August 2, 2023 • 54 mins
Prepare to be astounded as we embark on an enlightening journey with a group of extraordinary high school entrepreneurs from the Roseville Rising Program. You'll discover just how they brainstormed and developed innovative business startup ideas throughout the 16-week program, culminating when they confidently pitched their ventures at the electrifying Mark Tank event.
From launching a sustainable bag business to designing a remote workforce platform, these young entrepreneurs are truly redefining the business landscape. Their stories illustrate the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship and the life-altering lessons it imparts.
Join us in this episode and witness the power of youthful innovation and the promising future it holds.
________________________________________________________________
If this episode inspires you to be part of the movement, and you believe, like me, that entrepreneurs are the answer to our future, message me so we can join forces to support building truly great companies in our region.
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Subscribe to my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCom_...
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Mark Haney is a serial entrepreneur that has experience growing companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is currently the CEO and founder of HaneyBiz
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Instagram: http://instagram.com/themarkhaney
Facebook: www.facebook.com/themarkhaney
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markehaney
Website: http://haneybiz.com
Audio Boom: https://audioboom.com/channels/5005273
Twitter: http://twitter.com/themarkhaney
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This video includes personal knowledge, experiences, and opinions about Angel Investing by seasoned angel investors. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, or financial advice. Nothing in this video constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement.
#thebackyardadvantage #themarkhaneyshow #entrepreneur
#PowerOfWith #SacramentoEntrepreneur #Sacramento
#SacramentoSmallBusiness #SmallBusiness #GrowthFactory #Investor
#Podcast #Haneyville
From launching a sustainable bag business to designing a remote workforce platform, these young entrepreneurs are truly redefining the business landscape. Their stories illustrate the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship and the life-altering lessons it imparts.
Join us in this episode and witness the power of youthful innovation and the promising future it holds.
________________________________________________________________
If this episode inspires you to be part of the movement, and you believe, like me, that entrepreneurs are the answer to our future, message me so we can join forces to support building truly great companies in our region.
-
Subscribe to my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCom_...
-
Mark Haney is a serial entrepreneur that has experience growing companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is currently the CEO and founder of HaneyBiz
-
Instagram: http://instagram.com/themarkhaney
Facebook: www.facebook.com/themarkhaney
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markehaney
Website: http://haneybiz.com
Audio Boom: https://audioboom.com/channels/5005273
Twitter: http://twitter.com/themarkhaney
-
This video includes personal knowledge, experiences, and opinions about Angel Investing by seasoned angel investors. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, or financial advice. Nothing in this video constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement.
#thebackyardadvantage #themarkhaneyshow #entrepreneur
#PowerOfWith #SacramentoEntrepreneur #Sacramento
#SacramentoSmallBusiness #SmallBusiness #GrowthFactory #Investor
#Podcast #Haneyville
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So fired up today to be joined by a unique group of people.
We are actually joined today by high school entrepreneurs that have come through the Roseville Rising Program for entrepreneurs that are in high school and I can tell you today you are going to be inspired.
(00:20):
So to help kick off and help us understand our audience, understand what Roseville Rising is all about, I've got my good buddy, Murshad Mansouri.
He helped bring this group together, along with my co-founder and the growth factory, Monique Brown.
Murshad, how you doing?
I'm good Mark.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Well, thanks for joining.
Maybe we just talk maybe a little bit of your background.
You had GoPro, techstars, you've done some big stuff in the past and maybe just a little bit of that.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
All right.
I mean, you just took that intro and you know, that's my entire life no that's not my entire life.
That's my entire life, basically.
I've been in tech 25 years.
Started out in high school, sold computers out of my garage.
Dropped out of college, went back to college, worked in all facets of business, from PR to sales, to all the better development operations, finance, and then the last two lugs in my life have been more in the partnerships and corporate development realms.
(01:20):
So a lot of clients in the blue chip, like Microsoft's, the Google's, the Design Within Reach, but I definitely, you know, cut my teeth in the last 10 years.
You know some of the big corporates.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
So you brought this group together along with Monique Brown as we discussed, which to me, it's amazing how far they came in such a short period of time, and I think it's interesting to think about if people have access to minds like yours and Monique's and the others that you brought in what's possible, and so you're gonna hear today a little bit about what's possible, but maybe you could talk to us about what that 16 weeks looked like and what actually happened.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeah, I mean for sure.
This was definitely Monique's brainchild.
You know, without her we would not have the folks in the room here, she put together the you know bare curriculum as to what it was we're trying to achieve over the next 16 weeks.
She basically brought all these kids together and I was the border collie, if you will, just hurting them and running around them and making sure they were on track for the most part.
(02:22):
I'm looking at some of the kids that I had to definitely tighten around I call them the chuckleheads but definitely had a bunch of good activities coming out of the 16 week program and the thesis was how do we get a very big, very monolithic problem that's facing the world today and how do we just keep on cracking away at it?
How do we chip away at it Like a sculptor trying to build something out of marble into bringing it to form some sort of solution that they can actually build to slowly tackle those big problems?
(02:52):
So we thought big in terms of what are some challenges that we're seeing around us with what I call soft eyes, and how do we take a prescriptive approach to making a solution that is within our capabilities, something that these kids are familiar with, wanna do and bring to course, with a business plan, a business idea.
(03:14):
So we've done a lot of time in design thinking, the whole notion of how do you think differently, how do you think like a designer?
The soft eyes approach that I mentioned.
It's like look around you at any given time.
You know there may be something that you may not be aware of because you're so myopic and so focused on your day to day.
So how do you take that soft eye approach and how do you see the problems around you and how do you look within and see the capabilities that you have?
(03:39):
And also, how do you look to your side and see the capabilities of your partners on your team and the resource that's available through folks like you and folks like the growth factory, and bring a problem down to something manageable, a real solution?
So we kind of cover the conceptual upfront.
What we had them do really fun exercises involving paper, spaghetti marshmallows.
(03:59):
What else do we have, guys?
Macaroni.
And then we got to the nitty gritties of all right, what is the business plan?
You know?
what is going to market.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Well, they built businesses and we're going to get them up in a minute.
But okay, just one last question before we introduce our first entrepreneur.
They pitched at the end of the 16 weeks at an event called Mark Tank and I tell you, I saw what they had achieved and it brought tears to my eyes.
I had to like look away, and then I saw you over there talking to them like almost like a proud father, and I walked back there and I'm like I can't believe what I just saw.
(04:38):
Right High school students building actual businesses.
A lot of them are tech companies and just blown away.
When you see this imagination come to life, when you see greatness actually happening before your very eyes, you're like whoa well, we're going to hear some of that greatness today.
But what was your emotion after you saw them actually deliver at Mark Tank?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, I don't have kids and definitely teaching some of these guys I don't want to have kids, but I think the feeling that I had was I was overwhelmed with what I saw.
Three weeks before the Mark Tank we had them do dry runs and I was impressed, like totally impressed, by the dry runs.
(05:20):
These kids I shouldn't call them kids these guys and gals, they basically I'll perform a lot of the companies that I was looking at for acquisition when I worked in corporate development and GoPro, or when I was helping some of our founders find homes at Techstars and they definitely had the excitement of first time founders or they're dough-eyed, they're just seeing the world for the first time.
They don't have that sense of regular business as usual go into a pitch, try to get them out of it.
(05:45):
They were excited, they were genuinely excited and that showed and they continued to refine, they continued to test their messaging into the second week of practice before Mark Tank and it just exceeded my expectations even more and the way to office hours where I would get on the phone or zoom with them.
I'm still 11 at night leading up to Mark Tank and it's always the last that's past their bedtime, isn't it?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I mean they're in high school with him.
No, that's three hours before my bedtime.
Actually.
I mean their bedtime, yeah, their bedtime.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
I'm surprised.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, they're up to like midnight and when they went to Mark Tank, it's like I had a little bit of hesitancy in terms of how they were gonna articulate their solutions.
But and I say this without hyperbole every single one of the teams just blew me away.
And what I told some of the folks was when I was working in Corp Dev, we would see companies try to pitch themselves.
(06:38):
They had bankers come in and they try to pitch themselves for sale.
They wanted to say, why should we join GoPro, why should we sell to X company when other tech stars and their business modeling was not as concise or as strong as some of these guys in the Mark Tank exhibited?
So I would classify these guys and gals and their top 25% of the founders that I've worked with over the last 10 years.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Really incredible that what they did.
Well, let's get to that now, because you two well, I'm an old man- You're the old enough?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, you're not.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
I think.
Well, one thing too is I think our imagination decreases as we get older.
You know, as an older guy, I think some of what you don't have the imagination that these young people have, and so it's really being able to tap into that is is super for sure.
Okay, so our first guess so we have some of the winners.
There was three.
There was actually a three way tie for first place, and then there was an elevator pitch competition as well.
(07:39):
There was like prior to Mark Tank, and so one of the winners.
So we're gonna talk about some of the winners a little bit, but let's get to know them.
The first one is Sophia.
Sophia, welcome, you are in Viro.
You guys won the elevator pitch.
You were also one of the three winners of Mark Tank.
It was randomly, it was a three way tie and we had a lot of judges and I don't know how it became a three way tie, but it did, and I think the person I gave the high score isn't even here today, but I'm looking at who that was.
(08:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I don't know exactly but there was other good ones, is my point.
And so, sophia, let's get to know you a little bit.
How did you tell us about your idea and actually, where would you rather?
Let's get to know you first.
Let's start with you what school you go to.
Speaker 6 (08:28):
I go to Roosevelt High.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
School you go to Roosevelt High, and how did you find out about this and maybe just tell us a little bit about your experience going through Roosevelt Rising?
Speaker 6 (08:39):
So I personally didn't know a lot about it.
My dad kind of found it on Facebook one night as we were watching TV and he was like, hey, this is a cool idea.
And I was like, oh yeah, it is.
And so I signed up for it and I wasn't hopeful that I'd get in.
Or I was hopeful I'd get in but I wasn't expecting to because I'm a sophomore and when arriving I found that I was the only sophomore here.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Oh, wow.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
But I did get waitlisted at first.
I think it was because of my grade, but throughout the process I actually learned so much about not only like entrepreneurship, but like the ideas and creativity as a person, and I actually found out that this is the career path I wanna go down.
So that's pretty helpful for me and it was just a great opportunity.
(09:25):
I learned so much and it gave me more opportunities like the startup challenge and other stuff like that as well.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
That's exciting.
Okay, so do you wanna try?
You won the elevator pitch.
Do you wanna try it on us right now?
What?
Speaker 6 (09:38):
do you think?
Are you prepared?
