UCSB Students Present Innovative Business Ideas

What if you never had to enter another password or unlock another door for the rest of your life? That’s the promise behind Allthenticate, one of six finalists in the annual UCSB New Venture Competition. The competition features teams of undergraduate and graduate students from UCSB’s Technology Management program. The teams spend eight months working on their projects before presenting them to a panel of entrepreneurs and successful business leaders.

This year’s finalists were: Allthenticate, a mobile-based security solution to keep companies and employees safe from both hackers and thieves; EnterVIEW, a software platform designed to make the job hunt easier for candidates and companies; Guniea Gig, an application aimed at creating a central database for university research studies; MicroPrint, a highly innovative printing process which will soon enable every device you own to be powered by Micro LEDs; Selva, an on-line marketplace that connects textile mills with apparel companies to facilitate the sale and usage of deadstock (excess) fabric; and The Hurd Co, a more sustainable pulp feedstock for textile production from cannabis waste.

Learn more about these upcoming companies and see who takes home the top prize.

Watch — 2019 New Venture Competition Finals

Investing for Good

What if you could align your values with your investment portfolio?

Leaders from the world of impact investing discuss what it means to invest for good. Their stories are fascinating and you will understand the path of early stage ventures that create meaningful social and environmental value.

First up is a panel with Lewam Kefela, Investor at VilCap Investments; Noushin Ketabi, Founder of Vega Coffee; Nancy Swanson, Executive Director of Linked Foundation. The moderator is Julia Sze an impact Investment strategy advisor. They discuss their paths to investing for good.

Then, Kat Taylor, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Radicle Impact, talks about the problem with the banking system and how it can be fixed. She is the CEO of the Oakland-based Beneficial State Bank, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) whose mission is to bring beneficial banking to low-income communities in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner.

Watch — Investing for Good: Women in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Series

Seven Steps to Building a Best-Selling Brand

Building a brand is about more than spending money on marketing. It’s about how you think about your brand conceptually, and the strategies you employ at every level of your business. That was the message from brand architect and strategist Larry Gulko when he spoke at the Rady School of Business at UC San Diego recently.

Gulko laid out his recipe for success in seven simple steps. His first piece of advice: specialists win, generalist lose. He points to several examples of companies that lost sight of their core business and ended up failing. Gulko told the crowd, “be the Q-tip.” He says it’s a brand unmatched in specialization and name recognition. His next six steps touched on everything from connecting with your customer, to inspiring your employees to be brand ambassadors.

After his talk, Gulko sat down with two UC San Diego alumni-turned-entrepreneurs to learn their brand secrets. Pierre Sleiman is the CEO of Go Green Agriculture, and Suman Kanuganti co-founded Aira, a high-tech company improving the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. Gulko, Sleiman, and Kanuganti have a lot of expertise to share about branding, including why you don’t remember your second kiss, and what that has to do with being a best-selling brand.

Watch Building and Growing Brands with Larry Gulko: Global Business Leadership Forum

Want to Build a Start Up? Advice to Students from Jarrod Russell

I like to think about the path to building successful startups as a journey–it’s really the entrepreneur’s journey. Each journey will be different, especially when it comes to the early stages of what sparks the idea for the startup. I simplify this journey by thinking of the entrepreneur is one of three stages: curious, committed, and crushing it.

Most students will be in the curious stage, where they are looking for inspiration, ideation, rapid prototyping and thinking about diving into incubation.

That said, assuming most students are curious about how to launch a startup, I have three general recommendations that might be helpful, and they are in three different areas of their life.

  1. Explore campus to make connections with talented peers / professors and find the programs and initiatives that will inspire and focus your ideation process.
    a.   Ideation — Be curious. Find problems to solve or new solutions to scale while doing your classwork and projects.
    b.   Programs / Relationships — see if your campus has an incubator, entrepreneurship program or certification, a business school, design or engineering programs; this is where you can build relationships with talented folks that can help you make an idea real, either as collaborators or mentors. If your school doesn’t have these resources, tell the campus leadership you want it.
  2. Have an idea? Build something, test it. Or work in a similar industry and help them test it. Embrace lab-to-market opportunities.
    a.   Don’t stay in the classroom. Push your professors to give you real-world, real-time problems and projects you can work on now. Can you do work study? Are there any competitions that will focus your efforts?
    b.   MVP, rapid prototyping, lean startup approach→ getting market feedback and data if and when possible.
    c.   If you can’t build an idea yourself, identify your needs and get a team together. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you don’t have an idea yet and want to boost your IQ, work at a startup part time or as an intern.
  3. Nurture community off campus. San Diego has a lot going on beyond your campus. Make an effort to attend a meaningful event off campus once a week.
    a.   There are lots of organizations in San Diego that are working to support aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs. Learn who they are and check out their events. Subscribe to their newsletters to stay in the loop. Hop into meetups.
    b.   E.g. Startup San Diego has a lot of monthly and annual events coming up in 2019, including Convergence in late February, which is a must-attend event for college students. It’s essentially a Meetup for all Meetups crossed with an uncareer fair.

The last thing I would add is that the entrepreneurial journey can be a paradox. It requires both patience and impatience, a plan and the ability to pivot, investment to grow and fear of not having enough. However, three things that I have found hold constant are integrity, authenticity, and discipline. Basically, folks have to trust you, so be real with where you are at in your entrepreneurial journey and remember that you can’t build your idea alone, it requires collaboration.

On that note, something I heard from the Governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, comes to mind — it was his mantra when he was mayor of Denver.

Collaboration moves at the speed of trust.

Jarrod’s Bio
Jarrod is a local San Diegan, born and raised in Oceanside. He studied at Mira Costa Community College, then transferred to UCSD, where he was both an undergrad and grad student. For his undergraduate degree, Jarrod studied international political science and physics at Warren College. In graduate school, he went to the School of Global Policy and Strategy, where he focused on environmental policy and economic development. Jarrod has worked throughout Latin America, especially Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico. He speaks both Spanish and Portuguese. He is also on the board of the Museum of Man in Balboa Park. He’s also taught in the hospitality and tourism program at San Diego State University.

Jarrod currently lives in Ocean Beach, where you’ll occasionally find him working from coffee shops, surfing, playing volleyball, and doing acro yoga.

Jarrod started working in the local innovation economy in 2013 when he became the Director of Public Affairs of a fast-growing internet marketing company. He has been a strong advocate of the startup community ever since, including his past community service as co-chair of the tech-startup committee for the Downtown San Diego Partnership for 2 years.

Watch Starting Up in San Diego: The Entrepreneur’s Journey with Jarrod Russell – Job Won

Workforce Frontiers

We know that the future of work is upon us–AI, robotics, global markets and online innovations are driving massive changes. So, what about workforce development? This event explores the boundary-busting, outer reaches of workforce development where job quality, equity, outcomes and opportunity take center stage.

The program is presented by The San Diego Workforce Partnership which is committed to advancing new ideas and trailblazing daily to remain on the cutting edge of these critical shifts that shape how we work and thrive.

Watch Workforce Frontiers Symposium