Jason Kuperberg, ‘18, a biotechnology major in Arts And Sciences may have a hard sciences academic background and extensive resume in the field, but he is an entrepreneur to the core. Although he did not start out on that path, Jason has found his entrepreneurial inspiration through his years at Syracuse and has not passed up on an opportunity to apply his entrepreneurial spirit to all of his endeavors. Founder of Drop Top, the regional winner of the Hult Prize, he is now headed with his team to Toronto in early March to showcase their concept to conserve water and enhance drip irrigation utilizing REVLAR, a waterproof, tear-proof, durable paper-thin material specifically designed to withstand high/low temperature fluctuations.

Sitting down with him to talk about how he discovered this passion and skill set, it was no surprise to hear that his first source of inspiration came from taking a EEE 370 course his sophomore year, which led to him pursuing a path in entrepreneurship. Although by this point he already had been heavily involved in the hard sciences field both on campus and doing research in the biology department for Plant Molecular Research and the National Institute of Health’s Cancer Research department, he had been missing the passion that entrepreneurship inspired. Finding that inspiration thanks to the interdisciplinary curriculum that biotechnology provided, he took more EEE classes and began to get involved in Syracuse University’s Blackstone LaunchPad.

Another pivot experience for the young entrepreneur was working at a startup hub in Israel over the summer. Spending the summer consulting and learning about different projects strengthened Jason’s desire to make an impact through innovation. Returning to Syracuse for his final year, he has continued to involve himself in everything and anything entrepreneurial on the Syracuse campus, which is full of opportunities for those with a driven and inspired mindset such as Jason’s.

Searching to create change in everything he does, Jason immersed himself in the entrepreneurial mindset. Dedicated to the opportunity of potentially advancing to the global regionals and finals of the Hult Prize Competition, and winning other competitions such as the ACC InVenture Prize, Jason has created meaningful connections with faculty and students who are also driven to create change through entrepreneurship.

I asked Jason about his plans after graduation, and he responded with a big smile. “It keeps changing.” Speaking to his found passion, Jason plans to do something unconventional that continues to fuel his passion for creation and relationship building. Whatever he decides, there is no doubt that he will continue to innovate and build on endeavors that ignite change.

Reflecting on his last four years, he explained how the biggest change was in his mindset and approach to everything he experiences. Valuing the importance of collaboration, Jason will continue to bring his excitement and drive to everything he does.

By Luz Perez, Blackstone LaunchPad Engagement Scholar

Photo by Blackstone LaunchPad staff

William Lee Mendes McKnight ‘18, Arts and Sciences major and founder of Farm to Flame Energy, is working to empower rural farmers by providing them with sustainable energy through a biomass combustion system that can be used to power micro-grids.  As the winner of the recent Syracuse University Hult Prize campus competition, he is about to take that message to a bigger stage when he heads to Boston in early March to pitch at the global regionals of the $1 million competition that is known as the Nobel Prize of student social entrepreneurship.

Working closely with his family, Will has been dedicated to this venture since he arrived on the Syracuse campus, almost four years ago. With the incredible goal of bringing sustainable energy solutions to areas of the world without reliable power, he is already partnering with farmers and energy entrepreneurs in African countries such as Liberia. He is literally building his dream, and expects to launch later this year.

Along the way, it has been a transformative journey for both Will and his venture.

Will evolved his original idea of a building a portable biomass heater into the larger concept of creating an integrated biomass combustion system to provide electricity to communities without reliable power sources.  Working with a patented technology originally developed by his grandfather, he is now building his own beta prototype with a goal of bringing it to community scale.  “As we grow together as a global community, no corner of the world should be left out,” says Will. “In the age of the technology, electricity has become a basic human right.  Our solution can help bring electricity to the 1.2 billion people around the world living in energy poverty by building a smokeless, odorless, biomass generator and community microgrid solution.  Best of all, our system leverages the power of locally available energy crops and agricultural waste to create energy entrepreneurs in developing countries.”

Farm to Flame does four things.

• It builds 40 kw biomass powered biomass generators;
• It builds fuel processing units capable of grinding any feed stock or agricultural waste into a fuel source;
• It works with farmers to help grow the best feed stocks for their climate and soils;
• It works with entrepreneurs in emerging economies to build and manage a microgrid.