Speaker 1 (09:39):
It's been a couple weeks, but I'll go ahead and do it, all right, so the elevator pitch is like a one minute pitch on your business, so take it away, sophia.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
So we are in Viro.
We're local, supporting local.
We support local by creating sustainable bags to kind of replace the plastic bags used in fashion in store places.
We have two types of bags the seed paper bag and the tote bag.
The seed paper bag is kind of in place of the one time use plastic bags that get thrown into the landfills and into the oceans.
(10:14):
Basically, after you use it you tear it up, throw it in your backyard and it will grow wildflowers.
And then we also have the tote bag, which is made out of a coffee ground material, usually from the big companies that throw all those coffee grounds away.
So the brand we're planning on partnering with was actually Synxtex, which partnered with Starbucks, and this isn't like an original idea of creating sustainable packaging.
(10:40):
So we kind of had to create something that made us different.
So we looked outside the venture lab window and saw we are Roseville and we kind of took that local moment and kind of thought about how we can connect local artists with the local business community and we figured out that we could create just a connection there and have the local artists featured on the bags.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Wow, just looking out the window inspired your different, one of your differentiations.
Right, you got this environmental bag and you look out the window and you're inspired at some level by the.
We are Roseville and now you can have a local bag with local branding.
That makes you feel like you're tight.
It's tied to your home.
Speaker 6 (11:22):
Yes Wow.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
What were the biggest, what was the biggest challenge in bringing this together?
Speaker 6 (11:30):
I think we had a lot of good opportunities to give us knowledge, but it was kind of hard.
I think it was the differentiating part, because there were other people trying to do what we did, not specifically with the local artists, but with the sustainable packaging, and it is more expensive.
And I think the hardest part was probably going to get customer validation from the businesses, because as a business, you want to save as much money as possible and be profitable and the bags that we are selling are a little more expensive, so it's kind of harder for them to get to that point where they'd be willing to switch what's the plan for the business at this point?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Is it going to, is it going to fade away and it was just a cool school project, or is it going to have a life?
Speaker 6 (12:16):
Since I'm still in high school, I think it would be pretty fun to continue, but Felina and Sophia, my co-founders they're both going off to college, like all around California, so it'd be kind of hard with putting in money because they're going to be college students and I have a job but I don't make that much money.
What's your where's?
Speaker 1 (12:35):
your job.
I work at Revolutions Naturopathic right now.
Speaker 6 (12:38):
It's right next to Lazy Dog.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
It's natural medicine, so I'm in high school and you already have a job.
Yeah, Let me, let me, let me also.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
she's being super humble here, which which is also a quality I like in people, but I was invited to judge a startup sack competition about three weeks ago, a startup weekend three months ago.
Three weeks ago, time flies and, surprisingly, haley who we'll talk to in a bit and Sophia were presenting, and Sophia got up there and they had 48 hours to bring an idea together with strangers, people they didn't know, you know, and they managed to, in the course of 48 hours, put together a presentation on a unique problem and presented a unique solution not in viral, something completely different and they nailed that out of the park.
(13:26):
They got first place, like just Sophia, for her age, was articulate, she demonstrated with clarity, she demonstrated with conviction and, you know, she was on a wavering in believing, you know, that this is something that she could do, and I think that was just like okay, great.
This is probably a sign of things that come for, for Roosevelt rising, you know, and they all exceeded expectations.
(13:52):
But you know that's a testament to these folks here doing way more than just this activity to prove there can be leaders in the future and they don't need to do business, you know.
They don't need to go into marketing, they don't need to go into whatever.
They just seem to know how to tackle problems on their own, how to get that confidence they need.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
That is so cool.
Well, thank you, you're an inspiration, but we have more inspiration as yet to come.
Let's bring up, let's go to our next one.
Bye, sophia.
You know, this is an interesting one for me, rental bay, as a guy that dabbles in real estate a little bit.
These gentlemen have tackled a actual problem that exists for people that own real estate and single family homes and they want to rent them out.
(14:34):
And so why don't I have you guys introduce yourselves each, and then we'll talk a little bit about your experience in the program and then we'll go into maybe, an elevator pitch, or you can tell us about the company.
I'm Hudson, I'm Michael, I'm for a lot.
Well, welcome guys.
You were one of the three winners and, hudson, you got up and you delivered a presentation I think blew away a lot of the judges and a lot of the audience.
(15:00):
Maybe, before we get into that, why don't you tell us, maybe, each of you, a little bit about your experience going through the Roseville Rising program?
And who did you like better, monique or Machan?
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Nope, nope, nope, no.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
Yeah, so we were originally me and Michael.
We kind of went through this together because we were originally part of DECA.
Hailey was the president of that, and that's how we even heard about this in the first place.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Okay, what's president of DECA?
What's that?
Speaker 7 (15:27):
Oh, it's this business club, like high school business club thing.
Okay, we joined it and they compete in business competitions and we joined that looking to looking to explore business and we heard about this through them and we both applied and we both got in and that's where we showed up and then 16 weeks have been amazing.
(15:48):
It's been an amazing journey for what's, what was the highlight?
Probably the pitch, at least for me.
Yeah, what was the?
Speaker 1 (15:55):
feel Were you at a lot of adrenaline, were you nervous?
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Oh, my oh.
I was so, so nervous.
I was so anxious going up there, but after I was finished it was.
It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Oh, you knocked it out of the park.
Okay, how about you?
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I mean, the overall thing was pretty like just awesome, awesome experience.
I learned a lot.
We learned a ton about the question.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Okay.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Who do?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
you like more?
Yeah, we don't play favorites you guys, both pretty good, both pretty good Okay.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
They gave us a lot of help and resources when we asked them to and we just like.
We just like we learned a ton with the different like the steps to make a complete business plan, from the idea to the pitch, and I think we did.
I think we managed it well yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
That was great.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
Brlatt, yeah.
So first off, I had to give a shout out to my dad.
He's the one who brought me here.
He's like one of the first ones to sign up for this program.
He saw it on Facebook and next minute he was called me.
I was in my volleyball practice and he's like, oh, do you want to sign up for this entrepreneurship program?
And at the time that was like when I wanted to do business.
I was like thinking how to explore and I didn't.
I only knew the niche like parts of business.
(17:06):
I know much.
So now I was like, yeah, why not, let's go for it.
And then so the 16 weeks have been really great.
I learned all the like basics and I learned more advanced working with my friends.
Both go to my school.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Which school you guys go to.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
Granite Bay.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Granite Bay.
Oh yeah, you guys had the teachers.
There's a woman that in the audience that teaches at Granite Bay?
Yeah, I thought it was great that we had.
You know, there was an audience at Mark Tank and there were actually a few teachers that I mean.
To me that was really inspired by that Having my teachers wouldn't have showed up for something for me when I was a kid, so that was pretty inspiring.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
Yeah, and also like I learned so much about this, like I learned how to go to market plan, I knew how to find good target market, how to like find good market opportunities, like how to develop and like how to like use market penetration all these different strategies that would definitely help me later on in my path in just being an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Was there a low light?
Was there a down part?
That was really you didn't enjoy.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
Well, we did actually have to pivot once, I believe, right.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
More than once.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
More than once.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
Other than that, then I think everything was good.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
That's pretty normal pivoting right.
We see pivots in very mature companies end up having to pivot yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
I mean, it's embraced.
The pivot is what we try to let them know.
It's not a sunk cost, it's something that you can.
You have the ability, you have the skills.
There's no reason why you can't go somewhere else.
These guys, though I'll be fully transparent.
I call them chuckleheads for a reason, because it's four dudes, and all they did, you know, throughout the working session every week, was shadow box, play chess on their phones, get on tiktok and Instagram, and I was like dudes, come on, but but but, but, you admit that.
(18:45):
You admit that.
But but they came through the modern workplace.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Models stimulus from other areas.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I was.
I was, you know, thoroughly impressed when they went into their two weeks before the pitch and they realized, all right, customer personas are important, go to market plans are important.
Actually, having a revenue model is important.
Even though this was a big simulation and there was no money, real money, involved, you know, it's good to think about those important aspects of running a business, their actual dollars associated with it.
(19:17):
So they came through and, and you know, I call them the pizza eaters also because they just come to the table.
You're in nicknames aren't you, Masha, Well, yeah some of the nicknames you know it's a good way of building the affinity yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
All right.
So we want to know about this business because you're one of the winners and there's a rumor that you guys that it might actually turn into something.
I don't know about that rumor, but if you can clarify that would be cool.
But who wants to do the elevator pitch?
Hudson, not surprised.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
So rental bay.
Currently, mortgage rates have gone up significantly, as you mentioned, and because of that there's a large number of new homeowners looking to rent out their properties and they're finding it really hard to find property managers.
So because the current, the current tools to find a property manager are pretty poor there's Yelp, zillow, google, and you end up having like hundreds of pages of property managers, each with like five or zero stars, and it's it's a pretty awful experience.
(20:09):
So we kind of come in and what we do is we match homeowners and property managers and we flip the traditional dynamic on its head.
Instead of homeowners looking and chasing down property managers, the property managers come to them and this allows the homeowner to get the best deal possible and allows them to get save time and stress looking for a property manager and allows the property manager to get access to way more customers.
(20:31):
It can lower their cost of acquisition and it allows them to pick what clients they wanna pursue.
So it's really a win-win for both parties and because of that we feel like we're a much superior service to traditional methods.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
That's awesome.
Okay, then may you follow up question what is the revenue model?
So Marsha talked about revenue.
Who pays you?
Speaker 7 (20:50):
Yeah, so our customers are the property managers, our product is the homeowners.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
That's how we work.
Speaker 7 (20:58):
It's completely free to use for both homeowners and property managers.
However, we charge property managers for verification, which will get them put higher up on lists and it'll give them a verified tag and it'll make like they're listing in different colors.
Well, so they'll stand out more to customers and they get access to better client customer data.
So, there's strong incentives for them to do.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Well, it's amazing that you built conceptually this business.
That is really a platform that can scale I mean, it's like Airbnb or any of these other platforms incredible.
Do you have something to add?
I mean, so we Go ahead and speak to Mike a little bit, yeah, so we came up with this like the original thing was.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
I moved here from San Antonio, texas, and my parents had a few properties there that we weren't there at all, so we didn't have the capabilities to manage them or anything.
So we of course we were trying to get a property manager, and my mom in particular had a horrible experience like going on Google, on Yelp and all that stuff.
(22:02):
So I was like there's no way that that's the only thing that we can do.
So we came together.
The original thing was like a ranking system, but we decided that that was not the very good option.
So we decided to attack the issue by itself and that's how we came up with rental bay.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Perla, do you wanna add anything?
