Fagan Harris Works to Reinvigorate Baltimore

As co-founder and CEO of Baltimore Corps, Fagan Harris has made it his life mission to harness the knowledge, skills and talents of young people with advanced degrees in social enterprise, non-profit, and government toward reinvigorating Baltimore, his native city. His non-profit organization wants to build a better Baltimore through the mobilization, education, and retention of the new generation of leaders in the city.

Baltimore Corps works toward scaling effective and efficient social innovations and entrepreneurship throughout Baltimore. Its approach involves building critical systems, innovating effective solutions to the city’s challenging issues, and contributing strategic capacity, which involve the active participation of young leaders. Its goal of building the next generation of leaders in the private and public sectors as well as in the political, social and philanthropic aspects, thus, further spurring Baltimore’s growth.

The organization now works on various areas including implementing education and family services, expanding services for students with minus 1.0 GPAs, and strengthening the emergency hotline of United Way. Expansion plans to Birmingham, New Orleans, Detroit, Raleigh-Durham, and Richmond are underway.

Harris has a history of working toward the betterment of Baltimore, which is considered as one of America’s greatest cities. He worked at College Track, a nationwide after-school program committed to the creation of college-going cultures particularly in underserved communities. He is also a Fellow at the Emerson Collective where he was a staff at the White House Council for Community Solutions.

As a Student Body Vice President at Stanford University, Harris also worked toward empowering his fellow millennials to pursue career paths with greater social impact. He continued his advocacy at the Franklin Project, a nationwide cross-sector program dedicated to citizen revitalization through public service.

Harris has a Masters of Philosophy in Comparative Social Policy degree from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He also studied international human rights as a Senator George J. Mitchell Scholar.

Emily Núñez Cavness and Betsy Núñez: From Sword to Plough

Emily Núñez Cavness and Betsy Núñez, two sisters from a military family, established Sword & Plough in 2012 as a way for non-military people to emotionally connect with military service people. Emily first came up with the idea after working with the Middlebury’s Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

Sword & Plough recycles and repurposes military surplus products into a wide range of fashionable bags and accessories. It recycled 18,000 pounds of military gear and produced over 5,500 products – and counting. Its bags are known for their rugged durability, refined design, and relevant impact on society, in general, and on veteran welfare, in particular.

The Núñez sisters’ company supports 38 veteran jobs and donated 10% of their profits into veteran assistance programs. Their efforts have also resulted in reducing the waste of military surplus gear and in reinforcing the understanding between the civilian and military sectors.

For its notable work, Sword & Plough has not only made a social impact but has also garnered several awards. It won Harvard Pitch for Change Competition’s Audience Choice Award and participated at the Dell Social Innovation Lab.

Alexandra Cart Manages Resources for Social Impact

Alexandra Cart comes from a line of savvy investment managers – she is the granddaughter of Peter Peterson, a Blackstone co-founder. She is, however, making a name for herself with Madeira Global, an up-and-coming giant in impact investing, of which she is a co-founder. She is the current Director of Strategic Development, a position she has held since 2012.

Madeira Global is widely considered as a leader in the investment management industry with specialization in strategic advisory and quantitative analytics. Its client base consists of alternative investment managers as well as their limited partners, such as wealthy individuals and foundations, who want to engage in social impact investing activities. It is becoming known for its cost-efficient, results-effective, and client-responsive management of financial resources for better social impact.

As Cart and her co-founders envisioned it, Madeira Global strictly adheres to its mission of effective and efficient alignment of social and financial returns for all of its clients’ portfolios. The firm applies an environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework in its implementation of its clientele’s proprietary investment strategies.

In 2013, Cart was instrumental in launching Madeira Global’s asset management unit, a partnership with Brevet Capital, a New York City-based hedge fund manager. In 2014, she was also instrumental in advising the deployment of more than $100 million in socially responsible investments.

Indeed, Cart is a leader in social impact investments, a personal passion that has its roots in her heritage. She is active in several organizations that align with her thrust at Madeira Global, too.

