Originally posted by Mike Wilner, Co-founder of Compass on Readthink.com

“Always be closing.”

“Be persistent.”

“Don’t take no for an answer.”

When I started selling for my startup, Compass, it was my first time doing sales. I channeled cliché sales advice that echoed in my brain from having Glengarry Glen Ross clips sent to me.

With this picture of sales in mind, I thought I was ready. After all, friends, family, and coworkers have often applauded or complained about my persistence.

I used this persistence to help get Compass off the ground, but in the long run, constantly trying to close led to a lot of wasted time, put a low ceiling on sales, and started to burn me out.

Once I stopped pushing people through the door and instead allowed them to walk through it, sales got easier, more efficient, and I regained my sanity.

But it wasn’t a Wall Street heavyweight or a sales consultant that taught us how to make changes in our sales process — it was our own customers.

The Scrappy Start

After six months of working on Compass on the side, we had acquired 20 customers. When we went full-time, our mentors and advisors pushed us to set a goal of acquiring 100 customers in the next three months.

Hustling was something I’d always embraced, so we set up our sales machine in a way that allowed us to put hustle in one end, and get customers out the other. After all, we’d yet to really hustle for sales, and that’s always a great place to start.

Our hustle top of mind, I made our sales funnel.

1. I cold emailed you

2. You responded and I tried to get you on the phone

3. We talked on the phone and I followed up until you became a customer

4. You became a customer

Our sales process was all about me, based on what I wanted from prospective customers. I was desperate for traction, so I prioritized my needs over the needs of our leads.

At the beginning, it worked! Using this process, I was able to get the initial pickup we needed to get Compass off the ground.

But even as sales were growing, something didn’t feel right. I was working long hours and getting exhausted.

I tried to put in even more hours trying to push people through a funnel that was building more and more leads. I was frustrated when more and more hustle wasn’t resulting in more sales. In fact, spending more time trying to close started to hurt sales.

Why was this happening?

We took a look at some of our leads that were in our funnel, like Jason.

Jason’s touchpoints:

43 emails

35 outgoing emails

8 received emails

52 total calls

45 outgoing calls

4 incoming calls

That’s 95 touchpoints over 10 months, for a combined 8 hours — and nothing to show for it. If you’re wondering what hard-but-not-smart work looks like, this is it.

Jason regularly told me he was a soon-to-be-client. I was persistent in trying to push him through the door (my communication outnumbered his by a ratio higher than 5:1), but he never became a customer.

And that’s just Jason. Relying on this brute-force sales process meant there were always dozens of leads I was trying to push through the next door. Last June through September, I spent roughly 4 hours a day manually following up (with a call or email) with leads regardless of where they were in the sales cycle. Some of these leads had told me that they were eager to get a new website; some had simply asked me what “mobile-friendly” meant. Yet I was treating all of these people the same.

So, my obsession with closing stunted our growth. Don’t get me wrong, that approach served its purpose. We’d validated our business model and gotten initial traction. It also helped me understand the different hesitations that leads have and the different degrees of readiness.

But, if we were going to continue to grow faster, I needed to spend more of my time on bigger challenges, like testing out new marketing channels — instead of spending a majority of my time following up with people.

Doubling Sales in Half The Time

Over the past 5 months, we’ve made changes to both our marketing funnel and our sales process.

Here’s that same graph, extended for three more months.

I spent half the time following up in February as I did the previous June, yet we acquired nearly twice as many customers.

We did this by waving goodbye to the “always be closing” mentality and stepping outside of the vacuum where our first sales process was created. Instead, we let our customers teach us how to sell to them and designed a new sales process to reflect that.

I took a hard look at some of the hesitations customers had before converting, and in some cases, asked them what was happening in the months before they converted. We determined that there were four basic stages of readiness.

1. Preliminary research:

This person doesn’t want me to try to schedule a call with them like I’d been doing — they just wanted to stay in touch so they could reach out when they were ready.

2. Consideration

This person doesn’t want to hop on the phone yet either — they wanted a way to learn more about our process, see our work, and get a ballpark estimate on price — none of which needs to happen on the phone.

3. Diligence:

“This all sounds great, but I have a few specific questions.”

Now this person wants to talk to the phone — it was time to answer questions and determine a mutual fit so that they could take the final step.