Nothing much.
They said it all Okay.
So what's the plan?
Again, I heard that rumor.
I confronted you before the show that I heard a rumor that you might actually continue and make this an actual business.
Is that a rumor?
Where does that rumor lie?
We wanna-.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I didn't tell him anything, guys, so let's go get someone else.
Speaker 7 (22:44):
Well, we're currently in the process of incorporating.
It's not done yet, but it'll be there soon.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Are you doing a C-Corp, Delaware C-Corp.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Well, at the moment it's gonna be an LLC, but after that we can make it a C-Corp once we actually get people just on both sides just coming in.
But at the moment I feel like an LLC is a better option.
Speaker 7 (23:09):
We currently have a website.
It's in the process of being.
It'll be up in two days.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
It's two days.
Speaker 7 (23:16):
Everything we built the website and everything.
Well, the splash page.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
There's a waitlist that we added.
So if we're gonna start to do some outreach, we're gonna try and get some people to sign up for the waitlist and to do this survey that we made to try and get some hype around the platform and things like that.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
So, yeah, I love it Okay, anything else to add by anybody?
Speaker 7 (23:42):
Not particularly.
This is a great program.
It was an amazing experience for all of us, I think.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, I connected them with an advisor that I spoke with for the first time yesterday.
Superior Intellect with that advisor and they're helping them with their launch.
So I've got some confidence.
Yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Hopefully, take it to the next one.
This is amazing.
Thank you guys appreciate it.
Okay, this one's gonna be fun.
Hailey Garrett, who has been helping the growth factory I guess it's an did you get discovered at the growth at Roseau Rising and then get brought in as an intern Right?
Speaker 10 (24:13):
so the whole process was.
I actually took an opportunity that our school offered a CTE internship program once you complete the business pathway, and so I connected with Mrs Griffin, who does a lot of outreach with interns, and connected with me the growth factory, and so I was actually able to learn about the Roseau Rising program a few months ahead in December.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
So you knew about it, you had the inside track.
Yes, tell us about your experience going through.
You already knew some of us, at least a little bit.
You knew Monique really well, but tell us about the experience, maybe the highs and lows of this 16 week journey.
Speaker 10 (24:52):
Right.
So I have to say I think we've all come a long ways, because when you go into this program, no one had an idea on what they wanted to tackle, what it really was to be an entrepreneur.
I think this was probably the biggest lesson, and so I mean, I'm sure many people went through this.
But you go four weeks, you choose a problem and it's a big one, like remote worker, disengagement or homelessness, and then you have to figure out what's the best way to narrow down to make it a niche problem.
(25:23):
And so I mean, personally, for our team, we had four weeks of pivots where we didn't know what exactly we were gonna do, what was the exact problem we were gonna solve, and so that's 14, that's four weeks of a.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
You're like a sprint.
I mean there's 16 weeks.
To build a company is a very, very short time.
So it took four weeks just to get to the decision, I guess.
Speaker 10 (25:47):
Yeah, exactly, and talking to all the mentors coming in, and it was a very crazy experience, I have to say.
But once we kind of go on the track, it was learning how to do customer validation, how do we meet the people then, how do we wire frame a product, and so, really, this was a 16 week learning experience for sure.
(26:08):
And, yeah, I have to say thank you for having me, because this was an amazing time.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
How has your perspective maybe changed?
We had Sophia saying now I think I wanna be an entrepreneur, or maybe she is gonna be an entrepreneur.
Has your perspective shifted at all?
In terms of career-pathetic, absolutely.
Speaker 10 (26:26):
So I wasn't sure what I was gonna do with my life, except I knew I wanted to be in business, and especially interning for the growth factory, learning how to invest in startups.
I fell in love with the startup culture and I plan on pursuing this space, either in venture capital or as an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Wow, that's exciting.
Gonna be motivated, okay.
Well, you motivated me at Mark Tank as well.
You are one of the three winners one of the three-way tie.
Would you be up for doing your elevator pitch?
I can do that.
Yes, all right, let's do it All right.
Speaker 10 (27:05):
so the company we created was Co-Elevate, and we are about connecting remote workforces.
This was inspired by the pandemic experience where I personally didn't know my teachers or my peers I honestly didn't talk to anyone for three months and so we realized that this is not a pandemic problem.
(27:27):
This is an everyday problem, because remote workforces can undergo the same exact struggle.
When they're working alone in their home, in their apartment, they are unable to see their coworkers for long periods of time, and so with Co-Elevate, we are a platform that connects remote workers within the company using personalized results.
(27:48):
So they answer a daily question, do a daily activity and we kind of gauge their interests.
They connect them with coworkers with similar interests.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Wow.
So a big part of that is building, strengthening a culture of a remote workforce, because people become so disconnected and sometimes disengaged.
Speaker 10 (28:08):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
So, thinking about how you arrived at that problem, you already saw it as a problem.
And then whose idea?
Because you built a team too.
Right, you have other members of your team.
Yes, so in assembling that team first of all, how did you come up with who's gonna team up?
Right, you get a lot of high school students in one room.
I went in there on that first day and I'm like, how are these all gonna team up?
(28:34):
And Monique sort of did this little game where you broke up by.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Snapchat versus TikTok, Dutch Brothers versus Starbucks.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Who would get along with each other, and then you formed a team.
You have to actually make the decision who I want to be on my team, and so did your co-founders.
So how did that walk me through that?
A little bit.
Speaker 10 (28:54):
So I have to preface this.
My best friend and I, sherveny, we actually came together a week before.
We came up with a list of problems and met together and we actually chose remote workforce disengagement as the essential problem, and so this was kind of a bonding experience for her and I to figure out what to do there.
(29:17):
And so, after looking at all the other teams pitching, it was kind of about what was the best problem to tackle and did we feel passionate about it.
And so once we decided that yes, this is something we wanted to do, we onboarded Nathan and he was in my calculus class.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
So Brought in a smart guy, huh, oh yeah, smart girl calculus.
Speaker 10 (29:40):
Hey, we're all yeah, very technical people, and so it was an awesome experience, and especially hearing how other teams formed and what their ideas were.
Yeah, it was about finding a problem that's most applicable.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Anything.
So you've seen how this got made.
Being kind of have an inside track Anything, you would have us do differently in terms of putting this together If you were to advise Mershaden, monique how we might wanna and me how we might wanna change it.
Speaker 10 (30:11):
Yeah, and so I actually do have a little something was I love the shock of the pitch.
So two weeks before we had to practice pitch in front of the mentors and before that was like around Robin pitch, and so I think that was pretty much essential to how serious I think everyone got when we realized, oh my gosh, this is happening soon and so, honestly, having that experience beforehand might inspire some people to really get on the project.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Oh, okay, instead of wait until two weeks before the actual event, do that?
Have a pre-pitch a little earlier, with a live audience and adults listening?
Speaker 10 (30:56):
Yeah, but I think, being an entrepreneur, the best way to learn is doing it, and so I don't know if everyone's going to pursue business or become an entrepreneur.
But the greatest thing I took out of this program was how to take a no and how to turn that into something, because we got told no, or let's say they don't really like this part, but what about this?
(31:20):
And being able to pivot was such a big thing for most of the program, if not all of it.
So learning how to take a no, Learning how to take a no.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Wow, some lessons in there.
Learn how to take a no.
Best way to learn is by getting the game and try it and do it.
Good stuff.
Well, anything else to add to?
Speaker 10 (31:38):
that.
Yeah, all I want to say is thank you for having me.
This is, I don't think.
Well, I think this is the best learning experience of the year, so oh, thank you, Great job.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Thanks, Ailey.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
And now we've got the co-founders of Career Compass.
Why don't I have you guys introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your experience going through Roosevelt Rising?
Speaker 3 (32:01):
So I'm Teth Patel, I go to Granite Bay High School, I'm a junior and I think it was just a really great experience for me.
These 16 weeks I learned a lot of stuff about how to, like you know, make it like, get your problem and make it an actual, like solution.
We spent a lot of time like perfecting our problem.
I know we spent, I think, four or five weeks just doing the problem itself and then we started pivoting and we started focusing on like the solution and how to really get like the like idea we had into like an actual, like tangible thing that we could, you know, pitch.
Speaker 9 (32:29):
All right, my name is Rishil Tarvati.
I go to West Park High School and I will be a senior this upcoming year.
My experience with Roosevelt Rising has been mostly positive, actually all positive.
Working with people I knew and working with people I also didn't know.
We were able to create something that I'm especially proud of.
(32:50):
I'm sure I can speak for my other teammates, but in such a short amount of time, the things we were able to create as a whole was really beneficial.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah, did you two know each other prior?
Speaker 9 (33:05):
We did yes.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
You two knew each other, but the other people, some of the other teammates you guys did not know.
But tell me about that team dynamic Was there?
Did you develop a leader?
Did one person kind of take over, or was it really, I guess, cohesive in terms of everybody?
Speaker 3 (33:20):
contributing.
So I think I knew almost everyone on that team.
So it was me, Rishil and another friend and we sort of kind of signed up for this together and we knew that we wanted to be on the same team and we started discussing problems beforehand and then we sort of set the problem on the table and then we had other people join and we sort of talked with them, discussed with them, and we didn't have a leader of sorts.
(33:41):
We just kind of we like to listen to everyone's opinions about our problem and we tried to vote for the best opinion and we sort of implement that into the solution.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Kind of like a democracy.
It was going to be a voting system yeah, more or less.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Interesting.
Do you think that's the best way to run a company?
Speaker 3 (33:55):
I think it is because you don't have a hierarchy and people may not agree with that hierarchy, so it's just better to have everyone have a voice.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Any challenges in terms of the team.
I mean, that sounds like a really cool way to get decisions made, but any internal budding of heads in deciding things.
Speaker 9 (34:15):
Decision-wise, I think we were all on the same page.
We did have our different opinions on topics, but we were able to resolve those fairly quickly.
Our biggest problem as a team, however, was showing up.
Although we had the biggest group we had eight people At the start we lost somebody along the way and many people had their conflicts with their commitments outside commitments, and I think that that was one thing we lacked as compared to other teams.
(34:48):
If we were able to solve that problem a little bit quickly and make Rosarizing a commitment for the entire team, we would have got more done.
But I am like I said, I am proud of what we got completed.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
It's amazing how much that's like real business is the commitment level.
But I do have to say and I heard this from Monique that we ran the program during a time that is extremely difficult for high school students, especially those of you that are trying to achieve great grades and get into college and all these kind of things.
(35:22):
Part of it was over finals periods.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, one of them had a growth spurt.
They grew a foot during the session as you say, wow, incredible.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
So I mean commitment is really difficult when you've got all these.