She is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), Gotham Chapter, since 2013. YPO is an international association of young chief executives who form partnerships among each other for their mutual benefit (i.e., more opportunities for success).

She is also a member of the Young Leaders Circle (YLC) of Milken Institute since 2013. YLC is an association of the best and brightest in finance, business and law as well as technology and entertainment.

Lauren Talbot: Making Texting and Dating Mesh

Lauren Talbot learned that texting during dating was a minefield of its own. While dating apps were great for meeting people online, texting was a different genre with different rules – when to text, what to text, and why text in the first place – which bewildered her.

Talbot decided to do something about it and PVLL (pronounced as “pull”) was born. PVLL is Talbot’s attempt at answering the Digital Age question: Can data be a solution in solving the riddles related to early-romance texting? With her new Android app, she appears nearer to answering it.

PVLL is an application that can control, monitor and analyze text messages, which can then be used to create graphs showing useful information for users. The information includes which partner initiates the text exchange and who takes longer to reply to text messages. The app also provides users with the tools to send entire text conversations to others for their inputs as well as edit and recall texts by up to 5 seconds after pressing the “send” button.

While the app has only gained 2,000 users, Talbot is confident that PVLL will be the next big thing in texting.

Evan Stites-Clayton and Walker Williams: Not Just T-shirts

Evan Stites-Clayton and Walker Williams, co-creators of Teespring, have created an innovative way of leveraging the crowdfunding model and profiting from it, too. The duo created a website to sell a commemorative t-shirt about their favorite college bar, which amassed hundreds of pre-orders via PayPal within 6 hours. The team soon received requests from individuals, clubs and communities to create similar campaigns for them albeit with their own custom products.

And Teespring, a platform for individuals to create unique campaigns for their custom apparel, was born. The duo has not only received hundreds of requests but millions of dollars in venture capital specifically $55 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.

Teespring’s business model is innovative, easy to use, and profitable for both the creators and users. Each user can choose the type and color of items to sell, add customised designs using tools provided by the website or a third-party app, and set the price and sales goal for the items.

Teespring will not process, manufacture, and ship the items until the sales goal has been reached via pre-orders, a process known as “tipped”. The company takes charge of the production and distribution of the items including customer services associated with the orders. The items offered on Teespring include t-shirts, hoodies, tank tops, long-sleeve shirts, kids’ and babies’ apparel, and youth apparel with plans of expansion to non-apparel products.

The user and Teespring benefit from the transaction with each one collecting a portion of the profit. Such is the power of the crowdfunding business model that Teespring has become the platform for self-made millionaires whose items have become bestsellers. According to Williams, millions of entrepreneurs can be empowered to launch their own brands when every pain point, cost, risk and compromise between their creativity and bringing said creativity to life is removed.

And the duo is on a roll, too. Teespring continues to attract the attention of investors so its future growth seems assured – and it’s not such a bad thing to achieve for the Brown University students.

Cameron Manwaring: At the Top Of YouTube Videos

Cameron Manwaring considers YouTube as his hustle and it certainly shows in the early – and quick – success of Shareability, a digital company that he co-founded in 2012 after dropping out of Brigham Young. Shareability specializes in the production of viral video campaigns for the YouTube generation, the first-ever full-service brand agency exclusively for the video sharing site. The videos usually combine art and science in creating and marketing YouTube content.

Today, Shareability is considered as one of the most investment-worthy and profitable companies within the YouTube family. It has generated more than 500 million organic views while 20 of its 100 video campaigns – and counting- have landed on YouTube’s front page. Its clients include big-name brands including Turkish Airlines, ESPN, Sony and NVIDIA.

Indeed, Manwaring has a dedicated drive to understand the why, what and how people share videos and then finding innovative ways to share these valuable contents with the rest of the world.

Ari Lewine and Shaun Zacharia Lifting TripleLift Together

In 2012, Ari Lewine and Shaun Zacharia together with Eric Berry co-founded TripleLift, a real-time bidding network designed to address the needs of publishers in turning brand images into native ads. The trio launched their company in acknowledgement of the rise of visual web with the native ads matching the look and feel of the publisher-cum-client’s website.

