Claire Howard

Andrew Kim ’24 on the power of marketing

In an unassuming hallway of a simple, neutral-toned Syracuse dorm, a RA encourages students to dream big. Andrew Kim ‘24, studying marketing and finance in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and one of this year’s new Launchstar, is committed to helping others develop professionally and personally.

Kim, originally from the Los Angeles area, came to Syracuse with a desire to create in the realm of business. For him, creating is the expansion beyond the status quo.  It’s the act of thinking outside the box.  “I want to be the person who creates a trend, not who partakes in it,” Kim said.  It’s the reason he’s studying marketing to developing his thinking in innovative, creative ways to advertise a product so consumers want it. 

During his time at Syracuse, Kim directed his creative marketing skills towards helping businesses flourish and individuals grow. In his freshman year he joined the student organization Enactus, which leads a variety of business-driven projects, all designed to create social impact and give back to the community, from veterans seeking to build a career to women making jewelry in Guatemala.

Kim, who now sits on the executive board of Enactus in the communications team, used his creative marketing skills to showcase the impact of the organization, advertise their products, and celebrate the hardworking individuals dedicated to creating change.  The marketing strategies Kim learned and implemented through his work with Enactus sparked an interest towards marketing that can be used to help starting and growing businesses thrive.

The idea that a startup with savvy strategic marketing and a correctly identified consumer space can rapidly turn into a successful business is exactly the philosophy Kim is implementing in his new role at the Blackstone LaunchPad as a Launchstar specializing in marketing and product development. 

“The power of marketing allows one person to share their passion and allows consumers to realize it could be their passion as well,” said Kim.

At the LaunchPad, he hopes to work with entrepreneurs and startups to turn their product into the one that consumers realize they can’t live without. He also hopes to assist business in clearly defining their purpose and identity, which he believes is at the heart of marketing. 

“What do you want to be known as? And who do you want to support? Marketing can get really messy,” spoke Kim on the importance of clearly branding yourself when attempting to gain more customers. 

With the correct marketing, Kim is working to create identity and consumer need for businesses in the LaunchPad community.

Kim’s desire to help others grow and flourish doesn’t lie merely within his marketing skills. Currently, Kim is a Resident Assistant in the Whitman Leadership Scholar Learning Community, where he mentors Whitman freshman towards professional excellence and personal confidence. A simple chat with Kim will quickly reveal how much he cares about the students on his floor.

For him it’s also a delicate balance between encouraging growth and creating safety for those in what is often an uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing freshman year.  “Mental health is such a big thing, and I have to take care of these students and don’t want to worry them about professional development,” said Kim about his wish to both motivate and uplift. 

Kim finds this balance through the constant grounding and kind presence he offers to his students combined with professional and team-bonding events for students to explore their career possibilities and grow their professional skills.

The LaunchPad couldn’t be happier to welcome Kim as one of the newest additions to their team. With his commitment to intentionally connecting to those around him, dedication for helping those around him develop professionally and personally, and expertise in guiding businesses to growth with strategic marketing, Kim’s presence fuels a warm, uplifting, and supportive LaunchPad community.

Story by Blackstone Global Fellow Claire Howard ’23; photo supplied

Sam Sanders launches some big ideas

man talking to students in a workshop setting

The most powerful tool for success lies in the idea machine that is our minds. Unfortunately, our minds can also be our greatest obstacle to success. To unlock that potential, Sam Sanders, author of Your Next Big Idea, joined the Blackstone LaunchPad on September 17 for an Idea Jam to kick off a series of weekly Startup Socials. Behind the glass doors of the LaunchPad, the event featured mingling over slices of afternoon pizza with old friends, long-time LaunchPad members, and new faces as they shared excitement and connected over ideas.

Sanders, Syracuse alum and successful entrepreneur many times over, spoke on his specialty: crafting ingenious ideas to solve problems, societal or every day, large or small. Sanders, whose recently published book guides readers through exercises on how to overcome barriers in thinking and dream up ideas to do anything from start your own business to make your every-day workflow more efficient, hoped to give back to the LaunchPad entrepreneurship community in helping our own entrepreneurs and problem solvers ideate effectively.

