By Shilpa Sadhasivam
For many graduating college students setting their sights on the job market, buying a home is a distant goal, not worthy of much worry. However, with the accelerating rise of home prices and mortgage rates that show no sign of stopping, millennials will soon have difficulty in affording their first homes.
This week’s feature interview is with Jenna Martinez ‘19, the creator of Açaísy, an açaí bowl delivery business that brought the first trendy smoothie bowls to Ithaca.
Co-founder of The Worldwide Travel Network
This week’s feature interview is with Colby Triolo (left), co-founder of The Worldwide Travel Network, a platform that connects solo-travelers with one another. We asked Colby a few questions to learn more about her experiences of creating a start-up, and where The Worldwide Travel Network is headed in the future.
By Ruth Park
Interview with Michael Eaton ‘18, Lisa Condoluci ‘18, and Sivan Sud ‘18
What is Iko Systems, and what sparked your desire to create the company?
Michael: That is something that has definitely been taking us awhile to align in all of the founders’ visions really because we all have big, long-term goals for it. We describe it as a functional, organic design for your home. We were all brought together because we wanted to solve food problems, and we all want to do that in very different ways, but we all think that food is a really big problem whether it be in Manhattan or Texas or Botswana or Southern Africa. This is the first way we are going to be solving this problem, by allowing it to grow efficiently at home. Oh and how it started! Want to hear a little bit more about that?
Yeah, sure.
Michael: I come from Botswana, which is in Southern Africa, and you can’t believe how different it is from Ithaca, you know? I grew up on a farm; it’s pretty lush, and we have a lot of space and a lot of sun. Coming to Ithaca, it’s cold and dark a lot, as you might know. I just tried to grow plants one day in my home because I am used to eating food I grew myself, and the seeds I tried to germinate didn’t even grow much. The ones that did didn’t even grow much. So I said that I would build something for myself, and because I am an engineer like making things, I started talking to my friends. The next thing I knew, I had friends working with me and trying to market something. Pretty organic.
How did you come up with the name Iko Systems? I believe you were called Petal before?
Sivan: It’s a Japanese-inspired design. Michael has always been really into drawing and a Japanese vision, and we once found this handle for a website iko.systems. It fit perfectly with ours because we are all so focused on environment.
Michael: Yeah, initially Petal was something we first just latched onto, and it stuck. You know, we didn’t really think much. We thought, “That’s fine, it’s quick and easy… you can get it right.” And then quickly, Petal became the name of the company and also became the name of this initial product. It was almost like a revelation. We realized we’re become one-dimensional. And we’re not going to be able to grow our vision until we get a better name with a better structure and a broader potential. So we said that we should come up with something that’s not just linked to one product. We’re not a product; we want to be a brand-- a brand that produces products and produces something that is exciting for the user, not just one product. We thought about so many different options, and we threw mood boards around and naming ideas and graphics. Eventually, “ecosystem” is something that came about because we are producing systems, and it kept on cropping up-- the word “systems.” We’re making systems-- complex systems, feedback systems, etc. as engineers, and we thought “ikosystems.” It’s a play on words, it’s fun, “I-K-O” on your keyboard is next to each other, which is kinda cute. We found out that “iko.systems” was available as a domain and we were like, “this is so cool” and we had to go with it. It has definitely allowed us to broaden our scope for what we can do. IKOfriendly, IKOsystems, IKOnomical: you can play on words all day. People gravitate to it; it’s fun, but people mess it up too much, which is annoying.
Was this product originally some kind of ragtag piece of machinery that you put together? What was kind of the design for it? What was the design and business process you went through in order to actually come to the product come to life?
Michael: Yeah… it’s pretty funny. The funny thing is, being mechanical engineers and engineers in general, you want to make things; that’s what you want to do. The first instinct is that I can make this today. The first thing I did even before I asked my friend for help was put wood together build a frame. It was half my height and a bit wider than me, so it was big. So I said this is what I was going to do: I’m going to build this big product and it’s going to be controlled and there will be water flowing through it. It’s so jank. We hooked it up the first time to water, I even had a pump, and I was so confident. I had it in my living room at the time; water was everywhere. It looked terrible. So I told myself, “We have a long way to go.” Since then, we’ve built so many different types of prototypes; we’re still testing them out right now. It’s just been amazing, starting off big but then realizing it wasn’t an efficient prototype. Let’s go small, perfect some aspects of what our design should feel like, the electrics feedback, and grow. Once again, I think it was kind of organic. We started off wrong, but then we started small.