One of our its generators can power an entire village, or 32 average American households, and can also power commercial buildings or schools.  Most important, it will work with a wide range of feedstocks. Most biomass units can only use one feed stock such as rice husks or nut shells.  The Farm to Flame technology can use anything that is grown locally, including the agricultural was from feed stocks.  As long as it can be ground up to a fine powder, it can burn in a Farm to Flame generator.  A franchise model will enable Farm to Flame to engage and train local entrepreneurs on how to manage and maintain the system, as well as create community microgrid infrastructure to support it.

Will is already developing a network to bring his concept to market.  His venture is in discussion with the recently inaugurated President of Liberia George Weah, and he has developed an important partnership with Kivu Green Energy, a utilities company based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Kivu will be Farm to Flame’s first master franchisee and work with Will and his team to implement and manage solutions in other African nations. He is looking to develop more master franchise agreements like this, in other parts of Africa, and scaling to Asia and South America.

Will explained how focus and dedication helped develop his venture developed, and this approach transformed his entire work ethic and plans for the future.

He sees a future in which he is his own boss and brings change and empowerment to those that need it the most. Looking to build his own path while using technology to better the lives of those in this world that need it most, it is no surprise that a large component of the model is a strong agricultural education component.  His entrepreneurial drive grew as he became more and more involved in the research and outreach components of the venture.  As he realized the potential and true impact of commercializing his idea, Will took the original patented technology and has pursued a path to commercialization over the past four years of working on this project.

As part of his original customer discovery, speaking with people in the energy business, he saw a lack interest in generators as heat sources, and this important research helped changed the trajectory of the venture. He shifted towards the idea of a biomass generation system connected to a microgrid that could provide electricity rather than heat.  Those conversations, particularly with propane companies, showed his entrepreneurial capabilities to assess problems and pivot and iterate to build solutions that best matched needs and market opportunities.

By listening to the energy companies he met, and building relationships with them, he was able to build connections with others in countries in Africa, as well as the Liberian government, who are interested in working with him to introduce forms of renewable energy to rural farming communities in developing nations.

Always passionate about engineering and invention, Will has found a way to combine everything he loves to work towards something he believes in. True to his entrepreneurial nature, Will used his passion and dedication to ideate, do customer discovery, iterate, and develop a compelling business model and parth to market as he transformed the venture itself.

Along with his team members Kwaku Jyamif, an engineering student, and Sage Lasenberry, ESF student specializing on energy crops and agriculture, they will are competing in multiple business plan competitions this spring on the Syracuse University campus.  Beyond these competitions, Will will continue to pursue this venture after graduation and embrace all the transformations that it brings within and in the world around him.

Catch him at the ACC InVenture Prize competition on February 16, and later this spring at both the Panasci and iPrize competitions.

Story by LaunchPad staff with Luz Perez, Blackstone Engagement Scholar

Photo by Amanda Chou, Blackstone LaunchPad Global Media Fellow

Saniya More ’19 believes in the beautiful and complicated intricacies of the human experience. She is also an entrepreneur who has created a unique way to capture and share those experiences.

With deep family roots in Thailand and India, and new student at SU, she looked for a way to make meaningful connections with her classmates. She quickly found friends in a tightknit circle of international freshmen, but found she was struggling to find a voice that resembled theirs, particularly in student media platforms. Saniya saw the need for an outlet that would allow students like her, from the 50 countries that comprise Syracuse University, to express their diverse cultural identity and perspectives. From that, grew the seed of an idea for an entrepreneurial venture to bring together other students like her, from across campus and around the globe, in a collective digital media platform with inspiring and thought-provoking original content.

In the fall of 2017, Saniya teamed up with Hanna Benavides ‘19, a native of Mexico, to launch their venture called Globalists. They assembled a team comprised of students who are talented writers, photographers and filmmakers interested in telling student stories that celebrate diversity. “Many of these interesting cultural identities just can’t be summed up in one sentence,” Saniya says. “We have layers to us. Globalists encourages people to peel back the layers, even if it is uncomfortable or hard to share. We really need to give voice to these stories, especially those that are not always talked about on this campus.”

“A Globalist is any individual with a cultural identity, who likes starting conversations on global issues,” reads the team’s mission statement. “Globalists value diversity and makes it their mission to share underrepresented perspectives with the people around them. Globalists gives great importance to freedom of expression, and makes it their mission to be a voice for those who are too quiet or too loud. Above all, a Globalist is a citizen of the world.”

Saniya sees the venture as a way to break past so many Americentric discussions she notices within and outside of the classroom. It is a way to give voice to a breadth of opinions – especially important since 25 percent of the Syracuse University campus population belongs to minority groups and 20 percent of the population is international. Beyond sharing narratives by international students, Globalists now also focuses on events that celebrate diversity, such as the recent Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner at the Dome.