4. Purchase:

Note: this is the same person from 1) Preliminary research

Finally, this person is ready to become a customer.

If a potential customer was in stage the Preliminary Research stage, no amount of phone calls from me would tip them into stage two. So instead of me acting like a bounty hunter, we created doors that customers could walk through on their own. For every stage a customer might be in, we created a corresponding low-pressure way for them to take the next step.

1. Enter Preliminary Research: For those casually researching getting a website, we created relevant content that they could download without needing to talk to anyone.
2. Enter Consideration: For someone who has a more specific inquiry about how much their project would cost, we created a pricing estimator so that they could get a detailed breakdown — without talking to anyone.
3. Enter Diligence: For someone who had more specific questions about working with us, they could schedule a call with me — whenever was convenient for them.
4. Enter Purchase: After a sales call, for someone who wanted to get started, they could submit the deposit form we sent them — whenever they were ready.

As a result, leads were able to build a relationship with us on their own terms. We also allowed people to walk back through doors the way they came in. If a lead had a call with me during the Diligence stage, but then encountered a change that put her back in the Preliminary research stage, we didn’t keep badgering her to make a deposit — we instead started delivering content to her that was good for casual researchers. This distinction allowed us to give prospective customers the experience they needed based on where they were in the purchase cycle.

By allowing our customers to walk freely through these doors, they feel better about Compass as a whole. Leads have even referred new customers before converting themselves.

While we let our customers design our new marketing funnel and sales process, it turns out they designed in a way that’s pretty identical to how more mature marketing funnels should look.

1. Marketing Qualified: leads who have identified themselves as interested in our services
2. Sales Accepted: leads who identify that they’re ready to be sold.
3. Sales Qualified: leads where a mutual fit is determined.
4. Customer: PARTY

After letting our customers teach us how to sell to them, this is how our marketing funnel improved:

Now that I’m spending even less time pushing people through doors, I’m able to spend more of my time on higher-impact marketing tasks, like running new lead generation experiments, finding niche customer segments, and writing this article.

Final Thoughts

When you barely know anything about your customers, a hustle-centric sales process can be really effective in getting the initial traction you need. It can also teach you a lot about what the buying psychology is like for your prospective customers.

But one person can only hustle so much. If your sales process is based on your own hustle, you’re going to hit a ceiling pretty quickly.

A sustainable sales process can’t be designed in a vacuum. We were stuck, and letting our customers tell us how they wanted to be sold to allowed us to remove the ceiling on our growth.

So if you find yourself hustling as much as you can but wondering how you can increase sales, why don’t you just ask your customers?

Brian Brackeen didn’t know he was an entrepreneur until much later in life. He was adopted at an early age by loving parents who supported his decision to drop out of college, leave a big job at Apple, and eventually start his own company. Despite having strong ties to Philly, Brian determined that the cost of living, cost of doing business, and access to capital made Miami the most compelling place to relocate his facial recognition and emotional analysis technology company, Kairos. Kairos is a VFA Company Partner in Miami with strong ties to the Miami entrepreneurial ecosystem. Kairos has managed several acquisitions and has over 9,000 customers around the world across a variety of sectors including medicine, events and retails. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about the fascinating world of facial recognition technology and how Kairos has helped reunite abducted children with their families.

Click here to listen

---

In this week’s digest: an inside look at innovative startup studio Human Ventures; what one founder’s customers taught him about sales; and why at a startup, learning is everything.

The talent experts behind Human Ventures on how to grow a community of “epic humans.” Human Ventures is a startup studio with a dual mission: to create the world’s best co-founders and companies that make people’s lives better. The necessary ingredient? Truly excellent people. CEO Heather Hartnett and Chief Growth Officer Megan O’Connell have cultivated a diverse group of potential founders who aren’t just skilled and capable, but also values-driven and great to work with—not an easy feat. How’d they do it? To start, it took deliberately seeking out a wide range of voices, and making the decision to trust referrals over resumes. LISTEN HERE: Interview with Heather Hartnett & Megan O’Connor, CEO and Chief Growth Officer at Human Ventures

