Tag: startups

If you think you’ve read this story before, you have, sort of…Andrew Glantz, BSBA’17 and his startup company’s app, FoodShare, won the qualifying round of the national RECESS competition last week and advance to the semifinals later this month. If he wins that round, he will compete in the national championship on June 9 in Los Angeles.

Judges included BazaarBoy CEO Eric Hamblett, BSBA’13, Build-A-Bear Founder Maxine Clark, and WashU Investment Management Co. CIO Kim Walker.

Since launching the app a year ago, Glantz has been winning startup competitions from coast to coast. The FoodShare iPhone app helps St. Louis locals discover and recommend restaurants, while transforming restaurants into social enterprises. Every time a user dines at a FoodShare partnered restaurant, FoodShare donates a meal to someone in need through Operation Food Search.

Read more in Student Life on his latest win.

Congrats, Andrew!!

Jane Wu Brower, BSBA ’08, launched into entrepreneurship this year.

She left her full-time job as a management consultant and founded Goalposte, a daily newsletter that summarizes major sports stories in a fun and accessible way.

“It targets an audience of casual sports fans who want an easy way to stay up-to-date or novices who want to learn more,” Jane said.  “In particular, its mission is to help level the playing field for young professional women, who may more often feel alienated in sports conversations with coworkers, bosses, interviewers, and clients.”

Jane developed the idea during her time as an attorney. While working on a case defending Major League Baseball, Jane was expected to interact with high-level baseball executives and attend sports business development events. All the while, she was anxious about her lack of sports knowledge relative to her colleagues.

“A huge part of business is being able to connect with the people you work with on some interpersonal level, and sports is just one of several ways to do that,” Jane said. “Unfortunately, I had never really followed sports growing up, so I was left on the outside looking in during sports conversations.”

From speaking with friends, she discovered that many of them had faced similar situations in client settings, during interviews, or with colleagues and friends. Jane thought that there should be a way to stay up-to-date on sports news in a way that was fun and easily digestible for the casual sports fan or novice.

“I didn’t see a product in the marketplace that satisfied the need of a quick and fun way to learn sports,” she said. “Instead, I only came across resources for avid fans.”

In addition to daily digests, the site provides primers on topics like MLB Opening Day, the Super Bowl, hockey, soccer, and more. Need help choosing your March Madness bracket? Goalposte provides common-sense tips for the sometimes emotionally-invested like, “Be objective,” and “Picking upsets is fun, but don’t go bananas.” Jane’s next goal for Goalposte is to increase its specialization on regions and sports.

Presenting sports news in bite-size, digestible write-ups is “an easy and unintimidating means of navigating the world of sports, where heavy stats and historical comparisons predominate,” Jane said—with, of course, the added bonus of staying on top of the latest watercooler chatter.

Jane Wu Brower, Olin BSBA ’08 and Michigan Law alum, is the CEO and founder of Goalposte. 

Don’t try to give JD Ross, BSBA ’12, a job to do. He only wants your problems. “I’m a terrible employee,” Ross said. “I’ve always been bad at being told specific things to do. If you tell me there’s a problem to solve, I love that.”

Today, he’s loving this problem: helping homeowners sell their houses instantly, without the heartache of weeks or months on the real estate market. Ross and three colleagues tackled the problem with Opendoor, founded in 2014 and boasting $30 million in venture capital support.

Only three years out of Washington University, Ross already had a string of startups on his resume, including Fresh Prints, a student–run custom apparel company he founded on campus, where he developed the staff and built the logistics to manage every aspect of the million-dollar business.

He was the fifth employee at Addepar (now more than 10 times that size), hired to create the product team for the Mountain View, California-based startup that builds financial portfolio analysis software for investors. He left to create Opendoor with former Square COO Keith Rabois and two others.

But even earlier—as a 13-year-old—Ross founded his first company: GenY Computer Consultants. Ross charged $60 an hour to clean viruses and malware from customers’ machines. “I could do the same thing as the adults, faster, and I could guarantee it. It was a great learning opportunity,” said Ross, who was installing computer systems for the local school district by the time he was 17.

His business school education was instrumental, as well. Every professor encouraged exploration, but he particularly recalled Lamar Pierce, his introductory management professor, and Michael Gordinier, his statistics teacher. “They probably pushed me the most,” Ross said. “When you’re a freshman, you look for some authority to tell you you’re going in the right direction.” They were key, he said, but “there isn’t a single person at Olin who didn’t encourage you to stray from the normal path if you wanted to.”

