Fostering Student Innovation

By Jason Dzilinski

In April, the Yale Entrepreneurial Society hosted the 2012 Yale Venture Challenge, which judges Yale ventures on their business models and implementation in the real world.

Industry professionals and business leaders reviewed the 22 applications this year and “the top 6 plans, determined by score, advanced to the final round,” said YES’s co-president Tony Wu (YC '13).  These six finalists pitched at YES’s Innovation Summit, competing to win a total of $25,000 in prizes to expand their startups.

Kevin Ryan, CEO and founder of Gilt Groupe, an online high-end flash sale site, was the keynote speaker of the Innovation Summit. “Ryan encouraged students to go out and try new ventures and not to be afraid,” said Avery Faller (YEI ’11, YC ’11), a co-founder of Roammeo, one of the finalists.

Ultimately, the panel of five judges awarded the first-place, $15,000-prize to Roammeo (YEI ’11), a series of web and mobile apps that help students find events going on around them in real time.  Roammeo’s CEO (Chief Exploration Officer) Jessica Cole (YC ’12) said of the win, “I was thrilled and realized that any number of us could have been in the top three due to everyone’s hard work and dedication to their companies.” Roammeo plans to use the prize to expand their web site, add new features, capabilities, and expand to the New York City and Washington D.C. markets this summer.

Second place and $7,000 went to 2012 YEI Summer Fellowship team, Red Ox Technologies, which is commercializing an electrochemical fuel cell based on Yale University technology.   “When the winners were announced, I was very excited,” said co-founder Claire Henly (YC ’12). “There were many great teams in the running and the pitches were impressive so to be there in the top three was a good feeling.” Red Ox plans to use the money to grow their scientific team to further their proof of concept.  

Little Salad Shop, a quick service restaurant focusing on healthy and customizable salads, wraps, and smoothies, won the $2,000 third place prize.  The process, co-founder Etkin Tekin (YEI ’11, YC ’12) said, “kick-started a lot of work that will go toward opening 2 more locations this summer.”

“The other teams were very impressive and put up stiff competition,” said Faller. “I’m happy to see that there is so much entrepreneurial spirit at Yale.”

After a record number of applicants this year and the most competitive pool in YEI's history, YEI is excited to announce the following fellows from across Yale University:

BeYou
Hilary Barr (YC' 12) and Tiffany Pang (YC '12)
An online social network for children and adolescents that are victims of bullying and peer pressure, providing an anonymous place for them to reach out to others.

Classroom Compass
Aaron Feuer (YC' 13), Alexander Tanner (YC '13), David Carel (YC '13), John Gerlach (YC '14)
A platform for K-12 schools and districts to easily collect student feedback and offer teachers clear reports with actionable insights.

Communificiency
Max Webster (YC '12), Sherwin Yu (YC '12)
Bringing the power of crowdfunding to energy efficiency by empowering local communities to collectively finance retrofits of local buildings.

Cronote
Aaron Abajian (MED '15), Ann Nguyen
A web technology to allow users to schedule an email or text message reminder about an upcoming product.

Dash
Amos Kim (LAW '12), John Cadengo, Andrew Park
An app that uses geolocation and a recommendation engine to help consumers pick a place to eat in real time.

PrepWork
Daniel Wolchonok (SOM '13)
An online service that does your meeting prepwork for you by creating “smart” interpersonal data – a way to analyze and discover what one user has in common with another.

Project: Optix
Vela-Susan Park (YC '13), Derrick Gomez
A dynamic daily deals website for discounted movie tickets.

Red Ox Technologies
Claire Henly (YC '12), David Kohn (YC '11)
An Electrochemical Desalination Cell, a Yale University technology that desalinates water while producing electricity and synthesizing valuable inorganic salts.

UnBuyThat
Neil St. Clair (GSAS '13), Brian Oduor (FES/SOM '12)
A secondary marketplace for the reselling of services, such as hotel and restaurant reservations and daily deal coupons.

Youlo.gy
Colin Mills (YC '13)
A life-affirming, dynamic social network for individuals to personalize and customize their own memorial celebration and share their intentions and stories with others.