What this first-time founder learned about sales — the hard way. During the earliest days of Compass, Co-founder and CEO Mike Wilner had one primary goal: get customers. With conventional sales tactics in mind (think: “Never take no for an answer,”) he pushed hard to get leads on the phone and turn them into happy customers. These tactics worked, for a while—but soon, sales slowed, and Mike was exhausted. So he took a step back, thought hard about what his customers really needed, and with a new, customer-focused strategy, helped Compass really grow. READ IT HERE: “How Our Customers Taught Us How to Sell” by Mike Wilner

Three mindsets to help you grow every day. The only constant at an early-stage company is change—and to consistently add value, you need to pick up new skills, develop tactics, and grow on a daily basis. No one knows this better than serial entrepreneur Anne Dwane—through launching a handful of ventures, she’s developed the skills of a constant learner, able to adjust on the fly to changing circumstances and shifting demands. According to Anne, it all boils down to three mindsets: gamer (thoughtful risk-taking), beginner (a rookie’s lack of preconceptions), and growth (mistakes and setbacks are all part of the process). READ IT HERE: “The ‘Adaptable Leader’ is the New Holy Grail — Become One, Hire One” by First Round Review

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible. Between now and August 4th, the team that raises the most money will receive additional funding to launch their venture.

Anna Isachenko is the Operations Czar at SPLT, a social ride-sharing platform designed to reinvent the commute. She was born and raised in Moscow, matured in New Jersey, moved to upstate New York to receive her bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Ithaca College, and now lives in Detroit. As a student, Anna revitalized the International Business Association, was elected to lead the Model United Nations team, and developed business ideas including the TraceIt Project, a smartphone app which allows users to scan the barcode of a garment and uncover its ethical background, in terms of both labor and environmental impact. While Anna is pursuing her passion for sustainability at SPLT, she is also developing The Forge, a space for visual, sound and design artists to collaborate.

---

This past January, my former jazz instructor asked me to record a version of a Billie Holiday cover. Fascinated with Detroit’s rich musical history, I decided to book studio time at United Sound Systems, a studio known for its contribution to the Motown movement. My good friend Cassie joined me for moral support. Surrounded by framed vinyl records, we made our way to Studio D. The floors creaked beneath our feet as we walked through the halls, reminding us of the many other musicians that had created in the space.

I had the live demo recording on my flash drive in less than an hour. Yet felt that something was missing and asked my friends for help. Kelly agreed to capture a photo that would portray the meaning of the song. Emily created the graphic design. Combining the skill-sets of sound, visual and design artists, along with an unconditional support network, the project was finally complete.

Now imagine what that would like look like if artists of these mediums lived together in a historic Detroit home. As you enter the ground floor, you see a room filled with artists sketching away at their ideas.
You keep walking to find a smaller room with soundproof walls and someone experimenting with a new melody on piano. The next, you see an artist working away at an acrylic, rushing before the sun goes down to take advantage of the natural light seeping through the wide windows. You explore the upstairs to find messy bedrooms, each with their own character. Residents of this home are part of a year-long opportunity to explore their art by collaborating with each other and the community. The result: a safe space for experimentation. 
I wondered what would happen if I brought emerging artists under one roof and was inspired to create The Forge. I realized the immense potential for a new type of artist space; a place combining the tools of maker-spaces, the knowledge of art institutions, and problem solving of design-thinking innovation centers, with the immersive experience of a residency program.
Part maker-space, part studio and part idea incubator, The Forge will be home to five emerging visual, sound and design artists selected to live for one year in a renovated Detroit house. In addition, they’ll receive all of the tools they need to get inspired and bring their crazy ideas to life. During the year, the surrounding community will be invited into the studio space every weekend (and weekday with enough funding) to learn, make art and meet up with other local creatives.

The ability to create music in a collaborative and supportive community has been a point of emotional growth for me and my art. I want to create a space where others have access to that opportunity. Follow my journey.

The Agrawal twins are a force to be reckoned with! As each others’ self proclaimed biggest cheerleaders, Miki and Radha have worked together on a number of interesting businesses including: Wild, a farm fresh, gluten free pizza restaurant, Super Sprowtz, a children’s nutrition education program that harnesses the power of storytelling, music and the arts to educate and inspire children to be more active and choose healthier foods to fuel their bodies, and Thinx, a patent-pending, leak-resistant, stain-resistant, anti-microbial and moisture-wicking pair of underwear for women dealing with their periods, to name a few. This episode just skims the surface of all the Agrawal sisters have accomplished and what is on the horizon. Download now for the rundown on all of their companies and hear about how the Agrawals aim to build communities and break taboos.