If school is the priority, to make this also a priority can be a real challenge.
But you know what?
That's what we face in the real world too.
We face commitment issues as we try to raise a business.
Well, my family's more important?
Well, let's make a decision.
Sometimes it's really difficult and to do it all.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
That's why, yeah, yeah, and I would say one of the unique characteristics about this team is, with large groups, it's kind of difficult to make decisions, as we're pointing out.
But this is what I call a self-healing team in which, if one or two members weren't there that week, they would come together and say OK, let's try to come together.
It's like a wound that sewed itself up naturally, and I think the one thing that made these folks here really focused is tackling a beach head, whereas before, as we're hearing in their elevator pitch, it was a pretty broad market, it was a pretty broad customer base, and then I think the dictum to them was all right, you got to focus, you got to find one specific customer to go after, and that will really kickstart your business better.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
OK, I look forward to hearing it again.
Ok, so who wants to do the elevator pitch?
I'll go for it, all right, great.
Speaker 9 (36:42):
So our company is Career Compass.
We are an education platform.
I'll give a little bit of insight on why we decided to tackle this issue.
Well, the issue being education, and more specifically, higher education college focused, we noticed that a lot of college students usually first year, second year college students struggle with deciding what major or what exactly they want to do.
(37:14):
It's a lot of uncertainty and it also translates down to high school level, and we decided to tackle this problem by creating a platform where you can learn the things at your own pace.
Whether you're a visual learner, a fast learner or a hands on learner, you're able to learn the things that you would learn in college or higher forms of education right at your house on your own personal device.
(37:42):
I think that was a really important issue to tackle, because there are statistics where there are so many people that are uncertain and there's a lot of money wasted in changing your major, and we wanted to really focus that down to people where they're learning exactly what they want to learn and explore at their own pace, without the risk of losing time or money.
(38:07):
Like Mershad said, we decided to focus in on the beachhead of the medical field to begin with, and expanding as we go.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
So you make your discovery by actually doing it at home, online, and then you don't have to go and get a bunch of student debt and all this other stuff and you know, drive to the campus or move out of state to go test.
You can test at home.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Yeah, what we mainly focus on is like careers.
So we wanted to connect students with an expert working in the career.
So like, let's say, if we had a medical student who was, like you know, kind of on the edge about like, should I go into medical, should I go into another field, we connect them with, like, let's say, a doctor who's been a doctor for five, 10 years and you know they'd be on like a one on one Zoom meeting or in a Zoom meeting with like 15 other kids and the doctor would share like little niches about his career and how he came to be a doctor, things that you can't find easily by doing a Google search, and they just be able to get that like personal connection.
(39:04):
That way the student can be a little bit more sure if they want to go into the medical field or if they want to.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
You know, pivot- there's also a reality check in what a doctor actually does day to day.
It's not so much the glamour and glitz.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
You can.
Yeah, the doctors have to do things that most of us would.
I wouldn't want to do, by this Exactly.
Okay, so that's now.
Is it going to turn into a business or is it just a fun project?
How did it change your perspective?
I guess that's more than one question, huh.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
So we actually we're like we've been communicating on Slack for a little bit now and we're planning on making it like a full scale business.
So we have like a bare bones website on Webflow right now.
So we're just focusing on developing that.
We're trying to get sort of volunteers on so they can be our sort of experts in the field, so we don't have to pay them at first while we make some revenue.
And once you start making some revenue, we're going to start actually bringing on more vol, like more experts, and start paying them and get that cycle going.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Okay, so you're actually going to take this to another level.
Then you're going to continue to grow.
Yeah, wow, is one of your parents a doctor?
Did I hear that, or?
Speaker 3 (40:07):
one of the teammates no.
I think one of the teammates parents is a doctor and we have, like, I think, a plethora of sort of parents that are in different fields, like my dad's a computer science major, and we have a another one who's like, I think, an engineering major, a doctor, other careers.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So you have some built in expertise to kind of prove it out.
Prove it out the model a little bit.
Yeah, that's great.
What's the?
What are you most excited about in terms of like building this, you guys doing this so you can get rich, or is this to change the world?
Speaker 9 (40:38):
Our main goal is to help the people that really need it.
We don't look at the profits that we make ourselves.
We want to take the profits that we do make, the revenue that we do make, and we want to reinvest it back into our business by hiring more capable, more educated you would say experts to then again teach our customers, and it's just a cycle from there.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
That's exciting and this came from a personal question mark that you guys had, like what is the point of college?
I mean, this is the problem.
That was true to you and I remember in the first weeks you guys were so adamant and so fervent, like college is always a time, or college, you know, am I going to get out of it and you boil that you know kind of personal into a all right.
(41:33):
How can we help others, how can we help ourselves by helping others at the same time?
Speaker 5 (41:37):
So, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, yeah.
How many of you are going to plan and go to college?
Looks like everybody.
Oh, all of you.
It's unanimous you all go to college.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
So you have to go to college.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Yeah, how many of you want to go to college?
Hopefully you're doing what you want.
Yeah, I mean yeah.
Speaker 5 (41:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, thanks guys, really good job, thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Thanks for having us, thank you for the experience you bet.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
All right, and now we have our last entrepreneur.
Alisa is here to talk about Ruminize, but let's, before we get into that, maybe just introduce yourself and tell us about the Roseville Rising experience.
Speaker 8 (42:13):
Of course.
So hello, my name is Alisa and I'm from Grenin Bay High School.
I just graduated, so I'm going to college next year.
I'm also majoring in business and I think one of the most interesting things that, like I've heard, is if you major in business, you don't know what you want to do in life and like part of it.
(42:34):
When I first actually applied as a business major, it was like I think I want to like it, but I'm not sure if I really like it.
So this program really actually let me get a glimpse of what the business world is, what it means to be a business major.
Besides, I was saying, oh yeah, I kind of like math, but I don't want to go into STEM type of like, type of interest.
(42:56):
So it's definitely.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
So now you definitely you're more confident in your decision to go to college.
Where are you going to go?
I'm going to go to UC Irvine, uc Irvine All right, okay, so in Roseville Rising maybe, just besides it, solidifying your decision around college and where to focus.
I mean, was there what did you like?
What did you not like about the program?
Speaker 8 (43:21):
Okay.
So what I liked about this program was how we were actually introduced to so many experts in the field.
Like there were people from marketing, people from, like operations managers and have much thought over here.
Like there's people, that there's so many experts around us that we can actually ask and then actually get an interact with the business world.
Like it's our first step into this business world through like a local manner.
(43:44):
So that was awesome.
Like that was amazing because there was no way I would ever be able to make the same connections as with without this program.
Some of this likes Nothing Come on.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
We want to improve too.
Speaker 8 (43:59):
Yeah, I think honestly the timing of this program was honestly not great at all.
Yeah, I was like running in and out between AP and IB programs or testing, so it was a disaster and like at the end of the program for me it just felt like a lot Did it take away from your grades at all, or did you still get straight A's?
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Oh, she got into a good school.
Thanks, you got straight A's.
Speaker 8 (44:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
I never got straight A's in my life, never got an A in my life, you never got an A PE.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Okay, you ready to do an elevator pitch?
Okay, sure, are you off the cuff?
Here we go, okay.
Speaker 8 (44:36):
So Ruminaze is about balancing mental health with online connections.
So one of the greatest problems we found, or one of the hardest topics we've heard, is this a lot of teenage girls we're going through social medias and we're just really hating what we see here, but it's we don't have anything else to look at as a model, so it's what we continue to compare ourselves to and our self-esteem is lowing just by looking at what's on social media, all of this unrealistic kind of body expectations or even just like lifestyle choices that we can't exactly imitate, even though it's never even possible.
(45:11):
So, taking this type of this humongous problem and it's like how can we turn it into an actual solution?
How can we do it?
Besides, oh, let's just quit using social media, because that's not a solution at all.
So what we found was we're going to go make a social media alternative.
So it's going to be a platform that's only shared between your closest members, so the people that you can truly be yourself with.
(45:34):
You don't feel the need to go and try and be someone better, and so with this social media alternative, it's going to allow for like breaks in social media, so it could just be go outside and do something fun.
So these are just prompts shared between family and friends and you just really establishing that connection, strengthening that connection and why you're taking those breaks from social media without actually it feeling like a real break.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
So is this a social?
Is this more like a private social media platform?
Is that a fair way to frame it?
Sure, yes, okay, so it's private.
It's still social media in a way, or like social media, but it's private, yeah.
Speaker 8 (46:16):
You're not connecting to other people you've never seen before.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Yeah, it's focused on positivity and you know we talk about Pivots.
Lisa and Mira were the smallest team of the bunch.
There are two folks started out of three and their problem from the very get go was a very what we call a wicked problem.
It's got so many interconnections and externalities that you can't control so you can't really create something that will solve the problem back to his root cause.
(46:44):
So they're thinking about body image problems and how we're just being, you know, feeling horrible by the effects of social media, and social media doesn't really care.
To be honest, they're profiting off of this.
So at first we're thinking, all right, this is going to be an ad campaign.
You know, this is going to be a, an organization that's not necessarily a scalable business, but something that's kind of like a nonprofit.
(47:07):
And we thought, all right, how do we?
or they thought, rather, how do we tap into a Facebook or a TikTok and track how much time you're in the app.
And then they realized, technically you know they can do that, but I think the old adage is, if you can't beat them, join them.
And that pivoted into a social media platform which right now the slipstream of wellness.
(47:27):
You know something that they just went into?
Apple just the other day announced their mental wellness efforts around a general app and there's more and more focus around this and they found renewed enthusiasm, to say all right, there's validation.
Other folks are doing this, but let's do it better, wow.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Wow, you're tackling a problem that maybe some of us don't even think about most of the time, and but it's real.
So congratulations.
Speaker 8 (47:49):
This is never talked about too.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah, and you're being true to your problem, that tell you want to talk to us about the thought process around how you want to incorporate this or how you wanted to to not, you wanted to sort of the nonprofit pivot or two.
Speaker 8 (48:05):
So because our problem was so like yeah, like you said, it was a wicked problem.
There was no way that we were ever going to try to profit off of the people who needed it most.
So we wanted to make sure all our services was available and free for every single teenage girl out there who wanted to use it.
But then it came to profit.
(48:25):
Like, how are we going to make profit?
How do we keep this platform running?
So in the beginning it was going to be nonprofit, but then we had a pivot into B corp because we do need to.
We need the revenue to continue on.
So as a B corp, we are going to be still benefit focused.
So that means we're going to put all.
We're going to put all our focus and make sure that our users are first, before everything else.