With deals between TripleLift and automated ad-buying platforms, the reach of the publishers’ native ads have expanded – truly, a good sign for the start-up since more publishers will come knocking. TripleLift has also raised $6 million in angel and venture investment as of January 2015 in addition to a significant increase in revenue from $1 million in 2013 to $7 million in 2014.

Ari Lewine, TripleLift’s Chief Strategy Officer, is a serial entrepreneur, author and patent holder. He was previously the CEO of University Trucking, Inc (2005-2009) as well as involved in sales (AppNexus, 2010-2012) and in business development (Oyster.comm 2009-2010), all in the Greatrr New York Area.

He has published works including The Visual Web Is Changing Everything in Media and Advertising (Wall Street Journal, June 2014) and Ugliness: An Unintended Consequence of Ad Viewability Online (AdAge, July 2014). He holds two patents with his co-investors, Berry and Zacharia, namely, Systems and Methods for Image Engagement Analysis and Systems and Methods for Dynamic Image Amplification (both filed 15 March 2013).

Shaun Zacharia has also worked with AppNexus (2010-2012) as a Solutions Engineer. His collaboration with Lewine and Berry has resulted in several awards for TripleLift including America's Most Promising Companies, Best Places to Work - NY Tech, and Start-ups of the Year - NY Tech in various years.

Together, the duo and their partner are taking TripleLift from its humble beginnings to greater heights in the digital industry.

Mike Foss Won Big-time with For the Win

Mike Foss set Facebook abuzz when he was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list not just because of his relatively young age but also because of his homeschooling education until 12th grade. He was proof that homeschooling works but he will be the first to say that homeschooling is not all there is to his success.

Foss’ first job after college graduation was as senior social media editor at USA Today’s website. He started developing a sports-focused website, known as For The Win, designed to become the main website’s entry point, a project on which he spent a frenzied 8 months but he won big-time and that’s all that matters now.

According to the numbers gathered by USA Today, For The Win has 35 million unique views in the 3rd quarter of 2014 – and growing. Launched in 22 April 2013, it quickly became one of the fastest-growing mobile websites. His creative vision that continues to reel in visitors: A sports-focused website that combines aggregated articles and original sports articles, thus, creating a site that mixes the personal approach of a blog with the professional standards of a newspaper.

Jonathon Francis and David Arabov: Millenials Creating Content for Millenials

Jonathon Francis and David Arabov, the co-founders of Elite Daily, are certainly part of the generation known as millenials – the people born between 1980 and 1995, who are tech-savvy with virtually every gadget available, and who can multitask in ways that Generation X cannot. Indeed, the duo started a digital media company that prides itself on being The Voice of Generation Y – that’s millenials to the rest of us.

Francis and Arabov, along with Gerard Adams, started Elite Daily in February 2012, as a content aggregator site for millenials – or as they say it, The Huffington Post for Generation Y – despite their zero experience in the industry. The duo, then undergraduates of Pace University, pooled $60,000 to start the company but have since raised additional funding.

The pair had to learn hard lessons about running a digital media company, lessons learned through trial and error. But the site soon took off such that by the end of 2013, it already had 41 million monthly readers and earned $400,000 – and counting. Elite Daily has also grown in its mix of direct traffic (20%), search engine optimization (10%), and social media traffic (70%) with 50% of the latter coming from Facebook. At present, the company employs 60 young people and enjoys 28.5 million unique views per month.

The duo wanted to compete with larger digital media companies, such as Business Insider, Vox, and Mic, but was unable to do so because of the lean operating budget; the company was profitable, nonetheless, but growth is must for digital companies. They decided to go the financing route and flew to the west coast for this purpose but fate had other plans.

Elite Daily was purchased by Daily Mail in a deal that combined the readership base between the two companies. The deal, which was rumoured to cost between $40 million and $50 million, was beneficial to both companies especially as there was a 10% overlap between their readerships.