YourGrid
Brian Marrs (FES '12), Jake Seligman (PACE/FES '12), Joseph Edgar (PACE/FES '12), Matthew Cooperrider (FES '12)
An internet platform for homeowners where they can choose new energy efficient appliances, thermostats, windows, and more that are financed entirely through net present value positive energy savings over time.

Keep an eye on the blog for updates from YEI's 2012 Summer Fellows!

BY AVERY FALLER

Earlier this week, Encendia Biochar (YEI ’10) unveiled its 2012 product line, which features two products: “Urban Blend” and “Spring Blend,” both proprietary biochar blends developed by the company.  The 1/3 cubic ft. bags, available at encendia.com, are stylishly designed with a rustic-looking print that explains the properties of biochar, and its potential uses and benefits.

Encendia was founded in 2009 by Michael Sesko (CEO), Justin Freiberg (Chief Marketing Officer), Peter Kuhn (Chief Technology Officer), George Collins and Bidisha Banerjee. It got off to a quick start when it won the 2011 Sabin Environmental Venture Prize, which is awarded every year by Yale University’s Center for Business and the Environment to an environmentally oriented, for-profit business.

As its name suggests, Encendia’s main product is biochar, which is a soil-enhancing, carbon-rich mixture, made from the pyrolysis of biomass, or in layman’s terms, the transformation of organic matter into a carbon-filled soil amendment.  Biochar is porous like a sponge, giving the soil the ability to retain greater amounts of water and fertilizer, increasing yield.  Also, microorganisms that plants depend on are able to colonize the surfaces of the biochar, decreasing the need for pesticides.  Although biochar has been known to increase the fertility of soil for hundreds of years, currently it is not widely sold in garden shops. Encendia is changing that. A growing number of stores across New York and New England are carrying its products.

 “One way to think about it is that the academic understanding of biochar has thus far outpaced the commercialization of it because companies are not sure if the market is ready for it,” Justin explained, adding, “In some ways, fertilizer is the high-fructose corn syrup of soil, giving a quick boost to the soil in the short term, while the benefits of biochar are longer-term. It keeps your soil stronger for years. Add the biochar to some high quality food for the soil, as we do, and you have a potent mix.”

While synthetic fertilizers are great short-term solutions, they tend to run off of soils. Encendia’s biochar blends are extremely durable and once applied, will continue to provide benefits to the soil for years to come, as evidenced in the historical terra preta soils of the Amazon basin, which remain bountiful centuries after biochar was incorporated into them.  Biochar also aids in the process of carbon sequestration by storing stable carbon in the soil.

Encendia’s current products were developed specifically for gardening enthusiasts with small indoor and outdoor gardens.  However, to test and optimize their biochar blends to the New England soil and weather, they have been working with  local partner farms with positive results.

The history of biochar as well as the visual properties of its bags will help Encendia create a brand-image and sell its product. Justin has been securing shelf-space for at local stores, and educating retailers on the properties of biochar, which they can then pass on to customers. Surprisingly enough, many of the store owners had never even heard of biochar despite working in the gardening industry, which just goes to show that the market is unsaturated. 

You can look for Encendia’s products in garden stores around Connecticut, or on their website encendia.com.  Both Spring and Urban Blends 1/3 cubic ft. bags are available for $17.95 a piece, just in time for Spring planting.

In the weeks leading up to the deadline for YEI's Summer Fellowship application (January 18th), we've asked past Fellows to share their advice for starting a company - and applying for the fellowship.

By Max Sutter

As an early-stage entrepreneur, you are faced with a daunting task—the task of turning an idea into a sustainable business. 

From day one you will run into difficult questions that need answering and you will probably find yourself bombarded with advice and suggestions, whether from enthusiastic friends, concerned relatives, supportive mentors, or any of the hundreds of books on entrepreneurship.  However, you cannot begin to answer these difficult questions or take any of these sage suggestions until you know exactly how they apply to your company. 

To try to manage a business without completely understanding its goals, its customers, and its potential for success can be worse than useless—it can be completely destructive to the venture.
 