Click here to listen

---

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th. Between now and August 4th, the team that raises the most money will receive additional funding to launch their venture.

Amanda graduated from Columbia University in 2014 with a degree in Creative Writing. She spent a year working in corporate advertising before starting her fellowship with Venture for America doing marketing and design work for the National Academy of Advanced Teacher Education. As an Army Brat, she grew up on the move with a love of service and adventure. She is on a three-Fellow team with Evan Snyder and Charlie Weikert for their Innovation Fund Project, the Wakeable.

---

Rise and shine – or not?

Waking up is something that everyone does every single day, and it is an experience that is often given the same attention and care as taking the garbage out. It’s just something we have to do, probably delaying it as much as possible, and when it happens, it is done begrudgingly. Why can’t this process be more enjoyable? Why don’t we all get to have a Cinderella wake up with singing birds, perfect hair, inside a sunny bedroom?
Our team pinpointed the definitive ugh moment of waking up – the snooze button.
We hit the snooze button several times, leading us to lose valuable minutes that we had planned to spend on a luxurious shower or breakfast. It causes fragmented sleep, which science researchers say can mess with your whole day. According to USA Today, 50% of all American adults say they need an alarm clock to wake up, and 1/3 of them hit the snooze at least once every day. While these numbers highlight a nationally shared problem, for our team, it was a much more obvious (and perhaps self-motivated) struggle.

Introducing the Wakeable

I’m on a three-Fellow team creating what we call the anti-snooze alarm clock. Wakeable is a remote off-switch to your alarm, wirelessly connected via Bluetooth to your smartphone. By removing the potential of hitting snooze, Wakeable forces you to get out of bed on the first try.
This idea was born out of our own complicated relationship with the snooze button.
Charlie Weikert has been a self-proclaimed alarm clock enthusiast for years, and has been researching ways of improving the waking experience (this is actually his third project exploring the subject). Evan Snyder snoozes an average of three times per week day morning, and I have to plan out rewards for myself like “splurge on a latte from the indie coffee shop” to get myself out of bed on time. We all met as part of the Venture for America Class of 2015, and when Charlie reached out with his idea for the Innovation Fund, Evan and I were sold on just the premise alone.
I remember saying to him, “Even if I don’t work with you on this, I’m still 100% buying one of those.”
And I am so glad that I decided to say yes.

The Innovation Fund

It started off with an email from Charlie with the subject line, “Avengers Assemble Alarm Alliteration.” That quickly turned into a flurry of texts, a shared Trello board, Skype calls, and a running (intermittently intense) group IM. We are all located in different places (Charlie=New York, Evan=Ann Arbor, me=Providence), and yet it felt like we were working together out of the same room.
Our entire process was a series of on-the-go decisions and action items. Our video was a group effort from across the country. Charlie crunched out a development budget. I think Wakeable was name suggestion #24 and we picked something largely just because it was go time. When we sent out our campaign, I think we hoped we’d raise enough money for one or two. Maybe our parents would buy one if they felt bad for us. 
Instead, we got an overwhelming positive response from Fellows, friends, family, and people that discovered us from who knows where. We kept our budget and expectations low, and were amazed to meet our goal a few days after launching. As of now, we’ve raised 239% of our $500 goal (and that includes 9 “good morning” phone calls to supportive backers who chose our $5 contribution perk).
From Day 1, we treated the Innovation Fund as a learning experiment. Charlie asked Evan and I to articulate exactly what it was we were hoping to learn, and he shared his own personal goals with us. We figured, even if we didn’t raise enough money, that we would all have had the opportunity to build upon current skill sets and explore new ones. Over the last few weeks, we’ve all learned about crowdfunding, the process of app development, industrial design, and more.
Every morning that I hit snooze these days, I’ve thought about Wakeable and realized how incredible it is that we have the opportunity now to make it happen.