“There isn’t a single person at Olin who didn’t encourage you to stray from the normal path if you wanted to.”

The future, Ross said, belongs to the multiple disciplinarians: Be among either the top 0.1 percent of people with one skill, or the top 5 percent of those with two or more.

“Everyone should find things they’re interested in and build skills around being able to do that,” he said.

With his computer skills and business training from Olin, it’s no wonder that Ross became the guy who could build Opendoor’s first prototype from scratch, then overcome skeptics who doubted anyone would pay a premium over typical real estate commissions to sell a house instantly. Now, Opendoor buys four homes a day in Phoenix and will soon be expanding into Dallas and Portland. And Ross, who runs product development, spends 40 percent of his time hiring new people for the growing company.

“Your job at any given moment is to replace yourself,” says Ross. “Everyone’s job in a startup is to grow the pie.

To succeed, you need to hire people who can take over slices.” He continues, “The only way to develop leadership is to drown someone in responsibility.”

This article first appeared in the 2015 Olin Business Magazine as one of several profiles highlighting successful entrepreneurs, innovators, and disruptors. Look for upcoming profiles on the Olin Blog, or pick up a copy of the Olin Business Magazine.

Sharron Battle’s mother knew her daughter would be an entrepreneur years before Battle did. The first glimpse might have been in kindergarten, when the teacher told Blanche Bragg her daughter was trying to charge children to fill pages in Sharron’s new coloring book. “At a very early age, children show who they are going to be,” said Battle, PMBA, ’05, who no longer colors pictures, but uses them to shake up the financial industry.

Battle is founder and CEO of selfiepay, her Atlanta-based startup that is testing an app for making purchases via a cellphone mobile wallet or at in-store kiosks by using a selfie to verify the customer. Battle plans to add retina verification to the app soon, which will offer customers 100 percent accuracy of identification. Merchants don’t get a copy of the photo. Facial recognition software only ensures that the buyer is authorized to make the purchase with the credit card information stored on the phone.

Battle’s road to launching this startup—and selfiepay isn’t her first—has wound through a half-dozen industries and half again as many jobs. The Florissant, Missouri native was a mechanical engineer for Boeing when she decided she wanted to put her career on the management path.

That led to her MBA at Olin, followed by a job at Procter & Gamble as a project manager, then as a quality manager overseeing a 60-person team in the diaper-making division. “That place prepared me for entrepreneurship,” Battle said. “They taught me how to do business, how to redesign organizations,” which eventually led to her certification as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt practitioner, adept at teaching and building collaborative, efficient business organizations.

“I had an awesome boss—I’ll never forget Mac McDowell,” she said. “He knew I was like a sponge. He made sure I would learn every facet of the business, from HR to logistics—everything.”

“My mom always felt I was an entrepreneur. I never knew. I wish I had known earlier. But all of these opportunities prepared me for where I am now.”

After gaining increasingly responsible posts at The Dial Corporation and Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc.—restructuring and building teams along the way—Battle joined Deloitte as a senior consultant, doing similar work for the consumer goods industry, medical, finance, gaming, and the federal government.

By 2012, Battle was ready to strike out on her own. She was close to finishing a program at the Portfolio Center, a prestigious design school in Atlanta, when she was driven to turn a concept she’d been contemplating into reality. Her goal was to figure out how creative people could share content on a social network and get paid for it. The concept led to her first startup, derbywire, where she’s still the CEO.

But it was a small piece of derbywire that really interested investors: the payment method, based on facial recognition. When she realized that was a potential business on its own, she stepped back and worked round the clock to develop a prototype in 2013. Now, she’s in private beta testing, working in partnership with Samsung, Best Buy, Optimal Payments PLC, and another company selfiepay hasn’t identified.

“My mom always felt I was an entrepreneur. I never knew. I wish I had known earlier,” Battle said. “But all of these opportunities prepared me for where I am now.”

This article first appeared in the 2015 Olin Business Magazine as one of several profiles highlighting successful entrepreneurs, innovators, and disruptors. Look for upcoming profiles on the Olin Blog, or pick up a copy of the Olin Business Magazine.

On Wednesday, February 10, I had the privilege of sitting with some of the most outstanding startup minds St. Louis has to offer. I was on a panel with LaunchCode’s Mark Bauer, Hatchbuck’s Don Breckenridge, and TopOPPS’ Ted Stann—the common links between them being that they have all found success building great startups, and their companies are St. Louis partner companies for Venture For America, a fellowship program for college grads looking to launch their careers as entrepreneurs.

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