It is not surprising that Globalists are entrepreneurial creatives.  Saniya herself is an entrepreneur. She created the Aboli Foundation in India with her sister in 2016. It is a nonprofit that works with children of the Adivasi community of indigenous peoples that can be found across South Asia. According to Minority Rights Group International, the Adivasis comprise more than 200 distinct peoples speaking more than 100 languages, and vary greatly in ethnicity and culture. What is common, however, is similarities in their way of life and oppressed position within Indian society. As marginalized populations, their isolation can be detrimental for the full, healthy development of children.

Aboli Foundation works with primary school children, teaching them English and basic social skills, while preserving their unique indigenous cultural identity, values and traditions. With a group of volunteers, Aboli Foundation is working towards removing the societal stigma that has been historically associated with the Adivasi community. Saniya has seen first-hand that connecting with these children – as a teacher and filmmaker — is a beautiful and powerful experience.  She sees shared human experiences as the most meaningful way to close separations between societies and cultures. As her honors capstone project, she is creating a documentary on the Adivasi community and how it has changed over time, with a particular focus on how each generational evolution has resulted in cultural loss.

As a junior studying broadcast and digital journalism, as well as minoring in Spanish and South Asian studies, she hopes to work as a foreign correspondent, and become involved with the documentary film production industry.  Both will demand her entrepreneurial skills and mindset.  She hopes to eventually return to India to gain a deeper appreciation of her heritage.  And to continue telling stories from her unique perspective as a true Globalist.

Visit suglobalists.com and follow them on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/suglobalists/) for more stories.

Photo and story by Amanda Chou ‘18, Blackstone LaunchPad Global Media Fellow.

Quentin Rosso is an entrepreneur, true to every aspect of the word. He is a third year senior studying finance and political philosophy. He is a Frenchman. He is a savant who understands the intricacies of blockchain and crytocurrency.  He is an accomplished growth hacker, a self-taught coder and web design genius, a music composer and producer, an origami artist and … a knitter. In other words, he’s something of a modern day DaVinci.  No stranger to the Blackstone LaunchPad at SU, Quentin brings life to the meaning of entrepreneurship each and every single day.

He started his entrepreneurial journey as a teenager in Paris, and was a speaker on the TedX stage when still in high school.  When asked about his past seven years as an entrepreneur, Quentin simply smiles and answers: “I like to think of this journey as learning how to connect the dots.”  And he has become a very skilled connector. By constantly breaking down barriers between certain industries, and finding creative ways to combine his many passions, Quentin embodies what it means to be an avid learner. And isn’t that what entrepreneurship really is?

Aside from his eclectic hobbies, his professional focus is on web design and marketing strategy. Quentin is working on a cross cultural web design project with an Israeli friend, Amos Cohen.  Together, they are designing beautiful websites for startups that are based in their home countries of France and Israel.

When he’s not on Skype communicating with his clients, he is actively tracking the marketing activity of startups through Radarset, a market intelligence firm that he founded.  One day, Quentin also hopes to open a restaurant, as a family project, in Canada or in France, where his roots lay. Quentin keeps his projects close to his heart, because he is so passionate he is about them.

Returning as a Blackstone LaunchPad Global Fellow for the third year, Quentin is working hard to leverage his Syracuse University network before he graduates this May. He wants to leave his mark on the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially at the LaunchPad. He is creating the Founder’s Circle, a tight knit network of LaunchPad alumni who have recently graduated or are graduating this year. He is actively making meaningful connections with Syracuse alumni who are now successful entrepreneurs themselves or VCs. Everything he does now is to refine his incredibly wide range of skills and to apply them as effectively as he can.

Stop by the LaunchPad to meet Quentin and get to know his latest projects, or email him: qrosso@syr.edu.

Story by Amanda Chou ‘18, Blackstone LaunchPad Global Media Fellow
Photo by Hannah Benavides

If you were to search the term “entrepreneurship club” on Google right now, chances are the result “Entrepreneurship Club at Syracuse University” will show up near the top. If you are an entrepreneur, or anyone who knows and cares about search engine optimization, you know this is no small feat.

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of animals.  They often work alone and have extreme passion. Also, the process of building a company easily becomes romanticized. So, what if there was a group of entrepreneurs who met regularly, who understood what it really takes to build something and who can, together, generate opportunities for one another?

This is the story of how current president Sarah Grosz Entrepreneurs Club at Syracuse University, or the eClub, was able to grow a small 20 person weekly meeting to a group of 200 aspiring entrepreneurs in just two years.