Originally posted by Andrew Yang on Entrepreneur.com

Here at Venture for America, we recruit and train aspiring millennial entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build businesses. Our goals are to help create 100,000 new U.S. jobs and revitalize American communities. I started VFA in large part because the national entrepreneurship stats among young people are starkly negative – fewer 18 to 30 year olds are starting businesses than at any point in the last 24 years. This struck me – and the people who support VFA – as a train wreck. Fewer new companies today means fewer new jobs tomorrow.
So what businesses and initiatives will 24-year-old entrepreneurs start if given the chance? Every year, we have a crowdfunding competition to find out. Our Fellows post their projects on Indiegogo, and we put up $15k in prize money as extra motivation.
It’s always illuminating, the challenges that they take on. This year their projects include:

1. Al-Dente by Simple Kitchen

When Swad Komanduri’s father was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes, he sought to find alternative dietary options that wouldn’t deprive him of the rice-bound dishes traditionally served in their Indian, vegetarian home. Swad ultimately found that rice cooked al-dente style (a process characterized by preparing pasta and grains in excess water) had 25 percent fewer calories than rice cooked in a rice cooker. This led him to create Al-Dente – a kitchen appliance that automates the draining of water during cooking, providing the convenience of rice cookers with the health benefits of al-dente cooking. Good thing Swad went to Caltech!
Swad’s already hit 80 percent of his fundraising goal on Indiegogo. With a little help, he can empower other health-conscious families to enjoy the meals they grew up on –and then some.

2. Bikes ORO

Chelsea Koglmeier was a triathlete at Duke. She loves bikes, and she wants more people to have one, particularly in underserved regions. Enter Bikes ORO (Of Reckless Optimism). Designed after the infamous Flying Machine model, Bikes ORO creates chain-free, lightweight, cost-effective bikes for everyday use. They then donate 15 percent of the profit from each bike to organizations intent on providing bike access to underprivileged people in under-serviced regions. Exciting stuff, right? World Bicycle Relief seems to think so.
Chelsea and Bikes ORO and have already raised $23,000 – roughly 50 percent of their crowd funding goal – which is enough to get a bunch of people a new set of wheels they’re going to love. Chelsea is definitely going places, literally and figuratively.

3. The Redge

Leigh Sevin and Jinesh Shah were always getting gifts that they didn’t really want. Awkward! They founded The Redge so that they could have a wish list of what they really wanted that they could easily share with, say, their aunts and uncles. Think of it as an online personal shopping cart you can throw things into and show other people when your birthday rolls around.
They set a new stretch goal after they roared past their original crowdfunding goal by a mile — it seems like a lot of people are getting gifts they don’t want. Maybe Leigh and Jinesh will change that in a little while.

Other Fellow projects include a mentor network for women, a card game that spurs profound conversations, a way to make your phone alarm ring from across the room and other fascinating ideas that give you a sense of what the world would look like if young people could bring their visions to reality. They’re all great ideas. More importantly, the Fellows are working hard to make them real.
Millennials get a bad rap sometimes about their grit and perseverance. This makes it all the more important that we highlight those who are taking on the tall task of trying to build something. Starting a company is rough. It’s even harder when you’re young – I know this firsthand, because my first company flopped when I was 25.
So let’s get behind Al-Dente, Bikes ORO, the Redge and the eight other young entrepreneurs and show them that great things are possible if they put themselves out there.  If they and their friends see that hard work gets rewarded, the sky’s the limit.

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo.

---

In 2016, it is a basic truth that technology drives and shapes human behavior. As an example, consider navigation. Prior to the propagation and ubiquity of smartphone based turn by turn navigation, having a sense of direction was a much more valued human skill than it is now. While turn-by-turn navigation has undoubtedly made transit more convenient, it is now far more acceptable than at any point in human history for a human being to have no sense of direction. Perhaps that is a desirable change, enabling humanity to focus our collective efforts on more pressing issues. But taken to an extreme, technology designed exclusively for convenience has the potential to create a future such as the one depicted in WALL-E, where humanity’s dependence on technology reaches a level where our capacity for self-sufficiency is threatened.
Consequently, it is imperative for technology developers to consider the change in human behavior their technology will create. As technology is adopted at scale, existing standards for human behavior and interaction will inevitably be rendered obsolete, which poses an ethical burden on technology developers to consider the changes they may impose. One example of this is the development and adoption of rice cookers. Prior to the development of rice cookers, there existed many different cooking methods for rice, each of which had different effects on the texture and nutritional characteristics of the cooked rice. One of these methods, commonly used in the Indian subcontinent, was to cook rice al-dente, where the rice was boiled in excess water and the excess water was drained out after the rice was mostly cooked. This process requires monitoring and a human presence to drain out the water at the right time. With the convenience provided by rice cookers, humans have understandably shifted to using rice cookers in lieu of cooking rice al-dente. However, what happens when this change has unintended consequences?