Sanders opened the event with a hands-on mind game. As he passed around pieces of paper and pencils, the room was filled with brainstorming and scheming chatter. The two mind games, simple math exercises, proved to be nearly impossible to solve. The problem? One of the largest barriers in our thought processes: stigmas. These can vary from social stigmas, where certain actions are deemed conventionally appropriate, to habitual stigmas, where we might unconsciously perform behaviors though they are irrational, simply because they’re habits.

Sanders then offered three key strategies to overcome the challenge of stigmas in mental patterns. The first, Blank Paper, involves starting from ground zero and challenging all assumptions surrounding the problem. In the second, Wild Imagination, one thinks of the absolute craziest solution to a problem, and then works their way backwards to a feasible answer. The last that Sanders offered is called the Alien Invasion Strategy, where one assumes they have no knowledge of human conventions or common behaviors, in the hopes to find a solution outside the box of traditional answers.

To test these stigmas and theories, Sanders encouraged the crowd of students gathered to apply these to their own ideas. Those in the room actively working on a business he asked to focus on a particular problem in their current business and use one of the problem-solving tactics to brainstorm solutions. The others in the room he grouped and asked to identify life passions and potential barriers and solutions surrounding pursuing those passions.  Participants began overflowing with ideas on topics from how to erase barriers to travel to how to publish the works of disabled authors.

After the Startup Social hour drew its close, participants left with sharpened senses of their own mind’s blind spots and energized by tactics to solve challenging problems. 

The LaunchPad’s Startup Socials are hosted to create a weekly space for our community to actively share ideas and grow from the advice of seasoned entrepreneurs, and we are so thankful to Sam Sanders for leaving the LaunchPad community smarter and invigorated to solve their problems. The LaunchPad is excited to welcome all in the Syracuse community to join us Fridays at 3pm to share in upcoming spaces of creativity and innovation.

Story by Claire Howard ’23, LaunchPad Global Fellow; photos by LaunchPad Rubin Family Innovation Mentor Kelly Davis ‘23

Fabio Xie ’23 launches C!ub App

student sitting on grass

For those who chase innovation, many long to be world changers, earth shakers – those who solve insurmountable global issues.  While this is admirable, the reality is that sometimes the most meaningful change can begin by solving challenges at a community level.  Fabio Xie ’23 exemplifies this.

Fabio Xie ’23, studying Environment, Sustainability, and Policy and Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, began his entrepreneurial journey by engineering a practical solution to a problem that he and friends faced on a daily basis.  

A high-achieving student, Xie joined many clubs his freshman year to meet new people across campus and open himself intellectually. What he found though, was that the clubs were often disorganized, using many different apps and systems for communications and often losing attendees through ineffective structure.  He discovered the same challenge when he entered college.  Anyone who has ever had GroupMe, Slack, WhatsApp, and dozens of other messaging apps knows this frustration.

Xie’s answer was to create a universal app for college clubs to use for announcements, chatting, and creating a shared community space.

The app, C!ub, contains four main functions to help clubs run smoothly: chat, announcements, moments shared between members such as photographs, and a search ability or various clubs and groups across a campus.  The app is designed to help students easily connect with campus groups and to help clubs communicate with and recruit new members.

The C!ub app is taking off rapidly.  Just this past semester C!ub gained its first two groups at Syracuse University – the Entrepreneurship Club, a Whitman student organization that the Blackstone LaunchPad and Techstars collaborates with, and the newly formed CryptoCuse cryptocurrency and blockchain club which operates out of the LaunchPad.

C!ub’s impact is not confined to Syracuse.  It has a team attending several different universities across the country and is currently in communication with numerous clubs across various campuses to get them on board.  

The vision to transform college clubs for the better started locally in the Syracuse community, but is quickly growing to campuses across America.

Xie’s commitment to forming strong communities and designing systems to facilitate those communities stems from his diverse childhood experiences. 