Sivan: A big help to that was being admitted to Rev’s Hardware Accelerator. They have really great resources, and we were able to rapidly make a prototype and really iterate our design and nail it down.
How big is the base product right now?
Sivan: It’s about 18.5 inches wide, 11.5 inches high, and 6 inches deep. It’s like a large shoebox.
Are you planning to expand to a bigger product, or is it more so for a home-design?
Lisa: The vision was a three-tiered system. You have your different layers where you could grow arugula, lettuce, and bigger greens on one of them, and you could grow your cilantro, parsley, and basil on another. Right now we are trying to perfect the one-tiered system, and we’re also going to try going deeper and adding two layers as opposed to one.
Are you targeting people on the high end and looking to grow their own plants?
Sivan: Right now we have narrowed down to three customer segments. One of them is a cook, someone who cooks so they don’t necessarily want the level of involvement a traditional gardener wants. The second one is someone who tries to display more exotic plants, and the third one would be gourmet--someone who wants better taste. One interesting thing we are researching is basically adding flavors to the herbs by process. So that could be a great differentiator for us.
Michael: That’s very special-- the control we are giving them. Just adding to what Savan said, you asked about high end. The first time I had this problem, The first thing I did was look online. What’s out there? What can I solve my problem with right now? I bought two products and I was disappointed; that’s why I’m on this journey, because I was disappointed by what’s out there. There’s nothing with quality. Everything out there that helps you grow at home is plastic; it has no story, it’s non-compostable, and that’s what we are trying to do. That’s what we do: it’s high end, it’s quality, it’s something that can fit into a stylish home next to other quality products.
So it’s not just food plants that you are supplying for, it’s other plants as well?
Sivan: That depends on what we ultimately decide to target but now we are mainly focusing on herbs.
You mentioned that you are from Botswana. Do you plan on launching there or sticking with the U.S. for now?
Michael: Botswana has too much space and sun and not enough of a population for it to be successful there. The United States is the perfect place to own a business and is perfect for innovation. We are looking at a lot of other seasonal places-- places that suffer agriculturally through seasonality. We have been talking to a lot of people in Europe, especially London where they have a lot of problems with rain and not light. Israel is another awesome place for controlled agriculture. But we are definitely lucky to be in America, especially the northeast, for a start.
Speaking of Israel, one of the problems they face is with water usage. Does your product take into account water usage?
Sivan: The plants only uptake exactly what it needs, so it is very minimalist when it comes to water usage. We use very few resources to make these organic pods. It all goes along well with our story of helping the environment.
Michael: Being environmentally conscious when it comes to agriculture is synonymous with being precise, and being precise with agriculture is also being sustainable. We provide the utmost form of precision at this scale. There are no evaporative losses from our system which is unique. There are very cool forms of equalisation in our system which is cool. We are inspired by systems from places like Israel that do a lot of good agriculturally.
Do you pour the water into your system, or is it hooked up to a faucet and connected all day?
Sivan: Now we have a reservoir inside that keeps water. Our target is to have it keep water for about a week. We have sensors inside that tell you when you are low on water. Something we could look into are the restrictions where you can put it, especially in cities. One of our goals is to have it easily installable, so experts do not have to come in and do it for you.
Michael: All you have to do is add water in the top of the pod and then it waters the plants. We have a goal to make it mainstream.
Sivan: That is something we learned from customer discovery: the level of involvement that these people want. Maybe they like watering it and form a habit around the product and begin to use it more.
Michael: We also have vacation mode for when people travel. People who travel a lot on vacation or for work definitely fit into our customer demographic.
What are the next steps for you guys?
Michael: We have been going down an awesome path with Cornell and eHub. Right at this moment we are recruiting more people; we are trying to maybe double our team. We have had a lot of interest. Hopefully we can get this out to alpha-testers before the winter break. The product can be in homes for the winter season which would be amazing. By the time we graduate we can hopefully be selling. Making revenues by then and getting it into people’s hands would be great. We will most likely stay in Ithaca after graduation. This is a phenomenal place to be with our resources and advisors for a small company like us. So, yeah, the next stage is to get it to people, start making money, and expanding the product.
A big differentiator for us is that our system creates an isolated environment. It is actually closed off from the regular environment, so we could control the temperature and humidity of the system which allows us to create flavors in plants that you wouldn’t normally get from this environment. We can grow a plant as if it was from Italy. No one does this now, so it is super exciting.
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Hayan : Our first question is what is Tiptoe& what is your desire to create the company?