Recent scientific studies are showing a correlation between white rice consumption and Type 2 Diabetes, particularly in Asian populations. In fact, South Asian Americans are 7x more likely to be diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes than the average American. Furthermore, preliminary research indicates that 28% of Bangladeshis in NYC have diabetes. These are communities that have eaten rice as a staple food for millennia, so how is it that these health problems are just now being noticed? One contributing factor could be the adoption and increased use of rice cookers in these communities. Because the cooking method used to cook a food affects its Glycemic Index, the change in rice preparation could theoretically have a huge impact on human health. To test this hypothesis, I had samples of rice cooked using a rice cooker and rice cooked al-dente comparatively tested for nutritional value at a food lab. To my surprise, the test results showed that rice cooked using a rice cooker had over 25% more carbs and calories than rice cooked al-dente. No wonder the rate of diabetes is skyrocketing! Each cup of rice now has over 25% more carbs, over 25% more calories, and a higher Glycemic Index than it did prior to the widespread use of rice cookers. When you eat at least two cups of rice per meal, at least twice a day, at least five days a week, that 25% adds up to a massive nutritional change.

Asking people to make significant dietary changes or give up the convenience provided by technology are impractical solutions. So the way to solve this is to develop technology that allows for convenience while maintaining the good parts of the old way of doing things. In the case of rice cookers, it is to develop technology that provides modern convenience with the health benefits of the traditional al-dente cooking process. That is precisely what we aim to do at Simple Kitchen with our first product Al-Dente, a rice cooker that cooks healthier rice.

As shown by Figure 3, unlike traditional rice cookers, Al-Dente works by boiling rice in excess water and draining out the excess. Because starch from the rice dissipates into the surrounding water as it is cooked, the excess water contains starch that would get absorbed by the rice in a traditional rice cooker. Al-Dente drains out this starch, which enables a healthier lifestyle!

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo.
Kelly graduated from Barnard College in 2015 with a degree in Economics and a minor in Psychology. Born in Los Angeles, she moved to South Korea at the age of 12 and is no stranger to airports. At Floyd, a Detroit-based furniture company, Kelly splits her time between supply chain operations and customer experience. Through All About That Paradigm Shift, she is working to create a movement to help people achieve a deeper level of self-awareness about themselves and the world we live in.

---

I was biking to the gym one afternoon in Detroit when I was catcalled not once, but twice within the span of a minute. As I pedaled away as quickly as possible, a combination of frustration and confusion circulated in my mind. Why did these individuals think catcalling was acceptable? The next morning, I recounted the previous day with my co-worker, Jacky, and came to the conclusion that people grow up adopting different norms of what is acceptable (in this scenario, that women are objects) and act from there.
He replied, “Yeah, I’m all about that paradigm shift.”
What started as an idea for a catchy t-shirt or tote design turned into our current crowdfunding campaign. All About That Paradigm Shift is a movement to crowdfund and crowdsource a deck of cards to help people have conversations about difficult topics like race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status (and so much more). The most critical aspect is that the public is the one providing their own experiences and viewpoints.
Our goal for All About That Paradigm Shift is that individuals will use the cards on their own for self-reflection or with a group of friends, strangers even. We’ve found that each time the cards were used, people walked away with a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them. We believe this is start of a foundation for change, to break down barriers and stigmas that we all have. Beyond conversations amongst friends and family, we also hope to implement this tool within schools, community spaces, and even with institutions like law enforcement.