(48:50):
So if we do happen to use ads, those ads are going to be body positive.
We're going to go through and make sure they are, and so on.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
And it's also something that's investable, because if a VC or an angel investor heard nonprofit, probably going to run away.
But if they hear B corp which, by the way, shout out to Al Moffitt, our mentor, who introduced that topic I didn't even know about it.
If you go B corp, you can balance the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
And we're seeing that's a new trend now which B corp stands for Benefit corp.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
Yeah, so there are PB LLCs, public benefit LLCs, like Blue Sky, which is a new Twitter alternative.
That's a PB LLC, and I do that so that profit is not the motivator in growth, but rather healthy user behavior, creating a co-op REI is a co-op, for example.
These are I don't know what the structure is, but they're certainly putting profit first.
(49:40):
But the definition of shareholders is their customers and their employees by far, and with a problem like this, you can't monetize off of teenage girls who are being targeted Exactly, it defeats a purpose.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Wow, congratulations, great job, exciting.
And congratulations on getting into UC Irvine too.
Thank you, it was that.
How did you choose UC Irvine?
Speaker 8 (50:03):
It was the.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
LA baby.
Speaker 8 (50:05):
LA.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
The weather.
Speaker 8 (50:08):
Yeah, I guess it was the best school I've gotten to.
Speaker 5 (50:10):
So it's going there for now.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
All right, well, thank you very much, thank you.
So fired up today to be joined by a unique group of people.
We are actually joined today by high school entrepreneurs that have come through the Roseville Rising Program for entrepreneurs that are in high school and I can tell you today you are going to be inspired.
(00:20):
So to help kick off and help us understand our audience, understand what Roseville Rising is all about, I've got my good buddy, Murshad Mansouri.
He helped bring this group together, along with my co-founder and the growth factory, Monique Brown.
Murshad, how you doing?
I'm good Mark.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Well, thanks for joining.
Maybe we just talk maybe a little bit of your background.
You had GoPro, techstars, you've done some big stuff in the past and maybe just a little bit of that.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
All right.
I mean, you just took that intro and you know, that's my entire life no that's not my entire life.
That's my entire life, basically.
I've been in tech 25 years.
Started out in high school, sold computers out of my garage.
Dropped out of college, went back to college, worked in all facets of business, from PR to sales, to all the better development operations, finance, and then the last two lugs in my life have been more in the partnerships and corporate development realms.
(01:20):
So a lot of clients in the blue chip, like Microsoft's, the Google's, the Design Within Reach, but I definitely, you know, cut my teeth in the last 10 years.
You know some of the big corporates.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
So you brought this group together along with Monique Brown as we discussed, which to me, it's amazing how far they came in such a short period of time, and I think it's interesting to think about if people have access to minds like yours and Monique's and the others that you brought in what's possible, and so you're gonna hear today a little bit about what's possible, but maybe you could talk to us about what that 16 weeks looked like and what actually happened.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeah, I mean for sure.
This was definitely Monique's brainchild.
You know, without her we would not have the folks in the room here, she put together the you know bare curriculum as to what it was we're trying to achieve over the next 16 weeks.
She basically brought all these kids together and I was the border collie, if you will, just hurting them and running around them and making sure they were on track for the most part.
(02:22):
I'm looking at some of the kids that I had to definitely tighten around I call them the chuckleheads but definitely had a bunch of good activities coming out of the 16 week program and the thesis was how do we get a very big, very monolithic problem that's facing the world today and how do we just keep on cracking away at it?
How do we chip away at it Like a sculptor trying to build something out of marble into bringing it to form some sort of solution that they can actually build to slowly tackle those big problems?
(02:52):
So we thought big in terms of what are some challenges that we're seeing around us with what I call soft eyes, and how do we take a prescriptive approach to making a solution that is within our capabilities, something that these kids are familiar with, wanna do and bring to course, with a business plan, a business idea.
(03:14):
So we've done a lot of time in design thinking, the whole notion of how do you think differently, how do you think like a designer?
The soft eyes approach that I mentioned.
It's like look around you at any given time.
You know there may be something that you may not be aware of because you're so myopic and so focused on your day to day.
So how do you take that soft eye approach and how do you see the problems around you and how do you look within and see the capabilities that you have?
(03:39):
And also, how do you look to your side and see the capabilities of your partners on your team and the resource that's available through folks like you and folks like the growth factory, and bring a problem down to something manageable, a real solution?
So we kind of cover the conceptual upfront.
What we had them do really fun exercises involving paper, spaghetti marshmallows.
(03:59):
What else do we have, guys?
Macaroni.
And then we got to the nitty gritties of all right, what is the business plan?
You know?
what is going to market.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Well, they built businesses and we're going to get them up in a minute.
But okay, just one last question before we introduce our first entrepreneur.
They pitched at the end of the 16 weeks at an event called Mark Tank and I tell you, I saw what they had achieved and it brought tears to my eyes.
I had to like look away, and then I saw you over there talking to them like almost like a proud father, and I walked back there and I'm like I can't believe what I just saw.
(04:38):
Right High school students building actual businesses.
A lot of them are tech companies and just blown away.
When you see this imagination come to life, when you see greatness actually happening before your very eyes, you're like whoa well, we're going to hear some of that greatness today.
But what was your emotion after you saw them actually deliver at Mark Tank?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, I don't have kids and definitely teaching some of these guys I don't want to have kids, but I think the feeling that I had was I was overwhelmed with what I saw.
Three weeks before the Mark Tank we had them do dry runs and I was impressed, like totally impressed, by the dry runs.
(05:20):
These kids I shouldn't call them kids these guys and gals, they basically I'll perform a lot of the companies that I was looking at for acquisition when I worked in corporate development and GoPro, or when I was helping some of our founders find homes at Techstars and they definitely had the excitement of first time founders or they're dough-eyed, they're just seeing the world for the first time.
They don't have that sense of regular business as usual go into a pitch, try to get them out of it.
(05:45):
They were excited, they were genuinely excited and that showed and they continued to refine, they continued to test their messaging into the second week of practice before Mark Tank and it just exceeded my expectations even more and the way to office hours where I would get on the phone or zoom with them.
I'm still 11 at night leading up to Mark Tank and it's always the last that's past their bedtime, isn't it?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I mean they're in high school with him.
No, that's three hours before my bedtime.
Actually.
I mean their bedtime, yeah, their bedtime.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
I'm surprised.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, they're up to like midnight and when they went to Mark Tank, it's like I had a little bit of hesitancy in terms of how they were gonna articulate their solutions.
But and I say this without hyperbole every single one of the teams just blew me away.
And what I told some of the folks was when I was working in Corp Dev, we would see companies try to pitch themselves.
(06:38):
They had bankers come in and they try to pitch themselves for sale.
They wanted to say, why should we join GoPro, why should we sell to X company when other tech stars and their business modeling was not as concise or as strong as some of these guys in the Mark Tank exhibited?
So I would classify these guys and gals and their top 25% of the founders that I've worked with over the last 10 years.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Really incredible that what they did.
Well, let's get to that now, because you two well, I'm an old man- You're the old enough?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, you're not.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
I think.
Well, one thing too is I think our imagination decreases as we get older.
You know, as an older guy, I think some of what you don't have the imagination that these young people have, and so it's really being able to tap into that is is super for sure.
Okay, so our first guess so we have some of the winners.
There was three.
There was actually a three way tie for first place, and then there was an elevator pitch competition as well.
(07:39):
There was like prior to Mark Tank, and so one of the winners.
So we're gonna talk about some of the winners a little bit, but let's get to know them.
The first one is Sophia.
Sophia, welcome, you are in Viro.
You guys won the elevator pitch.
You were also one of the three winners of Mark Tank.
It was randomly, it was a three way tie and we had a lot of judges and I don't know how it became a three way tie, but it did, and I think the person I gave the high score isn't even here today, but I'm looking at who that was.
(08:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I don't know exactly but there was other good ones, is my point.
And so, sophia, let's get to know you a little bit.
How did you tell us about your idea and actually, where would you rather?
Let's get to know you first.
Let's start with you what school you go to.
Speaker 6 (08:28):
I go to Roosevelt High.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
School you go to Roosevelt High, and how did you find out about this and maybe just tell us a little bit about your experience going through Roosevelt Rising?
Speaker 6 (08:39):
So I personally didn't know a lot about it.
My dad kind of found it on Facebook one night as we were watching TV and he was like, hey, this is a cool idea.
And I was like, oh yeah, it is.
And so I signed up for it and I wasn't hopeful that I'd get in.
Or I was hopeful I'd get in but I wasn't expecting to because I'm a sophomore and when arriving I found that I was the only sophomore here.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Oh, wow.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
But I did get waitlisted at first.
I think it was because of my grade, but throughout the process I actually learned so much about not only like entrepreneurship, but like the ideas and creativity as a person, and I actually found out that this is the career path I wanna go down.
So that's pretty helpful for me and it was just a great opportunity.
(09:25):
I learned so much and it gave me more opportunities like the startup challenge and other stuff like that as well.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
That's exciting.
Okay, so do you wanna try?
You won the elevator pitch.
Do you wanna try it on us right now?
What?
Speaker 6 (09:38):
do you think?
Are you prepared?
Speaker 1 (09:39):
It's been a couple weeks, but I'll go ahead and do it, all right, so the elevator pitch is like a one minute pitch on your business, so take it away, sophia.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
So we are in Viro.
We're local, supporting local.
We support local by creating sustainable bags to kind of replace the plastic bags used in fashion in store places.
We have two types of bags the seed paper bag and the tote bag.
The seed paper bag is kind of in place of the one time use plastic bags that get thrown into the landfills and into the oceans.
(10:14):
Basically, after you use it you tear it up, throw it in your backyard and it will grow wildflowers.
And then we also have the tote bag, which is made out of a coffee ground material, usually from the big companies that throw all those coffee grounds away.
So the brand we're planning on partnering with was actually Synxtex, which partnered with Starbucks, and this isn't like an original idea of creating sustainable packaging.
(10:40):
So we kind of had to create something that made us different.
So we looked outside the venture lab window and saw we are Roseville and we kind of took that local moment and kind of thought about how we can connect local artists with the local business community and we figured out that we could create just a connection there and have the local artists featured on the bags.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Wow, just looking out the window inspired your different, one of your differentiations.
Right, you got this environmental bag and you look out the window and you're inspired at some level by the.
We are Roseville and now you can have a local bag with local branding.
That makes you feel like you're tight.
It's tied to your home.
Speaker 6 (11:22):
Yes Wow.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
What were the biggest, what was the biggest challenge in bringing this together?