Luke: Tiptoe& is a social fashion enterprise which transforms the traditional fundraising T-shirts into a streetwear for a cause. We have a team of 50 members currently consisting of designers, alumni, and students. Last month we launched a crowdfunding project to support the victims of school violence in South Korea in which we raised up to $2,000. 30 percent of the profits will be donated to our partner NGO combating school violence which specializes in providing counseling and school supplies to the victims. To raise awareness, we are trying to further our partnership with 1 Million Dance, YouTube content generators, and Hip-Hop label in Korea. Tiptoe& started with 2 questions: why are fundraising T-shirts poorly designed and why is streetwear always associated with social resistance. These questions made me wonder how can we create synergies and add values by combining these two conflicting perceptions. By combining street wear’s provocative design with fundraising’s good cause, we aim to redefine the culture of donation, and we believe fundraising can be fashionable. We want to prove that a good cause doesn't necessarily have to precede desirable consumption. We want to empower millennials to realize that donation is not just for successful rich people, but it could be also for anyone who consumes fashion
Mike: By school violence, Do you mean bullying?
Luke: All kinds of violence are happening in South Korea, and school violence has been the most significant issue in South Korea.
Hayan: How did you come up with the name “Tiptoe&”?
Hyun Kyoo: We were thinking and questioning why is fundraising supposed to be done by rich people and why fundraising T-shirts cannot be fashionable. So we wanted to symbolize this lesson that even the smallest thing can change our perspective. We came up with an idea of a man standing on his tiptoe. It doesn't take much effort to just stand on one’s tiptoe, but it can allow him to see new perspectives. So we decided on Tiptoe& we’ve added And next to Tiptoe. It was to help us brand our name when we do some collaborations with NGO.
Mike: Why did you choose School violence for your first project?
Hyun Kyoo: We want to handle something that we have experienced and we can really sympathize on. We have like 15 members in Tiptoe& right now, and, except 1 or 2, we're mostly in college right now, so it's not been so long since we graduated high school. So we decided to touch on school violence since we can really work on it to give solution to the school violence in Korea. As Luke says, school violence has been a very severe issue in the past few decades in Korea.
Hayan: Is there a particular reason that you chose Korea as a first location to launch your company? Can you expand on more, what kind of school violence are happening in Korea?
Hyun Kyoo: This again comes from the question we had for our brand. We asked ourselves why fundraising is not as active in Korea as in U.S., because T-shirt fundraising events is very active in the United States but not in Korea. In Korea, donations and charity are considered something that rich people or adults can do but not students. We want to show the millennials that by consuming their fashion products and buying what they want, they can donate to the social cause that they sympathize with. So we wanted to implement a culture in Korea, and school violence has always been severe in Korea. In the past few weeks, the most viral news in Korea media was this middle-school girl that was bullied so severely that her wounded picture shocked many people.
And to add on, the age of the bullies is decreasing year by year. So the age group with the most offenders are in the elementary school right now. Now 5th and 6th grades kids do a lot of things related to school violence. I think we need to start and educate them from starting school violence since they're so young, which can eventually prevent and block adult violence and future crimes.
Hayan: As a startup company, it must have been challenging to increase awareness of your brand name. How did you raise your presence in the consumer and retail market?
JinHyung: As you mentioned, the initial target customers are Korean millennials. In Korea, the fashion trends of young people are massively influenced by K-pop, K-drama, or any kind of art exposed in Korea. Knowing this, we decided to approach many influential celebrities so they can wear our product and introduce our brand. Some of them have already posted pictures wearing our product to enhance our social awareness of social violence. That's the first marketing strategy that we did, and we have some Facebook posts related to fashion or social responsibility. Additionally, have a business related Facebook page. We created a social media buzz, which is such a vital strategy and was really successful. These are the two main strategies we conducted for raising the presence of our brand.
Mike: What struggles did you guys face when you were first crowd funding?
JinHyung: We actually encountered two struggles. The first one was that a lot of customers using cloud-funding platforms are interested in technological products rather than fashion-related products. So we had to induce the inflow of customers outside of the cloud funding platform. So as I mentioned, using the main two strategies we conducted, we were able to induce those customers so that we can drive sales not only just from customers currently using the platform but also from those outside of it. So that was the first struggle that we faced. The second struggle was vendor management because we actually installed the supply chains in Korea, but we are all in the States. And because of the limited budget and the time, many factories didn’t want to produce only a few products because they can’t really make a lot of profit out of those limited numbers. But we assiduously contracted many factories in Korea. So we were able to deliver our volume with them. They know that we are nonprofit, and we are trying to do something good for the betterment of society. So we were able to establish a supply chain in Korea.