We recognize that we live in an age when debates over political correctness can overshadow tackling the heart of  difficult issues. We know that a method to facilitate and have these sorts of conversations is invaluable. As a team, we have invested in brainstorming the best ways to approach it and came to a simple, but profound conclusion: the greatest potential for change comes from understanding the experiences of each other. After someone backs our campaign, we follow up with a survey in which the individual can submit their own experience or perspective on a wide range of social issues.
While we’ve reached our Indiegogo campaign goal of $1000 (thanks to all of our amazing supporters!), the conversation is just beginning. We need as many of your individual experiences as possible to make this campaign an even more diverse and thought-provoking platform for engaging in these discussions.
Our team held our first public workshop this past Saturday. A group of relative strangers sat down together at a table, created their own cards, and engaged in discussion for hours. One participant concluded, “We all have so much that we carry with us every day and I think it’s incredible how much we were able to share. I wish there were more opportunities to walk into a room and say ‘this is where I’m coming from.’” Indeed. Here’s to many more paradigm shifts.

This week Jeremy chats with Heather Hartnett and Megan O’Connor of Human Ventures, a startup studio that co-founds and incubates companies in house with exceptional humans. Human Ventures is building and supporting five new companies in their first year (they are a year old this month) and focuses on partnering with individuals who have innate characteristics rather than specific technical skills. Both Heather and Megan have a variety of experiences including backgrounds in the nonprofit space. Listen to this week’s episode to learn all about exceptional humans and why Megan and Heather take referrals over resumes.

Click here to listen

---

 

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th. Between now and August 4th, the team that raises the most money will receive additional funding to launch their venture.

Sean Wen was born and raised in the great state of Texas (H-town represent). He graduated with a degree in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin (Hook ‘Em). While at UT Austin, Sean became very involved with a program called 3-Day Startup, further stoking his entrepreneurial spirit. He is now a resident of San Antonio, Texas working as a Membership Manager for Geekdom, a collaborative co-working space where Entrepreneurs, Technologists, Developers, Makers & Creatives help each other build businesses & other cool things together. On the side, he is bringing community crawfish boils to San Antonio through Pinch Crawfish Kitchen.

---

Food is a funny, paradoxical concept. It’s both simple, and incredibly complex – in taste, flavor and preparation. It’s also one of the few things in life that is both necessary and enjoyable. Usually, that’s not the case (why can’t I look like Chris Hemsworth AND eat pizza everyday?). The idea of food being “necessary” has multiple levels to it as well – it’s necessary for health but also necessary for building culture & community.  With Pinch Crawfish Kitchen, we care about building community just as much as building great flavor in our crawfish. This is why we’re bringing community crawfish boils to San Antonio – inspired by Vietnamese flavors and culture.

ON COMMUNITY

“Like Greeks with his falafel, Italian with his to-mato pasta
What roti is to a rasta…” Nas – Fried Chicken feat. Busta Rhymes

Okay, so Greeks aren’t technically known for falafel, BUT this line from Nas still goes to show how important food is in defining culture and community! This is precisely why Andrew and I decided to go into this food venture – because we wanted to continue defining the legacy of our food and people.
Growing up, food was always around us. However, being Asian-Americans growing up in the South, the food you eat, see and smell can seem a bit peculiar to others. Even when the foods are Gulf-Coast classics with an Asian spin, what was normal for us was inevitably some exotic oddity for everyone else. But because the community continued to cook this way, and serve & sell food this way, we literally saw an entire city evolve. We began to understand the power of food. If you look at Houston today, various food cultures have thoroughly impacted the region’s cuisine, as well as the region’s appetite.
Diversity is a beautiful, beautiful thing. We want to bring this level of community to San Antonio, as well as to push San Antonio’s culinary boundaries.
So at this point, you may be wondering, “how does a community crawfish boil achieve these things?” Excellent question. If there’s one food that personifies community, it’s crawfish.
Growing up, anytime we went to a crawfish boil, it was always about cheerful bonhomie, family and good times. Even when writing this, there’s a bit of wistful nostalgia in the air. I loved the feeling of being around the people I cared about – eating food that I enjoyed. These fond memories are things we certainly do not take for granted, and we understand it takes these sorts of moments to build an identity within a community.  This is why we want to throw crawfish boils for San Antonio – so that people from all walks of life can eat well and feel good about being a part of something. I want to say that we’re also realistic and understand that we can’t individually change San Antonio, but if we’re a part of a (delicious) process, then we’ve done our job.