Speaker 6 (11:30):
I think we had a lot of good opportunities to give us knowledge, but it was kind of hard.
I think it was the differentiating part, because there were other people trying to do what we did, not specifically with the local artists, but with the sustainable packaging, and it is more expensive.
And I think the hardest part was probably going to get customer validation from the businesses, because as a business, you want to save as much money as possible and be profitable and the bags that we are selling are a little more expensive, so it's kind of harder for them to get to that point where they'd be willing to switch what's the plan for the business at this point?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Is it going to, is it going to fade away and it was just a cool school project, or is it going to have a life?
Speaker 6 (12:16):
Since I'm still in high school, I think it would be pretty fun to continue, but Felina and Sophia, my co-founders they're both going off to college, like all around California, so it'd be kind of hard with putting in money because they're going to be college students and I have a job but I don't make that much money.
What's your where's?
Speaker 1 (12:35):
your job.
I work at Revolutions Naturopathic right now.
Speaker 6 (12:38):
It's right next to Lazy Dog.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
It's natural medicine, so I'm in high school and you already have a job.
Yeah, Let me, let me, let me also.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
she's being super humble here, which which is also a quality I like in people, but I was invited to judge a startup sack competition about three weeks ago, a startup weekend three months ago.
Three weeks ago, time flies and, surprisingly, haley who we'll talk to in a bit and Sophia were presenting, and Sophia got up there and they had 48 hours to bring an idea together with strangers, people they didn't know, you know, and they managed to, in the course of 48 hours, put together a presentation on a unique problem and presented a unique solution not in viral, something completely different and they nailed that out of the park.
(13:26):
They got first place, like just Sophia, for her age, was articulate, she demonstrated with clarity, she demonstrated with conviction and, you know, she was on a wavering in believing, you know, that this is something that she could do, and I think that was just like okay, great.
This is probably a sign of things that come for, for Roosevelt rising, you know, and they all exceeded expectations.
(13:52):
But you know that's a testament to these folks here doing way more than just this activity to prove there can be leaders in the future and they don't need to do business, you know.
They don't need to go into marketing, they don't need to go into whatever.
They just seem to know how to tackle problems on their own, how to get that confidence they need.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
That is so cool.
Well, thank you, you're an inspiration, but we have more inspiration as yet to come.
Let's bring up, let's go to our next one.
Bye, sophia.
You know, this is an interesting one for me, rental bay, as a guy that dabbles in real estate a little bit.
These gentlemen have tackled a actual problem that exists for people that own real estate and single family homes and they want to rent them out.
(14:34):
And so why don't I have you guys introduce yourselves each, and then we'll talk a little bit about your experience in the program and then we'll go into maybe, an elevator pitch, or you can tell us about the company.
I'm Hudson, I'm Michael, I'm for a lot.
Well, welcome guys.
You were one of the three winners and, hudson, you got up and you delivered a presentation I think blew away a lot of the judges and a lot of the audience.
(15:00):
Maybe, before we get into that, why don't you tell us, maybe, each of you, a little bit about your experience going through the Roseville Rising program?
And who did you like better, monique or Machan?
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Nope, nope, nope, no.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
Yeah, so we were originally me and Michael.
We kind of went through this together because we were originally part of DECA.
Hailey was the president of that, and that's how we even heard about this in the first place.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Okay, what's president of DECA?
What's that?
Speaker 7 (15:27):
Oh, it's this business club, like high school business club thing.
Okay, we joined it and they compete in business competitions and we joined that looking to looking to explore business and we heard about this through them and we both applied and we both got in and that's where we showed up and then 16 weeks have been amazing.
(15:48):
It's been an amazing journey for what's, what was the highlight?
Probably the pitch, at least for me.
Yeah, what was the?
Speaker 1 (15:55):
feel Were you at a lot of adrenaline, were you nervous?
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Oh, my oh.
I was so, so nervous.
I was so anxious going up there, but after I was finished it was.
It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Oh, you knocked it out of the park.
Okay, how about you?
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I mean, the overall thing was pretty like just awesome, awesome experience.
I learned a lot.
We learned a ton about the question.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Okay.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Who do?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
you like more?
Yeah, we don't play favorites you guys, both pretty good, both pretty good Okay.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
They gave us a lot of help and resources when we asked them to and we just like.
We just like we learned a ton with the different like the steps to make a complete business plan, from the idea to the pitch, and I think we did.
I think we managed it well yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
That was great.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
Brlatt, yeah.
So first off, I had to give a shout out to my dad.
He's the one who brought me here.
He's like one of the first ones to sign up for this program.
He saw it on Facebook and next minute he was called me.
I was in my volleyball practice and he's like, oh, do you want to sign up for this entrepreneurship program?
And at the time that was like when I wanted to do business.
I was like thinking how to explore and I didn't.
I only knew the niche like parts of business.
(17:06):
I know much.
So now I was like, yeah, why not, let's go for it.
And then so the 16 weeks have been really great.
I learned all the like basics and I learned more advanced working with my friends.
Both go to my school.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Which school you guys go to.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
Granite Bay.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Granite Bay.
Oh yeah, you guys had the teachers.
There's a woman that in the audience that teaches at Granite Bay?
Yeah, I thought it was great that we had.
You know, there was an audience at Mark Tank and there were actually a few teachers that I mean.
To me that was really inspired by that Having my teachers wouldn't have showed up for something for me when I was a kid, so that was pretty inspiring.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
Yeah, and also like I learned so much about this, like I learned how to go to market plan, I knew how to find good target market, how to like find good market opportunities, like how to develop and like how to like use market penetration all these different strategies that would definitely help me later on in my path in just being an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Was there a low light?
Was there a down part?
That was really you didn't enjoy.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
Well, we did actually have to pivot once, I believe, right.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
More than once.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
More than once.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
Other than that, then I think everything was good.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
That's pretty normal pivoting right.
We see pivots in very mature companies end up having to pivot yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
I mean, it's embraced.
The pivot is what we try to let them know.
It's not a sunk cost, it's something that you can.
You have the ability, you have the skills.
There's no reason why you can't go somewhere else.
These guys, though I'll be fully transparent.
I call them chuckleheads for a reason, because it's four dudes, and all they did, you know, throughout the working session every week, was shadow box, play chess on their phones, get on tiktok and Instagram, and I was like dudes, come on, but but but, but, you admit that.
(18:45):
You admit that.
But but they came through the modern workplace.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Models stimulus from other areas.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I was.
I was, you know, thoroughly impressed when they went into their two weeks before the pitch and they realized, all right, customer personas are important, go to market plans are important.
Actually, having a revenue model is important.
Even though this was a big simulation and there was no money, real money, involved, you know, it's good to think about those important aspects of running a business, their actual dollars associated with it.
(19:17):
So they came through and, and you know, I call them the pizza eaters also because they just come to the table.
You're in nicknames aren't you, Masha, Well, yeah some of the nicknames you know it's a good way of building the affinity yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
All right.
So we want to know about this business because you're one of the winners and there's a rumor that you guys that it might actually turn into something.
I don't know about that rumor, but if you can clarify that would be cool.
But who wants to do the elevator pitch?
Hudson, not surprised.
Speaker 7 (19:43):
So rental bay.
Currently, mortgage rates have gone up significantly, as you mentioned, and because of that there's a large number of new homeowners looking to rent out their properties and they're finding it really hard to find property managers.
So because the current, the current tools to find a property manager are pretty poor there's Yelp, zillow, google, and you end up having like hundreds of pages of property managers, each with like five or zero stars, and it's it's a pretty awful experience.
(20:09):
So we kind of come in and what we do is we match homeowners and property managers and we flip the traditional dynamic on its head.
Instead of homeowners looking and chasing down property managers, the property managers come to them and this allows the homeowner to get the best deal possible and allows them to get save time and stress looking for a property manager and allows the property manager to get access to way more customers.
(20:31):
It can lower their cost of acquisition and it allows them to pick what clients they wanna pursue.
So it's really a win-win for both parties and because of that we feel like we're a much superior service to traditional methods.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
That's awesome.
Okay, then may you follow up question what is the revenue model?
So Marsha talked about revenue.
Who pays you?
Speaker 7 (20:50):
Yeah, so our customers are the property managers, our product is the homeowners.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
That's how we work.
Speaker 7 (20:58):
It's completely free to use for both homeowners and property managers.
However, we charge property managers for verification, which will get them put higher up on lists and it'll give them a verified tag and it'll make like they're listing in different colors.
Well, so they'll stand out more to customers and they get access to better client customer data.
So, there's strong incentives for them to do.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Well, it's amazing that you built conceptually this business.
That is really a platform that can scale I mean, it's like Airbnb or any of these other platforms incredible.
Do you have something to add?
I mean, so we Go ahead and speak to Mike a little bit, yeah, so we came up with this like the original thing was.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
I moved here from San Antonio, texas, and my parents had a few properties there that we weren't there at all, so we didn't have the capabilities to manage them or anything.
So we of course we were trying to get a property manager, and my mom in particular had a horrible experience like going on Google, on Yelp and all that stuff.
(22:02):
So I was like there's no way that that's the only thing that we can do.
So we came together.
The original thing was like a ranking system, but we decided that that was not the very good option.
So we decided to attack the issue by itself and that's how we came up with rental bay.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Perla, do you wanna add anything?
Nothing much.
They said it all Okay.
So what's the plan?
Again, I heard that rumor.
I confronted you before the show that I heard a rumor that you might actually continue and make this an actual business.
Is that a rumor?
Where does that rumor lie?
We wanna-.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I didn't tell him anything, guys, so let's go get someone else.
Speaker 7 (22:44):
Well, we're currently in the process of incorporating.
It's not done yet, but it'll be there soon.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Are you doing a C-Corp, Delaware C-Corp.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Well, at the moment it's gonna be an LLC, but after that we can make it a C-Corp once we actually get people just on both sides just coming in.
But at the moment I feel like an LLC is a better option.
Speaker 7 (23:09):
We currently have a website.
It's in the process of being.
It'll be up in two days.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
It's two days.
Speaker 7 (23:16):
Everything we built the website and everything.
Well, the splash page.
Speaker 4 (23:19):
There's a waitlist that we added.
So if we're gonna start to do some outreach, we're gonna try and get some people to sign up for the waitlist and to do this survey that we made to try and get some hype around the platform and things like that.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
So, yeah, I love it Okay, anything else to add by anybody?
Speaker 7 (23:42):
Not particularly.
This is a great program.
It was an amazing experience for all of us, I think.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, I connected them with an advisor that I spoke with for the first time yesterday.
Superior Intellect with that advisor and they're helping them with their launch.
So I've got some confidence.
Yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Hopefully, take it to the next one.
This is amazing.
Thank you guys appreciate it.
Okay, this one's gonna be fun.
Hailey Garrett, who has been helping the growth factory I guess it's an did you get discovered at the growth at Roseau Rising and then get brought in as an intern Right?
Speaker 10 (24:13):
so the whole process was.
I actually took an opportunity that our school offered a CTE internship program once you complete the business pathway, and so I connected with Mrs Griffin, who does a lot of outreach with interns, and connected with me the growth factory, and so I was actually able to learn about the Roseau Rising program a few months ahead in December.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
So you knew about it, you had the inside track.
Yes, tell us about your experience going through.
You already knew some of us, at least a little bit.
You knew Monique really well, but tell us about the experience, maybe the highs and lows of this 16 week journey.
Speaker 10 (24:52):
Right.
So I have to say I think we've all come a long ways, because when you go into this program, no one had an idea on what they wanted to tackle, what it really was to be an entrepreneur.
I think this was probably the biggest lesson, and so I mean, I'm sure many people went through this.
But you go four weeks, you choose a problem and it's a big one, like remote worker, disengagement or homelessness, and then you have to figure out what's the best way to narrow down to make it a niche problem.
(25:23):
And so I mean, personally, for our team, we had four weeks of pivots where we didn't know what exactly we were gonna do, what was the exact problem we were gonna solve, and so that's 14, that's four weeks of a.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
You're like a sprint.
I mean there's 16 weeks.
To build a company is a very, very short time.
So it took four weeks just to get to the decision, I guess.
Speaker 10 (25:47):
Yeah, exactly, and talking to all the mentors coming in, and it was a very crazy experience, I have to say.
But once we kind of go on the track, it was learning how to do customer validation, how do we meet the people then, how do we wire frame a product, and so, really, this was a 16 week learning experience for sure.
(26:08):
And, yeah, I have to say thank you for having me, because this was an amazing time.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
How has your perspective maybe changed?
We had Sophia saying now I think I wanna be an entrepreneur, or maybe she is gonna be an entrepreneur.
Has your perspective shifted at all?
In terms of career-pathetic, absolutely.
Speaker 10 (26:26):
So I wasn't sure what I was gonna do with my life, except I knew I wanted to be in business, and especially interning for the growth factory, learning how to invest in startups.
I fell in love with the startup culture and I plan on pursuing this space, either in venture capital or as an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Wow, that's exciting.
Gonna be motivated, okay.
Well, you motivated me at Mark Tank as well.
You are one of the three winners one of the three-way tie.
Would you be up for doing your elevator pitch?
I can do that.
Yes, all right, let's do it All right.
Speaker 10 (27:05):
so the company we created was Co-Elevate, and we are about connecting remote workforces.
This was inspired by the pandemic experience where I personally didn't know my teachers or my peers I honestly didn't talk to anyone for three months and so we realized that this is not a pandemic problem.
(27:27):
This is an everyday problem, because remote workforces can undergo the same exact struggle.
When they're working alone in their home, in their apartment, they are unable to see their coworkers for long periods of time, and so with Co-Elevate, we are a platform that connects remote workers within the company using personalized results.
(27:48):
So they answer a daily question, do a daily activity and we kind of gauge their interests.
They connect them with coworkers with similar interests.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Wow.
So a big part of that is building, strengthening a culture of a remote workforce, because people become so disconnected and sometimes disengaged.
Speaker 10 (28:08):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
So, thinking about how you arrived at that problem, you already saw it as a problem.
And then whose idea?
Because you built a team too.
Right, you have other members of your team.
Yes, so in assembling that team first of all, how did you come up with who's gonna team up?
Right, you get a lot of high school students in one room.
I went in there on that first day and I'm like, how are these all gonna team up?
(28:34):
And Monique sort of did this little game where you broke up by.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Snapchat versus TikTok, Dutch Brothers versus Starbucks.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Who would get along with each other, and then you formed a team.
You have to actually make the decision who I want to be on my team, and so did your co-founders.
So how did that walk me through that?
A little bit.
Speaker 10 (28:54):
So I have to preface this.
My best friend and I, sherveny, we actually came together a week before.
We came up with a list of problems and met together and we actually chose remote workforce disengagement as the essential problem, and so this was kind of a bonding experience for her and I to figure out what to do there.
(29:17):
And so, after looking at all the other teams pitching, it was kind of about what was the best problem to tackle and did we feel passionate about it.
And so once we decided that yes, this is something we wanted to do, we onboarded Nathan and he was in my calculus class.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
So Brought in a smart guy, huh, oh yeah, smart girl calculus.
Speaker 10 (29:40):
Hey, we're all yeah, very technical people, and so it was an awesome experience, and especially hearing how other teams formed and what their ideas were.
Yeah, it was about finding a problem that's most applicable.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Anything.
So you've seen how this got made.
Being kind of have an inside track Anything, you would have us do differently in terms of putting this together If you were to advise Mershaden, monique how we might wanna and me how we might wanna change it.
Speaker 10 (30:11):
Yeah, and so I actually do have a little something was I love the shock of the pitch.
So two weeks before we had to practice pitch in front of the mentors and before that was like around Robin pitch, and so I think that was pretty much essential to how serious I think everyone got when we realized, oh my gosh, this is happening soon and so, honestly, having that experience beforehand might inspire some people to really get on the project.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Oh, okay, instead of wait until two weeks before the actual event, do that?
Have a pre-pitch a little earlier, with a live audience and adults listening?
Speaker 10 (30:56):
Yeah, but I think, being an entrepreneur, the best way to learn is doing it, and so I don't know if everyone's going to pursue business or become an entrepreneur.
But the greatest thing I took out of this program was how to take a no and how to turn that into something, because we got told no, or let's say they don't really like this part, but what about this?
(31:20):
And being able to pivot was such a big thing for most of the program, if not all of it.
So learning how to take a no, Learning how to take a no.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Wow, some lessons in there.
Learn how to take a no.
Best way to learn is by getting the game and try it and do it.
Good stuff.
Well, anything else to add to?
Speaker 10 (31:38):
that.
Yeah, all I want to say is thank you for having me.
This is, I don't think.
Well, I think this is the best learning experience of the year, so oh, thank you, Great job.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Thanks, Ailey.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
And now we've got the co-founders of Career Compass.
Why don't I have you guys introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your experience going through Roosevelt Rising?
Speaker 3 (32:01):
So I'm Teth Patel, I go to Granite Bay High School, I'm a junior and I think it was just a really great experience for me.
These 16 weeks I learned a lot of stuff about how to, like you know, make it like, get your problem and make it an actual, like solution.
We spent a lot of time like perfecting our problem.
I know we spent, I think, four or five weeks just doing the problem itself and then we started pivoting and we started focusing on like the solution and how to really get like the like idea we had into like an actual, like tangible thing that we could, you know, pitch.
Speaker 9 (32:29):
All right, my name is Rishil Tarvati.
I go to West Park High School and I will be a senior this upcoming year.
My experience with Roosevelt Rising has been mostly positive, actually all positive.
Working with people I knew and working with people I also didn't know.
We were able to create something that I'm especially proud of.
(32:50):
I'm sure I can speak for my other teammates, but in such a short amount of time, the things we were able to create as a whole was really beneficial.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah, did you two know each other prior?
Speaker 9 (33:05):
We did yes.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
You two knew each other, but the other people, some of the other teammates you guys did not know.
But tell me about that team dynamic Was there?
Did you develop a leader?
Did one person kind of take over, or was it really, I guess, cohesive in terms of everybody?
Speaker 3 (33:20):
contributing.
So I think I knew almost everyone on that team.
So it was me, Rishil and another friend and we sort of kind of signed up for this together and we knew that we wanted to be on the same team and we started discussing problems beforehand and then we sort of set the problem on the table and then we had other people join and we sort of talked with them, discussed with them, and we didn't have a leader of sorts.
(33:41):
We just kind of we like to listen to everyone's opinions about our problem and we tried to vote for the best opinion and we sort of implement that into the solution.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Kind of like a democracy.
It was going to be a voting system yeah, more or less.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Interesting.
Do you think that's the best way to run a company?
Speaker 3 (33:55):
I think it is because you don't have a hierarchy and people may not agree with that hierarchy, so it's just better to have everyone have a voice.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Any challenges in terms of the team.
I mean, that sounds like a really cool way to get decisions made, but any internal budding of heads in deciding things.
Speaker 9 (34:15):
Decision-wise, I think we were all on the same page.
We did have our different opinions on topics, but we were able to resolve those fairly quickly.
Our biggest problem as a team, however, was showing up.
Although we had the biggest group we had eight people At the start we lost somebody along the way and many people had their conflicts with their commitments outside commitments, and I think that that was one thing we lacked as compared to other teams.
(34:48):
If we were able to solve that problem a little bit quickly and make Rosarizing a commitment for the entire team, we would have got more done.
But I am like I said, I am proud of what we got completed.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
It's amazing how much that's like real business is the commitment level.
But I do have to say and I heard this from Monique that we ran the program during a time that is extremely difficult for high school students, especially those of you that are trying to achieve great grades and get into college and all these kind of things.
(35:22):
Part of it was over finals periods.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, one of them had a growth spurt.
They grew a foot during the session as you say, wow, incredible.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
So I mean commitment is really difficult when you've got all these.
If school is the priority, to make this also a priority can be a real challenge.
But you know what?
That's what we face in the real world too.
We face commitment issues as we try to raise a business.
Well, my family's more important?
Well, let's make a decision.
Sometimes it's really difficult and to do it all.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
That's why, yeah, yeah, and I would say one of the unique characteristics about this team is, with large groups, it's kind of difficult to make decisions, as we're pointing out.
But this is what I call a self-healing team in which, if one or two members weren't there that week, they would come together and say OK, let's try to come together.
It's like a wound that sewed itself up naturally, and I think the one thing that made these folks here really focused is tackling a beach head, whereas before, as we're hearing in their elevator pitch, it was a pretty broad market, it was a pretty broad customer base, and then I think the dictum to them was all right, you got to focus, you got to find one specific customer to go after, and that will really kickstart your business better.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
OK, I look forward to hearing it again.
Ok, so who wants to do the elevator pitch?
I'll go for it, all right, great.
Speaker 9 (36:42):
So our company is Career Compass.
We are an education platform.
I'll give a little bit of insight on why we decided to tackle this issue.
Well, the issue being education, and more specifically, higher education college focused, we noticed that a lot of college students usually first year, second year college students struggle with deciding what major or what exactly they want to do.
(37:14):
It's a lot of uncertainty and it also translates down to high school level, and we decided to tackle this problem by creating a platform where you can learn the things at your own pace.