Hayan: I know that Tiptoe& has a really huge focus on social awareness, so are you guys planning on addressing other social issues for future products or any other partnerships for future products?
Luke: Our business model is that every project deals with a different social issue, and we’ve been tackling just school violence because we signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korean NGO combatting school violence. We are planning on a collaboration event in December that a few sculpture artists from EY University, one of the most prestigious Korean colleges, that have contacted us for collaboration. They are planning to host an exhibition with the theme of preventing school violence, and, by collaborating with them, we will dress their sculptures with our products and sell our products at offline stores. By maintaining a good relationship with 1 million YouTube content generators, the huge pop label that we have worked with, we want to expand our partnerships with them for our marketing purpose.
Hayan: Are you planning on expanding your market outside of Korea, possibly in the U.S.?
Luke: Yes, so in fact we want to start a club at Cornell to establish a local presence. By providing our resources, we want our club members to design clothing with a local issue and raise awareness. After we get a taste of the U.S. market, we want to expand it as a business. Also, as a business we have been in contact with three Cornell students from Hong Kong who are interested in our business model. So, if they execute their plan, then we are ready to provide our resources and start a similar business in Hong Kong.
Mike: I know you mentioned that elementary school kids are a proponent of school violence. Are there are reasons that you think people believe this is the case? Why does school violence start so young?
Hyun Kyoo: I think the main reason is that kids today mature really fast compared to the previous decades because of the media and social networking system. It’s not just the kids that are the problem; I think it’s the unconscious culture in itself. Like in Korea, the rank really matters. Rank consists of age or social position and your power socially. I think that very conservative culture in Korea evokes even the kids in primary school to get more violent and eventually bully their peers. It’s a very sad thing to see.
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What is impact investing and how does the club employ it?
Impact investing is different from other regular forms of regular investing. You are investing in organizations that not only generate some sort of financial return but also some level of social return. For Cornell impact investing, our club, we are introducing our analysts to the idea of impact investing. We are partnering with some of the top impact investing firms in the country. One of them is ImpactAssets; we are working with them to help with market research due diligence and for our analysts to sort of gain some experience. Currently, we are at a stage where we are preparing our analysts to do that type of research, so we created an analyst development program to teach the basics of finance, creating validation models, and things like that so that they are prepared for the next semester. In the long run, we are preparing to manage our own investment portfolio; we are currently talking with alumni and other impact investors to lead investing projects hopefully related to CALS and their work with agricultural projects. Also in the long run, we're hoping to offer consulting service to other impact investors or impact investment firms, so that we can provide them with some of our own services such as market research.
What made you initially want to start this club?
Impact investing is currently one of the largest fields in finance. Personally, I've always been concerned with ways to solve problems like global warming and things like that - so working on technologies that sort of help mitigate the effects of climate change. It's a combination of my interests. I have been involved with conservation sciences and renewable energies for a while. Having been involved in that and also taking a summer internship in finance, I sort of found an overlap in my interest. I believe in the future people are going to invest in renewable energy and projects that will help benefit society, and I think we need that more than we ever needed it before. I did research on that last spring, and I also contacted some of my other friends who had also heard about impact investing. We did some research over the summer and contacted a lot of impact investing firms to learn the model of impact investing and how that process works. We then made it into a club, and hopefully we can get others interested as well. We're actually one of the only impact investing clubs in the country.
What can a student learn from participating in this organization?
Getting involved in finance takes a lot. Something, I think, something that differentiates Cornell Impact Investing from other clubs at Cornell is that we made a promise that we're not just going to take people from AEM or people who have backgrounds in finance. If you take a look at our analysts, they come from all kinds of majors: engineering, bio, hotelies and ILR. Given that kind of diversity, it is very hard in the first semester to get them directly involved in impact investing. So, the first semester, the analyst development program is just geared toward them learning the fundamentals of finance, And in the semester right after this, the analysts will actually start doing hands-on projects, and they can actually expect to actually understand the ins and outs of impact investing. Some of this relates to their own experience. For example, the engineers that we have in our club have already begun to understand opportunities where they could invest because given some of the engineering projects they have worked on and the real-life opportunities they already know of given their background. So, the first semester is just really the development program, helping them get involved in impact investing, and from then on they’re working on hands-on projects in which they start learning everything they need to know from finding the right opportunities to actually allocating our resources and our investment funds in those projects.
What do you think is the future of impact investing?