Xie grew up in Portugal, forming his first friendships in Portuguese, then moved to Shanghai in his primary school years. There he attended multiple international schools and moved around several different districts within the gigantic city where a move across town is synonymous with a move to an entirely different city.

“The experience that I got from Portugal to China and then moving around within Shanghai, made me more open to making friends who are different from me. The environment that forced me to adapt to new language systems also helped me form new friends.” 

Xie referenced his background in his commitment to forming strong connections during college.

He met his C!ub teammates at his Shanghai high school. While they all attended multiple colleges across North America, COVID-19 sent them back home to Shanghai. Xie took this an opportunity to introduce his idea to those close childhood friends.  Together, they formed a team with widespread geographic impact. 

They hope to create a system that allows college students to continuously meet new people and form close relationships and communities.

His vision is to grow C!ub from a few campuses to a venture that can scale and create a transformation of the college experience.  As envisions its eventual path, he says, “If I’m able to make this happen it could be a huge hit.”

By LaunchPad Global Fellow Claire Howard ’23;  photo supplied  

Ben Ford ’23 is changing philanthropy for good

young man looking into the camera

Many first forays into the frustrating ordeal of fundraising, perhaps for some school project or trip, involve asking scores of people with little success, only to fall back on the donations of kind family members. Anyone whose raised funds for a social campaign, college club, or charitable organization knows how time consuming and frustrating it can be to pour energy into advertising with resulting minimum contributions. What if there were a more effective form of fundraising, a way to spread the word not just across your immediate social network but to those around the world who cared about your work?

Ben Ford ’23, studying marketing in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management and data analytics in the School of Information Studies, hopes to create a system of fundraising that maximizes both financial and social impact. Ford’s company, Fundwurx, is a multi-service platform that works to accelerate impact driven projects by using data, algorithms, and AI

to pair donors with funding needs according to one’s social passions, skills, and interests.

Built on the knowledge that 80% of crowdfunding campaigns fail, Ford is committed to creating a new platform in the fundraising space, by adhering to this underserved market in order to better connect people and projects.

Ford’s inspiration comes from his own disheartening experiences raising funds for meaningful social projects. Committed to philanthropy and doing good wherever he is, Ford in high school had a legacy for the number of social projects he was involved with. From raising money for pediatric cancer research, to selling reusable bags in his community to reduce single-use plastic bags, Ford cared about bettering the world around him and valued making a difference in his community. 

When he was asked to lead a project designing a sustainable study space for his school filled with upcycled furniture and live moss walls, Ford immediately took on the challenge. There was just one problem — the school didn’t have funding for the project. Challenged to raise funding  on his own, Ford endeavored to find the means for a $15,000 dollar project through community funding. “We expected this thing to blow up in no time,” Ford recalled their fundraising efforts. Yet they were not as successful as hoped. “There are so many people who care about the environment and a project like this would be so attractive to people all over the world- but they had no idea of knowing who we are.”

Hoping to forge a way for impact projects to connect with passionate donors all around the world, Ford stuck the idea of an online algorithm-driven fundraising platform in his back pocket. This past year at Syracuse, Ford’s idea surfaced through competition in a business competition at the Blackstone LaunchPad & Techstars at Syracuse University.

Ford had always been an entrepreneur. In addition to the multitude of social projects he worked tirelessly on, he started his own company in high school for tailgate apparel: Jersey Boy Apparel. After successfully growing and running Jersey Boy Apparel from high school into college, the LaunchPad competition CuseTank caught his eye in fall 2020 to generate funding for scaling his company. Ford had never competed in a business competition before but brought his pitch and vision, and won. Impressed by his talent, others urged him to compete in the next LaunchPad competition: The Impact Prize. Yet Jersey Boy Apparel was not an impact-driven business and could not qualify to compete in the competition. So, Ford, intrigued and excited by the possible prospects of business competitions, decided to enter the competition on a whim with his idea for impact fundraising, and in short notice threw together a full pitch deck and presented in merely a week, and won. Again.