Whether you're a visual learner, a fast learner or a hands on learner, you're able to learn the things that you would learn in college or higher forms of education right at your house on your own personal device.
(37:42):
I think that was a really important issue to tackle, because there are statistics where there are so many people that are uncertain and there's a lot of money wasted in changing your major, and we wanted to really focus that down to people where they're learning exactly what they want to learn and explore at their own pace, without the risk of losing time or money.
(38:07):
Like Mershad said, we decided to focus in on the beachhead of the medical field to begin with, and expanding as we go.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
So you make your discovery by actually doing it at home, online, and then you don't have to go and get a bunch of student debt and all this other stuff and you know, drive to the campus or move out of state to go test.
You can test at home.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Yeah, what we mainly focus on is like careers.
So we wanted to connect students with an expert working in the career.
So like, let's say, if we had a medical student who was, like you know, kind of on the edge about like, should I go into medical, should I go into another field, we connect them with, like, let's say, a doctor who's been a doctor for five, 10 years and you know they'd be on like a one on one Zoom meeting or in a Zoom meeting with like 15 other kids and the doctor would share like little niches about his career and how he came to be a doctor, things that you can't find easily by doing a Google search, and they just be able to get that like personal connection.
(39:04):
That way the student can be a little bit more sure if they want to go into the medical field or if they want to.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
You know, pivot- there's also a reality check in what a doctor actually does day to day.
It's not so much the glamour and glitz.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
You can.
Yeah, the doctors have to do things that most of us would.
I wouldn't want to do, by this Exactly.
Okay, so that's now.
Is it going to turn into a business or is it just a fun project?
How did it change your perspective?
I guess that's more than one question, huh.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
So we actually we're like we've been communicating on Slack for a little bit now and we're planning on making it like a full scale business.
So we have like a bare bones website on Webflow right now.
So we're just focusing on developing that.
We're trying to get sort of volunteers on so they can be our sort of experts in the field, so we don't have to pay them at first while we make some revenue.
And once you start making some revenue, we're going to start actually bringing on more vol, like more experts, and start paying them and get that cycle going.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Okay, so you're actually going to take this to another level.
Then you're going to continue to grow.
Yeah, wow, is one of your parents a doctor?
Did I hear that, or?
Speaker 3 (40:07):
one of the teammates no.
I think one of the teammates parents is a doctor and we have, like, I think, a plethora of sort of parents that are in different fields, like my dad's a computer science major, and we have a another one who's like, I think, an engineering major, a doctor, other careers.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So you have some built in expertise to kind of prove it out.
Prove it out the model a little bit.
Yeah, that's great.
What's the?
What are you most excited about in terms of like building this, you guys doing this so you can get rich, or is this to change the world?
Speaker 9 (40:38):
Our main goal is to help the people that really need it.
We don't look at the profits that we make ourselves.
We want to take the profits that we do make, the revenue that we do make, and we want to reinvest it back into our business by hiring more capable, more educated you would say experts to then again teach our customers, and it's just a cycle from there.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
That's exciting and this came from a personal question mark that you guys had, like what is the point of college?
I mean, this is the problem.
That was true to you and I remember in the first weeks you guys were so adamant and so fervent, like college is always a time, or college, you know, am I going to get out of it and you boil that you know kind of personal into a all right.
(41:33):
How can we help others, how can we help ourselves by helping others at the same time?
Speaker 5 (41:37):
So, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Yeah, yeah.
How many of you are going to plan and go to college?
Looks like everybody.
Oh, all of you.
It's unanimous you all go to college.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
So you have to go to college.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Yeah, how many of you want to go to college?
Hopefully you're doing what you want.
Yeah, I mean yeah.
Speaker 5 (41:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, thanks guys, really good job, thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Thanks for having us, thank you for the experience you bet.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
All right, and now we have our last entrepreneur.
Alisa is here to talk about Ruminize, but let's, before we get into that, maybe just introduce yourself and tell us about the Roseville Rising experience.
Speaker 8 (42:13):
Of course.
So hello, my name is Alisa and I'm from Grenin Bay High School.
I just graduated, so I'm going to college next year.
I'm also majoring in business and I think one of the most interesting things that, like I've heard, is if you major in business, you don't know what you want to do in life and like part of it.
(42:34):
When I first actually applied as a business major, it was like I think I want to like it, but I'm not sure if I really like it.
So this program really actually let me get a glimpse of what the business world is, what it means to be a business major.
Besides, I was saying, oh yeah, I kind of like math, but I don't want to go into STEM type of like, type of interest.
(42:56):
So it's definitely.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
So now you definitely you're more confident in your decision to go to college.
Where are you going to go?
I'm going to go to UC Irvine, uc Irvine All right, okay, so in Roseville Rising maybe, just besides it, solidifying your decision around college and where to focus.
I mean, was there what did you like?
What did you not like about the program?
Speaker 8 (43:21):
Okay.
So what I liked about this program was how we were actually introduced to so many experts in the field.
Like there were people from marketing, people from, like operations managers and have much thought over here.
Like there's people, that there's so many experts around us that we can actually ask and then actually get an interact with the business world.
Like it's our first step into this business world through like a local manner.
(43:44):
So that was awesome.
Like that was amazing because there was no way I would ever be able to make the same connections as with without this program.
Some of this likes Nothing Come on.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
We want to improve too.
Speaker 8 (43:59):
Yeah, I think honestly the timing of this program was honestly not great at all.
Yeah, I was like running in and out between AP and IB programs or testing, so it was a disaster and like at the end of the program for me it just felt like a lot Did it take away from your grades at all, or did you still get straight A's?
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Oh, she got into a good school.
Thanks, you got straight A's.
Speaker 8 (44:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
I never got straight A's in my life, never got an A in my life, you never got an A PE.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Okay, you ready to do an elevator pitch?
Okay, sure, are you off the cuff?
Here we go, okay.
Speaker 8 (44:36):
So Ruminaze is about balancing mental health with online connections.
So one of the greatest problems we found, or one of the hardest topics we've heard, is this a lot of teenage girls we're going through social medias and we're just really hating what we see here, but it's we don't have anything else to look at as a model, so it's what we continue to compare ourselves to and our self-esteem is lowing just by looking at what's on social media, all of this unrealistic kind of body expectations or even just like lifestyle choices that we can't exactly imitate, even though it's never even possible.
(45:11):
So, taking this type of this humongous problem and it's like how can we turn it into an actual solution?
How can we do it?
Besides, oh, let's just quit using social media, because that's not a solution at all.
So what we found was we're going to go make a social media alternative.
So it's going to be a platform that's only shared between your closest members, so the people that you can truly be yourself with.
(45:34):
You don't feel the need to go and try and be someone better, and so with this social media alternative, it's going to allow for like breaks in social media, so it could just be go outside and do something fun.
So these are just prompts shared between family and friends and you just really establishing that connection, strengthening that connection and why you're taking those breaks from social media without actually it feeling like a real break.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
So is this a social?
Is this more like a private social media platform?
Is that a fair way to frame it?
Sure, yes, okay, so it's private.
It's still social media in a way, or like social media, but it's private, yeah.
Speaker 8 (46:16):
You're not connecting to other people you've never seen before.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Yeah, it's focused on positivity and you know we talk about Pivots.
Lisa and Mira were the smallest team of the bunch.
There are two folks started out of three and their problem from the very get go was a very what we call a wicked problem.
It's got so many interconnections and externalities that you can't control so you can't really create something that will solve the problem back to his root cause.
(46:44):
So they're thinking about body image problems and how we're just being, you know, feeling horrible by the effects of social media, and social media doesn't really care.
To be honest, they're profiting off of this.
So at first we're thinking, all right, this is going to be an ad campaign.
You know, this is going to be a, an organization that's not necessarily a scalable business, but something that's kind of like a nonprofit.
(47:07):
And we thought, all right, how do we?
or they thought, rather, how do we tap into a Facebook or a TikTok and track how much time you're in the app.
And then they realized, technically you know they can do that, but I think the old adage is, if you can't beat them, join them.
And that pivoted into a social media platform which right now the slipstream of wellness.
(47:27):
You know something that they just went into?
Apple just the other day announced their mental wellness efforts around a general app and there's more and more focus around this and they found renewed enthusiasm, to say all right, there's validation.
Other folks are doing this, but let's do it better, wow.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Wow, you're tackling a problem that maybe some of us don't even think about most of the time, and but it's real.
So congratulations.
Speaker 8 (47:49):
This is never talked about too.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah, and you're being true to your problem, that tell you want to talk to us about the thought process around how you want to incorporate this or how you wanted to to not, you wanted to sort of the nonprofit pivot or two.
Speaker 8 (48:05):
So because our problem was so like yeah, like you said, it was a wicked problem.
There was no way that we were ever going to try to profit off of the people who needed it most.
So we wanted to make sure all our services was available and free for every single teenage girl out there who wanted to use it.
But then it came to profit.
(48:25):
Like, how are we going to make profit?
How do we keep this platform running?
So in the beginning it was going to be nonprofit, but then we had a pivot into B corp because we do need to.
We need the revenue to continue on.
So as a B corp, we are going to be still benefit focused.
So that means we're going to put all.
We're going to put all our focus and make sure that our users are first, before everything else.
(48:50):
So if we do happen to use ads, those ads are going to be body positive.
We're going to go through and make sure they are, and so on.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
And it's also something that's investable, because if a VC or an angel investor heard nonprofit, probably going to run away.
But if they hear B corp which, by the way, shout out to Al Moffitt, our mentor, who introduced that topic I didn't even know about it.
If you go B corp, you can balance the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
And we're seeing that's a new trend now which B corp stands for Benefit corp.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
Yeah, so there are PB LLCs, public benefit LLCs, like Blue Sky, which is a new Twitter alternative.
That's a PB LLC, and I do that so that profit is not the motivator in growth, but rather healthy user behavior, creating a co-op REI is a co-op, for example.
These are I don't know what the structure is, but they're certainly putting profit first.
(49:40):
But the definition of shareholders is their customers and their employees by far, and with a problem like this, you can't monetize off of teenage girls who are being targeted Exactly, it defeats a purpose.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Wow, congratulations, great job, exciting.
And congratulations on getting into UC Irvine too.
Thank you, it was that.
How did you choose UC Irvine?
Speaker 8 (50:03):
It was the.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
LA baby.
Speaker 8 (50:05):
LA.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
The weather.
Speaker 8 (50:08):
Yeah, I guess it was the best school I've gotten to.
Speaker 5 (50:10):
So it's going there for now.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
All right, well, thank you very much, thank you.
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