ON CRAWFISH

“If you fry him crisp or you boil him right, he’ll be sweeter than sugar when you take a bite. Crawfish.” Elvis Presley, Kitty White –from the film ‘King Creole’

Our crawfish is inspired by Vietnamese street cuisine. In fact, many of our ingredients come directly from authentic Vietnamese recipes. As the saying goes, “recipes are a better, more accurate, version of folk tales – both are time-honored and culturally significant!” (Disclaimer: No one actually ‘says’ this. I say it, but I didn’t want to quote myself, but…too late, I guess.)
But what the heck is “Vietnamese-style crawfish”? We say it a lot and understand it may be a foreign concept for some. Fair enough. Quick history lesson: many Vietnamese immigrants came to the Gulf Coast (primarily New Orleans & Houston) after the Fall of Saigon. They were originally fisherman, so naturally they trapped crawfish and caught regional seafood. Vietnamese chefs then took this local fare and cooked it the only way they knew how – Vietnamese-style. Injected with delicious Asian-inspired ingredients, crawfish began to take on a new, more flavorful, identity. Here’s an entry from our Indiegogo campaign describing our crawdads:
Our crawfish experience begins with a multi-step cooking process to ensure that each and every batch of your crawfish is soaked in flavor. We take traditional crawfish elements and spice it up with Asian-inspired ingredients — such as fresh chopped garlic, green onions, and hand squeezed citrus fruits. We top it off with a pinch of our secret medley of spices. The fresh crawfish is served with a side of juicy Andouille sausage, sweet corn, and spicy red potatoes – all tossed and drenched in our mouthwatering garlic butter sauce. *drools*
We have the exciting opportunity to bring a highly demanded food to a city that is becoming more open to trying new flavors and exciting cuisines.  What a time to be alive.
Thank you for everyone that has given our dream a chance. I’m unbelievably humbled and grateful by the amount of support we’ve already garnered, and cannot wait to get this concept out from the kitchen and into the community.

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Eleven Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th. Between now and August 4th, the team that raises the most money will receive additional funding to launch their venture.

Leigh Sevin graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in American Studies. She currently works in operations at Zeel in Miami, Florida, helping to grow the company in its new location. Jinesh Shah graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Information, focusing on user experience design. He now works at Rokk3r Labs in Miami Beach as a Senior Product Architect, designing product experiences for a vast array of startups. Together they’re working to build The Redge, a personal shopping cart for the web that allows consumers to store their favorite items and organize them into wishlists.

---

The Redge is designed to be your personal shopping cart for the web – a safe, centralized storage space where you can round up, compare, and pick items to purchase when you’re ready.
Now, this problem we’re solving probably doesn’t seem too pressing or top of mind. Why build something that people have managed without for so long? That is a great question. Here’s why: Currently 67% of us will end up not purchasing the items we add to our individual carts on e-commerce sites. That’s a crazy number! And if you reflect, I’m sure the reason was not that you didn’t like what you selected — most likely, life just got in the way. But I also bet that there have been times where you felt like you’d missed out on something great. At The Redge, we call this problem “browser’s paralysis,” and we’d like to bring it to an end.
It’s not about buying everything; it’s about taking the time to make smart decisions about what to buy when the right time to purchase comes along.
As co-founders of The Redge, one of our most rewarding experiences is explaining The Redge and having folks eagerly follow up with questions about what features we’ll add next. Right now, The Redge allows you to store an item you like by creating a wishlist and copying and pasting a URL into that wishlist (we’ve linked some of our own collections as inspiration). This is what we consider the Alpha product. There is much more that we’re excited to bring you.
Here’s a list of some of our top priorities: a Chrome extension to instantly “redge an item,” price displays on items and the total price of wishlists, social components such as searching for and following your friends, and of course, one day, alerts on sales of the items you’ve added.
But that’s not all! Oh no way. We’d like to see The Redge go from your personal shopping cart to your personal shopper, equipped with editorial on top products to accompany our collections, experts available to help you find exactly what you’re looking for, and ongoing recommendations tailor-made to fit your taste.
But we’re still at square 1 – albeit with big dreams and a heck ton of ambition. That’s why we’re participating in VFA’s Innovation Fund. We’re eager to keep building, keep improving, and continuing to respond to the needs of our users. To learn more about us and stay updated with our growth, check out our campaign or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.