After this, Ford knew he wanted to pursue his fundraising idea. Starting in January, in the past few months he has defined his company vision and model, placed in several other business pitch competitions, incorporated as an LLC, created a clickable prototype, built a board of advisors, and is now working with software developers to create the MVP for his company. By summer he hopes to have secured angel investors to fund further development for launching Fundwurx.

Ford is being mentored by many, including LaunchPad alumni Matt Shumer who is his AI expert and is providing strategic insight into building a scalable company.

Ford’s vision to transform the landscape of giving for good is on a swift trajectory towards success. Philanthropy is evolving and as Ford has mentioned, there is a need for a service like this to reshape fundraising and create the new era of giving. Fundwurx strive to build an environment where donors can become mentors and provide the help and support projects need to succeed. Ford cares about fostering strong relationships and constructing greatness through the help of others.

Ford’s story of an idea carried around for years in the hope to impact society for better inspires action for individual ideas of helping make the world a better, more generous place.

In Ford’s own words, “We are at the forefront of the rise in social impact, which is led by a generation of do-ers, with a care to do good that will last forever in the world and help lay the groundwork for a better future.”

Story by LaunchPad Global Fellow Claire Howard ’23; photo supplied

Insights: Automating Business Operations

decorative graphic

Gone are the days of a business ledger. Gone are the days of solely managing a business with a series of notebooks, receipts, accounts, and files.

In today’s digital world, where every task is accomplished by a software, gone are the days where business owners are in charge of managing operations.

Businesses today rely on software to streamline business procedure, analyze data, and market their product.

As entrepreneurs, learning these software can be crucial to creating well-oiled company operations.  Here are some software tools to help build and run a startup.

Salesforce

A cloud-computing software, Salesforce is designed to provide customer relationship management, marketing automation, data analytics, and application development.

In recent years the company has become #1 for customer success and is designed to help meet customer needs and improve the relationship between customer and company  and is currently used by billion-dollar corporations such as Amazon and Adidas.

Companies that use the software can expect to see an average increase of 27% increase in sales revenues and 34% in customer satisfaction.

How does the software actually work? As a cloud-computing software, Salesforce has multiple ‘clouds’ to provide your company with various services. These cloud platforms include a marketing cloud, app cloud, service cloud, analytics cloud, sales cloud and IoT cloud among many more.

Its usage doesn’t simply stop at Salesforce platforms, as the software can be integrated into third-party applications and has thousands of apps available for every business need you could think of on their AppExchange marketplace.

As an entirely unique software, Salesforce does require basic education  for utilization and offers tutorials online, but learning Salesforce allows you to build your own applications on top of their software.

Tableau

We live in an information age. Knowing how to effectively analyze and interpret data is key to any job, but particularly important for successfully running a business.

Tableau is a data analytics platform that creates appealing and easy to read visuals of complex data.  Their graphics are no Excel bar graphs or pie charts, either. Creating stunning visualizations of data with multiple different variables and analysis, with Tableau you can create interactive data that even uses artificial intelligence for natural language processing of questions.

Tableau is an essential software for entrepreneurs to summarize their data in presentations for investors, and create models for themselves to improve sales, marketing, and strategy.

Alteryx

While every business professional may know how to create a simple bar chart or cross-analysis through spreadsheet software such as Excel, complex data analytics is generally reserved for information technology or analytics professionals.

With Alteryx, no more. Their system of platforms and apps makes advanced data analytics possible for any individual.

Just a few of the many data analytics features include geospatial analytics, for tasks such as routing and logistical efficiency, prescriptive analytics, to evaluate the most optimal outcomes; and data blending, to blend together data gathered from different resources for analytics or app creation.

Alteryx also uses artificial intelligence machine learning to validate business models and predict outcomes.

With Alteryx at your fingers, evaluate every business decision and predict every market outcome.

Application Programming Interface (API)

An Application Programming Interface, commonly known as an API, is an interface that allows interactions between different software. For innovators creating their own application or software, APIs eliminate coding from scratch and can allow you to pull any feature you need from an API found on any quick Internet search.

Google APIs, available for public use, contain APIs for building features from chatbots to machine learning implementations.

