for airfare, travel, and insurance, he wasn’t sure the organization he’d volunteered to work for was legitimate, or whether anyone would even pick him up at the airport. Nonetheless, he says, his three weeks working in an orphanage for children with HIV/ AIDS turned out to be remarkable.

Still, Weddle couldn’t stop thinking about how to make the experience easier for others. After meeting Ling at the start of the MBA program, the pair began discussing a Kickstarter-like platform that could be used by individuals who want to raise money to cover the costs of their trips, coupled with Trip Advisory-style program reviews for potential volunteers to read about the experience of others.

Since coming out of beta in fall 2013, Volunteer Forever now receives 50,000 visits a month and has about 3,000 users. Collectively, volunteers have raised well over $500,000 to travel largely to Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America. Volunteer Forever makes money by collecting 5 percent of each donation and will soon earn revenue through advertisements from international volunteer organizations.

Sara Beckman’s Problem Finding, Problem Solving class helped Ling and Weddle to think more about how other people understood their idea and to consider designing it in ways not done before.

They also entered the Global Social Venture Competition and UC Berkeley Startup Competition to seek feedback from users and investors with a potential cash prize.

This is part of an occasional series of articles spotlighting students who are juggling their studies with starting a new business or nonprofit venture.

If the Shirt Fits…
Parag Jhaverie, Full-time MBA 15
Co-Founder, Hucklebury

Parag Jhaveri started Hucklebury in 2012 with co-founder Dhawal Shah with an idea to apply a crowdsourcing model to manufacture premium menswear. They wanted to design and make a great-fitting shirt without leaving the U.S. for manufacturing—and sell the shirts directly to customers.

On Tuesday, Oct. 15, the pair will launch a Kickstarter campaign intended to raise $20,000 to start work at a factory near Washington, D.C. that already makes clothes for stores including Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Jhaveri’s interest in the industry began at a young age in Mumbai, India, where his mother ran a factory that manufactured men’s and women’s scarves and shirts. His engineering background helped him use Six Sigma and lean manufacturing to develop Hucklebury’s crowd-sourcing business model.

A case study at Haas about Spanish retail giant Inditex and its biggest brand, Zara, clarified Jhaveri’s entrepreneurial vision and influenced the company’s decision to let customers choose what Hucklebury makes.

“My first-year operations class at Haas, taught by Pnina Feldman, helped me to understand how Zara was bringing offline efficiencies online,” Jhaveri says, noting that Inditex uses feedback from Zara store managers to update the brand’s fashions twice a week.

Hucklebury (the name is a twist on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) cuts out the middleman by buying 100 percent Egyptian cotton milled in Italy directly and makes better-fitting shirts with less fabric around the chest, armhole and waist. The high-end shirts will cost $78 each if Hucklebury meets its Kickstarter goal—a bargain that Jhaveri hopes will draw buyers, shirt by shirt.

Fits to a T
Shawn Sheikh, BS 15
Founder, The Hamper

Shawn Sheikh bootstrapped his third venture, The Hamper, with profits from two previous startups, Structured Designs, which he started as a high school sophomore, and HotelsNThings, which he launched as a Berkeley undergrad.

With The Hamper, Sheikh and his 10-person team are turning their startup efforts toward direct philanthropy. Shiekh says he has always been inspired by his mother, who with her nine siblings fled from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge as a child, and later sent food and money back to Cambodia. His father, a Pakistan native, worked at a health clinic that his family ran for the poor.

When Sheikh started The Hamper, he launched a Facebook site committed to selling t-shirts on behalf of a different cause each week. Sheikh donated $7 per shirt sold. The Hamper’s tagline: Cleaning up the world, one shirt at a time.

Now he is revamping its business model, looking at partnering directly with charities run by other young entrepreneurs. One possible new venture would use apparel sales profits to directly fund a new school in Ghana, Sheikh says.

Charitable groups Sheikh has reached out to at Berkeley have been “awesome,” he adds. Haas offers so much to student entrepreneurs, he says, and he gives back by mentoring students and investing in smaller ventures. “I really believe in the power of student leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship.”

Brain Candy for Kids
Tavis McGinn, Evening & Weekend MBA 15
VP of Marketing, Kizoom

After 10 years of management consulting and marketing experience, Tavis McGinn decided to change his focus toward kids’ play—and learning.

McGinn is vice president of marketing for Kizoom, which recently received a $500,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant that the startup will use to make software that helps children “know and grow their brains.”

Kizoom was co-founded by neuroscientist Erica Warp and Web designer and developer Jessica Voytek, both Berkeley grads, who raised $26,370 on Kickstarter last year. Kizoom used the money to roll out an ebook called The Adventures of Ned the Neuron for the iPad. It was a great idea, but a niche product looking for a market, McGinn says.

Warp, who created Ned for kids ages 7 to 11, started looking for a marketing exec to help commercialize the firm’s future ideas. She met McGinn in January at UC Berkeley’s Bplan Competition, which mixes students from Berkeley’s different schools and departments.

The two clicked and McGinn joined Kizoom. Now, the company is testing new brain-related apps and ideas with students—such as Brain Jump with Ned the Neuron—using Haas Lecturer Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad model to figure out what works. Blank’s framework focuses entrepreneurs on developing business models, rather than business plans, and on iterating their models quickly and frequently while engaging and learning from more than 100 customers.

“We’re in a stage now where we are throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks,” McGinn says. “We’re using the Lean LaunchPad method of letting our customers guide us.”