As I walked into Room 101 in the Whitman School of Management one Monday night last fall, I was immediately taken back by the sight of the packed auditorium that seats 200 students. Just a semester ago, the meeting was held in a regular classroom with only a hand-full of students. How did Sarah manage to grow something so fast? I decided to sit down with Sarah, who has become one of the most recognizable student faces of entrepreneurship on campus, to unpack the hidden DNA of the club’s success.

As a freshman, Sarah joined the eClub and quickly became the Director of Programming. For her, group engagement and consistent activities is key to a successful club. The first problem she had to tackle was to make a club a more social place that is welcoming and above all else, fun to be part of. Over the past two years, Sarah has brought in speakers with diverse backgrounds, launched campus wide campaigns, and after-hour networking events. The list goes on. Her focus on the social aspect of this club has definitely paid off.

With such a rapid growth rate in membership, the demographics of the eClub have also shifted from being made up of almost 100% Whitman students to over 50% student participation from other colleges. Diversity was the next problem Sarah tackled. The eClub has successfully changed the stereotype that entrepreneurs are only business students. The truth is, entrepreneurs come from any and all disciplinary backgrounds.

Sarah also built out the leadership structure to the eClub. She has added executive positions like a C-Suite to run a club business and a strategy team to better understand the dynamics of our members. Together, these three key improvements have led to companies from across the country to sponsor and partner with SU’s eClub. Sarah’s vision for the eClub led her to be recently awarded first place for her outstanding leadership in a network of 250 entrepreneurial clubs nationally.

Outside the eClub, Sarah is an IT major in the School of Information Studies (iSchool). She also continues to pursue her entrepreneurial journey with HomeSlice, a startup app designed to revolutionize the way we order pizza. She is also actively engaged with the School of Information Studies in promotion of the IDS program.

As I closed our interview, I asked Sarah if there were anything else she would like me to include. She said, like she always does, “Monday evenings, 8 p.m., Whitman Room 101.:

Article by Lawrence (YongZhang) Lin and edited by Amanda Chou, Blackstone LaunchPad Global Media Fellows.

Photo provided by Sarah Grosz.

As a junior majoring in EEE in the Whitman School of Management, Amanda balances a demanding schedule as an officer with the 108^th Infantry Army National Guard in Utica and full-time Syracuse University student.

She is also an entrepreneur who appreciates the art of craft beer. Her interests are coming together in a venture she is launching, Blood, Sweat and Beers, with a goal is to create a “kickass craft brew” specifically for a niche military audience. Her business model has a double bottom line, promoting safe drinking, with a portion of the profits going to support military organizations such as the Wounded Warriors Project, Disabled American Veterans and the USO.

Having grown up in Fairhope, Alabama in a family that works in the craft beer and distillery industry, Amanda remembers going on long road trips with her mother visiting customers and local breweries. Her love for well-made craft beer helped her notice a market trend.  Craft beer production has increased by 16% since 2015, but there is no brand specifically brewed for the military.  She did her research and realized there is also a ready-made distribution network through more than 2,700 military exchanges.

Since enlisting in the military five years ago, she saw that military personnel often grab a beer after work to relax and socialize.  She also realized that there are no niche craft beer options for sale at military exchanges – only large commercial brands.  She did customer discovery interviews with active members of the military and veterans, and discovered they were interested in craft beers. She spoke with military exchanges who indicated interest in her concept.  With that validation, she got to work refining her concept for a EEE class during the fall semester of 2017.  She reached out to advisors who have backgrounds in the beer and distillery business, found a master brewer, and identified the perfect spot for her brewery in a historic building in a Main Street revitalization district in Marion, Alabama.  And then she connected with the Blackstone LaunchPad to refine her business model in anticipation of competing in competitions to raise seed funds to help kickstart her goal of creating a craft beer company that gives back to the military and their service.

Blood, Sweat and Beers envisions a product line that represents the five military branches and civilian contractors. She is working on concepts with fun names like Blue Falcon Lager, Puddle Pirate Pale Ale, and Zero Dark Thirty Double IPA. Six packs will come with a wristband to promote responsible drinking, and packaging will reinforce that messaging.

Amanda will be competing in several campus business plan competitions this spring, so come out and support her mission. If you’re interested in being part of that mission, you can find her at the Blackstone LaunchPad in Bird Library:  LaunchPad@syr.edu

Photo and story by Amanda Chou ‘18, Blackstone LaunchPad Global Media Fellow