But Google APIs are only the beginning- a simple search for an API online will return a plethora of results, from APIs for recipe gathering to finding key images in videos. Any feature or software to task you want- search for an API.

The software shared here only touches the surface of the various applications available to automate business creating and operating. Entrepreneurship may start with the idea of a single person or small team, but successful entrepreneurship is built upon the use of developments from thousands of other innovators.

Your business growth and management does not have to be self-run but perfected by developed applications.

By LaunchPad Global Fellow Claire Howard ’23; graphic by Sasha Termerte

Insights: Building social media presence

Building social media presence

Ideal or not, we live in a digital world. If it wasn’t true before with the rise of smartphones and social media, our virtual lives in the time of Work from Home, Zoom calls, online shopping, and streaming all forms of entertainment are undeniable.

In this virtual world, presence on social media is crucial to building your company and increasing user interest. Social media is in essence your business’s chief marketing strategy.  It’s how users will become aware of your company and incentivize them to use or buy your product. Building social media, however, can seem like a daunting task. Creating an account for your company that has just one follower (yourself) and desperately hoping you’ll magically rise to viral fame and garner millions of followers simply will not grant you the brand success you’re dreaming of.

Social media success necessitates a carefully planned content strategy and active follower engagement. In order to help your brilliant ideas, become known and celebrated by your users, we’ve compiled a list of key strategies to implement when building your business’ presence on social media.

  • Establish a Brand Identity

In a world where business is conducted almost 100% online, first impressions from design can make or break your company. Before you launch a social media campaign to line up customers begging for your product, create a logo and design theme consistent with your product’s field and target audience. Create a clean, aesthetically pleasing website that effectively tells your message and entices readers to buy your product. Still not sure of the importance of branding? It takes .05 seconds for individuals to gather a first impression and online – 94% of first impressions are formed from web design and 75% of consumers decide a company’s credibility based on their design.

  • Know Your Audience

Garnering likes, views, comments, and followers interested in your product is the reason to even use social media; but knowing how to do this without begging your friends and family to follow you can be harder. The first step is to know your audience and who you’re appealing to. This can help with choosing which social media platforms to be on and what kind of content to curate. Facebook interest groups can be helpful for advertising your product and page, and one of the first steps to getting more followers is to follow other pages within your vertical, your product’s field, to get other profiles to follow you back and stay updated on trends.

  • Use Algorithms

This step involves a bit of personal research, as social media algorithms for what posts garner popularity vary from platform to platform. However, a simple Google search should help you determine things like what kind of hashtags to use, and what times of day you’ll get the greatest number of views. Tracking which of your posts are most successful and what your views are is also imperative to generating content that appeals to your audience.

  • Create a Content Strategy

Effective social media use is built upon consistent posting and careful schedule of releases, not casually posting whenever you have news to share with your users. When it comes to creating a plan for your content, consistency is key. Having stressed the importance of design, creating a consistent theme and voice for your posts solidifies your brand identity. Posting frequently and habitually (ex. every three days) keeps users interested and engaged. The best way to create this consistency in your social media use is to carefully plan a social media content posting. Softwares like Hootsuite can help you plan out all your posts in advance and automate their publication.

  • Advertise your Product

While one of the golden attributes of social media use is the cheap marketing cost (utterly free), paying for advertisements or sponsored posts on platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn can do wonders for increasing your presence. On Facebook, paid advertisements can start as low as $5 per advertisement and ensure that your content will be seen.

  • Encourage Engagement

While it might be easiest to implement a strategy of “post your pics and go,” social media use that encourages your followers to feel connected with your brand and compelled to buy your product creates engagement between your account and followers. This can take many different forms – perhaps someone on your team takes over your Instagram story for a day, showcasing their day-to-day work and answering questions, or perhaps you create fun polls on people’s preferences. Whatever route you choose to take, any use that makes your users feel like they’re personally engaging with your company and having their needs listened to creates brand favorability.