If you think about our country as a whole, there are different housing projects and developments that haven't taken place yet. Our government hasn’t been able to fund some of those projects when it comes to education and things like that. I think there have been significant issues surrounding that, and given our political climate as well, I think that has contributed to our problems. We are constantly fighting on where we should allocate our resources - whether that be the military or education - so I think impact investing definitely helps with that because now you have people who are actually mindful on some of these issues, working to get involved in that. People have found opportunities where they can not only get some sort of social returns that help society as whole, but they can generate some sort of the financial return from it as well. I think this type of model hasn't been explored before. Given our constraints with how we are able to use our resources and our federal budget, people are more mindful and want to get involved in this field. So that's where I believe the future of impact investing is going to be. We are going to see the growth of different technologies that haven't been able to emerge because there hasn't been suitable investment opportunities. So I'm excited for sure.
What are some of the challenges you faced so far?
One of the prime challenges for us was actually getting ahold of some of these impact investment firms. This club, Cornell Impact Investing, was something that was thought of 6 years ago. There was an effort to create an impact investing club 6 years ago, and I am still in touch with the person who initially led that initiative, but the reason that they were never fully established was because they weren't able to talk to any of these impact investment firms. They wanted to make their own impact investment, and the impact investment firms didn’t think an undergraduate investment club was going to offer anything useful. With our club, we talked to some of the impact investment firms and said that “we are more than capable to create a successful program, just allow us the opportunity to first train our analysts and gain some sort of credibility.” It was a challenge for us to just talk to them and say what we wanted to do and getting them to listen to us. Some of the other challenges that we are currently facing is receiving funding. Like I said, we are in talks right now, and hopefully we are going to get a lot of funding for next semester to start managing our own investment portfolio. That is honestly, for now, one of the only challenges that we are facing, but things are going well for us.
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1. What prompted you all to write this book?
A few years ago, I spent a good half an hour searching Amazon for a book that would help give me a high-level overview of the tech concepts I needed to know to excel at interviews and better understand the technical implications when making business strategy decisions in the tech industry. I found that nothing of the sort existed. The information I sought was scattered across the web, written with various levels of presumed knowledge. Although there are hundreds of books to teach beginners to code, I found nothing to help me better understand the underlying technology concepts.
So my friends from Microsoft – Neel Mehta and Parth Detroja – and I decided to write a book to help people interested in working on the business side of tech understand things like how Google search actually works or the business rationale behind why Amazon changes product prices 2.5 million times a day. Our book is called Swipe to Unlock — check it out on Amazon!
We have been reaching out to clubs and career services at universities to get the word out. We broke even a few weeks ago and recently hit #1 Best Seller on Amazon.
2. Many employers use a student’s degree as a signal that they have mastered their area of study. Do you think students without STEM degrees, even if they ace the tech side of the interview, would still be at disadvantage when compared to students who do just as well on the interview but also hold a STEM degree?
I don’t think you need to know how to code to work in tech, however it is extremely difficult to get offers without having a high level understanding of how everyday tech — think Spotify, Snapchat, Apple Pay — works under the hood.
I think my high-level understanding of tech really helped me in my interview. For example, if you are applying for a non-software engineering role at Google, you most likely won’t be asked to explain how Google’s ad-targeting algorithm works. But they might ask you how you could increase ad revenue from a particular market segment. If you know how Google's ad platform works, you'll be in a far stronger position to come up with good growth strategies. Little tech-side insights like that helped my interview answers stand out from the pack.
3. The tech industry is constantly evolving at an incredible speed. Even engineers with strong computer science backgrounds have trouble keeping up with these developments. Do you think Swipe to Unlock would provide students without backgrounds in STEM a strong enough foundation in tech to continue developing with the industry; let’s say 5 years from now?
We plan on updating the book with new insights as the industry changes.
4. What advice do you have for our readers who are interested in pursuing a job in the tech industry?
I did a lot of networking. Essentially, I would reach out cold to people who currently had a job I wanted via LinkedIn. People are actually more receptive to a 15 minute chat with a stranger than you might think. The key to getting people to be willing to chat with you is really personalizing the message to why you want to talk to that particular person rather than why you want to chat with someone with their job. For instance, if you mention that you and your perspective conversation partner both went to the same school, majored in the same subject, or worked in the same industry previously, and you wanted to learn how those experiences helped prepare them for their current role, that would be much more effective in getting a response. You can expect someone with a competitive job gets several messages daily asking to chat. Make sure your message isn’t generic if you want people to make time for you.
Book link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0756MTX6K
Video Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqCcDS63hZE