The only way to gain such an intimate understanding of your company is to build a prototype and measure its performance.  Until you have a working prototype, you cannot truly know your value proposition, your target market segment, or your growth strategy.  Any research done prior to building a product is bound to be based on hypotheses, assumptions, and abstract market or demographic data.  A prototype, on the other hand, gives you hard data that relates specifically to your company. 

On one level, the process of building a test product forces you to work out the bugs in your technology while encouraging further innovation and improvement.  It also lets you start comparing yourself to your competitors in terms of performance, pricing, and unique features.
 
Most importantly, however, a prototype is something you can show to customers so you can start getting real feedback.  Customers may not love your first attempt at a product, but the sooner you learn what it is about the product they do love, the sooner you can stop wasting your time on everything else.  The continuous flow of this type of customer feedback is what will allow you to build your idea into a streamlined, successful company.  It will ultimately determine what you’re selling, whom you’re selling it to, and whom you’re going to sell to next. 

This knowledge, backed up with concrete data, is what makes the difference between a few people with a cool idea and a company that generates real solutions to real problems.

Max Sutter is a 2011 YEI Fellow and the cofounder of Scaled Liquid Systems.

In the weeks leading up to the deadline for YEI's Summer Fellowship application (January 18th), we've asked past Fellows to share their advice for starting a company - and applying for the fellowship.

By Kate Harrison

There are many parallels that can be drawn between entrepreneurship and the movie Field of Dreams, but one aspect is distinctly different: If you build it, they might not come. Or, more accurately, they might not come by themselves or as fast as you hoped they would.

Like many enthusiastic and inexperienced entrepreneurs, I fell into a classic trap: development obsession. In my case, the product we were developing was a complex website that merges information, vendor listings and e-commerce together in the green wedding space. I was—and still am—trying to create a green version of a site called The Knot, with less time, money and experience, but with all of the whistles and bells. I understood when I began that it could not be done all at once, and that if I waited until it was complete to launch, it never would. So I embraced the popular tech mantra “publish early, publish often” — which is what we did.

In the first two years of the company, we rolled out feature after feature, constantly moving the site closer to my vision. It was exciting and productive, but in retrospect, I wish I’d known that the coin that tech mantra is inscribed upon has a flip side, which reads: “market early, market often.”

I assumed that if the site were as amazing as I knew it would be the traffic would somehow build itself. In part, I was misled by the fact that site traffic was growing rapidly in relative terms. In two years, we grew from a few hundred visitors each month to over 15,000, with almost no advertising. We saw 700% growth – but in numeric terms we just moved from tiny to small. I’ve spent many sleepless nights imagining where we would be today if I’d known enough to take advantage of all of the pr and marketing opportunities presented to us along the way!

The truth is that in business, more really is more. That means that as soon as you have a viable product, you must market it.  You may have heard this advice before; I know I did. But what I did not understand was that you have to build your marketing efforts like you build your product: passionately and systematically.

Effective marketing requires testing, and that takes time, focus and money. So here’s my advice to you: brainstorm the top ten ways you could market your product and then come up with a systematic, and preferably inexpensive, way to begin testing the various channels. It may turn out that Google ads are less expensive but don’t convert as well as Facebook ads. Or that buying traffic doesn’t work at all and affiliate referrals are the best way to scale your company.  You won’t know until you try and you need to run these tests for a while to get good data.

The good news is that marketing can pay off quickly. The bad news is that there may not be a silver bullet for your particular product. I kept hoping we would find one channel that would be quickly scalable – a money in/customer out equation with endless possibilities. So far, I am still looking.

If you do find this Chimera, hold on tight, because you are in for the VC ride of your life. However, most of you need to plan on building your businesses using many channels. That means figuring out new and creative ways to leverage the assets you have built while continuing to improve your product over time. The good news is that there are many paths to success and if you follow this advice early, you have a good chance of getting there.

Kate Harrison is the founder the The Green Bride Guide, a comprehensive and credible resource for eco-friendly wedding ideas, product and services. She was a YEI Fellow in 2009.