The average user opens social media applications 17 times a day. Capitalizing on society’s current favorite pastime can propel your budding startup towards thousands of users and help scale into a large company. While the algorithms and sudden virality of social media can appear a mystery, these key strategies can help you build your brand.

Our recommended first step? Follow @launchpadsyr and we’ll be your company’s devoted follower.

Column by Blackstone LaunchPad Global Fellow Claire Howard ‘23

Insights: The Science of Ideating

The science of ideating

We’re all struck at some point or another with ideas that sound like business gold. Around a dinner table with our friends, we argue the advantages of our latest dream innovation, and as we’re taking showers, we imagine products that could be perfect to solve society’s most frustrating problems.

Yet most of these ideas become nothing more than a conversation topic or a pipe dream we keep in our back pocket for our genius future selves.

How does anyone turn ideas into an actual business? The path to entrepreneurship can seem impossible.  How does one shape an idea into a path to market?

The first steps of entrepreneurship are not as daunting as securing millions of dollars in investment nor as easy as creating a dream product and seeing consumers to line up to buy it.

It may be helpful to think of early-stage entrepreneurship as similar to the scientific process. First you create a hypothesis about how the world works, then carefully test that hypothesis, then adjust, and test again in a repeated cycle until you’ve found one that sticks.

The key is careful reiteration and constant adjustment. How does this relate to entrepreneurship? Let’s break it down into a few steps.

Identify Your Problem

The problem is the first hypothesis. This step is identifying some sort of societal problem and proving the existence, importance, and negative effects of that problem that your idea hopes to fix. This is especially important, because without a problem that your product is fixing or a gap that your innovation is filling, your idea will simply never get off the ground. No matter how cool or ingenious your idea may be, consumers will not buy it unless they need or want the product because it is going to fix some issue or fill a space in their life. Still not sure of the importance of this? 42% of products that fail in the market fail because they do not meet a user need.

Market Research

How does one identify or validate the problem? Market research, one of the most critical steps for successful entrepreneurship, is the first ‘testing’ of your hypothesis that a problem exists and requires a solution. First, you’ll want to target the group of people that suffer from this problem and you hope would buy your product. You might find a group to contact via Facebook groups, online forums, or consumers of a product in a similar market. Surveying those people allows you to gather firsthand experiences of a problem and concrete evidence that a market need exists.

Proof of Concept

Another hypothesis that you’ll need to test, after you’ve confirmed that there is a problem and market need, is proof that your product will actually work. This is a simple technical creation of the essential elements of your product to verify that whatever you’re creating, from a technological innovation to a new mobile app, will actually work and effectively respond to your problem. A proof of concept is especially important once you begin pitching to potential investors to prove what you’re hoping to create is feasible.

Minimum Viable Product

The next hypothesis relies again on market research and validating your product with consumers. A Minimum Viable Product is the barebones model of your product to test that consumers can use your product and respond positively to it. One example of an MVP is that of the shoe retail company Zappos, where the founder took pictures of shoes in stores and posted them online. If someone bought the shoes, he personally went to the store, bought them, and shipped them to his buyer. MVPs are not elaborate but validate that the essential components of your proposed product will be wanted and utilized by the user.

Entrepreneurship is not simply the drive to flesh out a fantastic idea, but the careful commitment to testing a hypothesized product again and again. From problem identification to product validation, the work of entrepreneurs is similar to the work of scientist in its thorough analysis of assumptions about how the world works and what society needs.

By Claire Howard ’23, LaunchPad Global Media Fellow

Cullen Kavanaugh ’22 is placing his bet on Spread

Person in front of a computer screen

It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention. Progress is shaped by identifying problems or responding to crises and developing new technology or systems to adequately address them. But while necessity may give birth to invention, what sustains it and breathes life into it is passion. No company would ever be founded, and no product patented without the long hours of work and sacrifice driven by love for what you’re creating.

Cullen Kavanaugh ’22, studying finance and real estate in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management is the perfect example of the businesses and ingenuity that can come from personal love for a topic and the process of creating a solution. To say that Kavanaugh is a sports fan is an understatement. It’s what he and his friends’ bond over and find thrill in the hours spent immersed watching a riveting game or betting each other on the success of teams and players.

When COVID-19 hit and college students found themselves at their homes all around the country, separated from the academic community and friendships, Kavanaugh and his friends lost their shared time and excitement over one of their favorite activities: betting each other over the games. Separated by distance, their only alternative was to bet on online platforms similar to casinos, losing the socialization and closeness the found in the activity.

Driven by finding an alternative to the current ineffective models of online sports wagering, Kavanaugh decided to found his own company for sports betting. Together with a few of his close friends who all met at the end of their freshman year in their fraternity he formed the company Spread: a peer-to-peer wagering platform.

“We found a problem over quarantine with the sports betting world and wanted to find a way to create something unique,” Kavanaugh said.

Spread aimed to solve three main problems within sports betting: lack of socialization, percentage cuts of winnings from online platforms, and lack of customization of bets. Their peer-to-peer wagering platform eliminates any fees and creates a social platform for people to bet with each other and customize as they wish.

Spread’s well-rounded team contributes largely to the growth and soon launch of their business. Daniel Slate, studying public policy in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, is the head of operations.  Daniel Stern, studying sports management in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics is the head of marketing. Quinn Francis, studying accounting in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management is the head of finance. 

Their current path to market is beginning to take shape as states are beginning to legalize on-line gambling.  Until now, the heavy regulations around sports betting have made it difficult for the team to build their business, but Spread is getting started by working to improve people’s perceptions on sports betting.

“We aim to change the taboo behind sports betting and make it more friendly and fun,” Kavanaugh said of the team’s hope for shifting sports betting culture.

What has sustained the team’s drive to launch Spread through hard work and navigating a heavily regulated field is their own love for sports and what they’re creating.

“We live and breathe sports. I love what I do.  I work 8 hours a day at this and never get bored or tired,“ Kavanaugh said of his passion for sports.

To pour your energy and time into creation of a business is nothing less than exhausting and demanding. Particularly in a field where current laws are not allowing a launch or success, the effort demanded is intense. Yet passion for what you do is a boundless energy that motivates individuals to throw their whole selves into creation of what they love. Kavanaugh and Spread is the perfect example of what we can create if we too focus our energies on what we love.

By Claire Howard ’23, LaunchPad Global Media Fellow

Max Freund ’21 sees a more sustainable world world through the lens of his camera

student looking at the camera

In the rugged marshes and sultry heat of the Florida Everglades, a young boy named Max Freund takes pictures of everything he sees. In love with the rich beauty of nature he grew up surrounded in, he finds joy and fulfillment in capturing that beauty in the perfect shot or mesmerizing film.

Today, Max Freund ’21 studying Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management and Photography in the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications, has not lost that love for capturing beauty.  He is pursuing it as a full time career through his photography and filmography business, M. Freund Photography Productions.

Freund fell in love with photography at age nine as a creative escape from a world he didn’t naturally succeed at: school. Throughout his early school years, Freund struggled to perform well academically and found joy for himself in the wonder and exploration of the outside world and capturing what he saw in a frame.

When he was diagnosed with dyslexia and an auditory processing disorder in the sixth grade, Freund resisted the idea of working with tutors and teachers to overcome his learning disabilities and continue to learn effectively in the classroom.

His father decided to strike a deal with him. His father told him that he would buy Freund any camera he wanted as long as Freund agreed to work with his tutors and try to perform better in school. Naturally, photography lover that he was, Freund agreed and soon found his father taking him to a camera store to buy any camera he picked out.

“Dad took me to the camera store and said ‘you can pick any camera you want‘ and that was the deal. That was what grew passion and love for photography and allowed me to thrive in school, despite having the learning disabilities,” Freund said.

From then on, Freund and his camera were inseparable. His weekends were filled with taking pictures in the national forests or beaches.  Photography allowed him to devote his passion to what he cared about and then his focus to school. As he grew older, Freund decided to make a photography business out of his hobby and creative pursuit.

In 2015 Freund incorporated his photography business and began selling his photography services for events. Though nature photography was always his passion and being a National Geographic photographer his dream profession, Freund knew that he had to start where the demand was largest and went into event and portrait photography.

“Starting out was a very much optimistic mindset.  It was bootstrapping in that I set out to grow and work with clients,” said Freund of his early photography work.

From there Freund pursued photography as his career passion and dove into other realms of photography, including taking sports photography for the Daily Orange st Syracuse University.

Yet he always knew he wanted to take pictures of one thing only: nature.

For his family’s nature conservation foundation, the fStop Foundation, Freund began taking photography to raise awareness of the dual beauty and fragility of nature. “ 900 -1000 people move to Florida a day. As each person moves to Florida, that displaces green infrastructure.  Natural habitats are being taking over by humans and the built environment.“

One of the films Freund produced for fStop is currently being featured in an international film festival, and his new work includes a partnership with the Florida Wildlife Federation. Through his tenacity in pursuing what he has always truly loved, Freund has come from a teenager taking photos to make a name for himself to a business owner photographing and filming his passion.

This past week Freund won top prize in the Education and Well-Being category of the iPrize and Compete CNY competitions coordinated by the LaunchPad at Syracuse University.  He worked with the LaunchPad on his business model and pitch, and will now be taking his story to the finals of the New York Business Plan Competition next month.

Freund’s story of photography is a lifelong love story of a boy finding his place in the world and having the perseverance to pursue what he loved. From when taking pictures of the beauty he grew up in encouraged him to persevere in school to now when taking pictures to preserve nature’s refuges landed him international recognition, Freund’s continued determination to work for what he loved is a reminder to not back down in pursuit of what we find refuge in. 

By Claire Howard ’23, LaunchPad Global Fellow; photo supplied

Insights: Entrepreneurship as universal creativity

entrepreneurship as universal creativity
Claire Howard

We can’t all be the CEO.  Not everyone wants to start a company or strive to become a household name.  But when we think of entrepreneurs, the names of tech startup giants typically come to mind.  While starting businesses and achieving notoriety can be incredible goals, that perception can sometimes have the surprising negative effect of discouraging talented creatives and innovators from thinking of themselves as entrepreneurs. For those who don’t aspire to bring technology to market, entrepreneurship may seem like an elite field reserved for the few that are tirelessly driven and incomparably brilliant.  Nothing could be farther from reality.  The heart of innovation lies in seeing possibilities for improvement and enrichment in all aspects of our lives and careers.

While traditionally defined as creating new products for the market and forming a company, innovation and entrepreneurship can be found in every pursuit and in every creative endeavor.  Whether it’s art, social change, or community growth, innovation is creation to enrich the world. It’s found in every individual bursting with ideas and dreams to improve something about the world around them.

Within the Blackstone LaunchPad & Techstars at Syracuse University, some of our favorite entrepreneurial stories come from those who are innovating and creating in a field outside of business. Erica Morrison ’21,  a member of the LaunchPad and winner of some business competitions, is currently creating a documentary on the life of her grandmother who grew up on a reservation, in hopes to showcase the disparities and struggles on reservations. Maggie Sardino ’23, a Syracuse native and talented writer, started a column uncovering the lives of Narratio fellows, refugees currently living in Syracuse and telling the stories of their experiences.

The realm of entrepreneurship is boundless and can include anything from designing a technological product to inspiring social change to creating meaningful impact within larger organizations.

It’s no surprise that humans tirelessly pursue their own vision through entrepreneurship. We as humans are driven to create, constantly imagining and reimaging ways to improve our own lives and the world around us. We dream of ways to make our own impact on the world and to leave it better than we found it. We’re problem solvers and dream chasers. Entrepreneurship is a way that dreams can take flight and turn visions into reality.  In whatever projects we start and ideas we wish to make tangible, we are leaning into our natural creativity to innovate for good.

At the LaunchPad at Bird Library, we welcome all to lean into their creativity and bring their ideas to a community continually imagining a better world.   Join our creative community.

By LaunchPad Global Fellow Claire Howard ‘23