Start-Ups Snapshot 2014
Ecovention
My company, Ecovention, designs, licenses and manufactures products intended to improve outmoded, outdated and wasteful food packaging. Our flagship offering, the GreenBox PizzaBox, is a multifunctional container made from 100% recycled material that is both recyclable and compostable. The top of the box breaks down into four dinner plates, while the bottom folds into a handy storage container for leftovers. Our GreenBox line also includes the SliceBox, the WrapSleeve, WingBox and the HoagieBox.
Scope: Six employees at this New York City-based company. The GreenBox line of products is sold through distributors across North and Central America and Australia to retailers, including Whole Foods, one of our largest end-customers.
My ‘aha' moment: My business partners, William Walsh (designer of the GreenBox) and Ned Kensing, and I decided to produce a demo video for the GreenBox (www.tinyurl.com/ckbawe) before we’d even formally set up our company. We uploaded the video to YouTube in mid-2009 and within a few weeks, Ashton Kutcher (the then-champion of Twitter) tweeted about it. We received 55,000 hits overnight and inquiries from across the U.S. and around the world. That’s when we knew we had a winner.
The most fun I’ve had so far was seeing our product on national U.S. network-TV shows. In February, the GreenBox PizzaBox appeared on ‘Rachael Ray’ (CBS) and ‘The Chew’ (ABC) and received enthusiastic responses from the studio audiences. I also get a thrill from walking into a restaurant, grocery store or hotel and seeing our GreenBox products in use!
Time Auction
My social enterprise, Time Auction, enables people to trade volunteer hours to bid for experiences money can’t buy. Visitors to the website can browse rewards and bid the hours they’ve spent volunteering for a chance to meet with some pretty amazing people, such as Ron Joyce, the Co-Founder of Tim Hortons. The more hours bid, the better the chance of winning the auction. I believe volunteerism improves our communities and deserves to be recognized. Time Auction makes it more enticing for people to get involved and help others.
The most fun I’ve had so far has been hearing about the great volunteer work our bidders have done. Each bid needs to be verified, so we contact references at volunteer organizations to confirm that a bidder has completed the number of hours they’ve bid. That’s how I’ve found out about people who have donated their time to serve food to the homeless, coach sports teams, and even teach Zumba classes for free. Others serve on boards, help preserve national parks, facilitate support groups, file tax returns for low-income and elderly individuals, or play with kids in palliative-care facilities.
Something less fun, though quite exciting, was the crashing of our server due to a surge in traffic after someone posted on Reddit our auction for a chance to meet that company’s co-founder, Steve Huffman.
What the business needs right now is more bidders and donors. If you’re a business leader, talented artist, inspiring community worker or leader in an interesting field, consider offering a meeting with you as an auction reward. We are likely to leverage each hour you offer in your reward into 20 volunteer-hours benefitting charities in your community. You can also check out the interesting people we have for our next round: CEOs, a foreign affairs reporter, VCs, finance gurus, and even a professional boxer. To date, Time Auction has collected more than 8,000 volunteer hours.
TeachMe Inc.
My company, TeachMe, creates educational games and apps that combine play with learning in a unique way. Our games and apps are guided by the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and pay careful attention to regional curriculum all over the world. Our games change based on each player’s mastery of that skill and their experience. Because the difficulty changes with the students’ strengths, they don’t get frustrated or bored. Instead, they play longer and learn more as they progress.
Scope: 11 employees, Edmonton-based
Why I started the company: For all the time they spend on it, parents and teachers still can’t get every student to love math. MathGames combines the worlds of learning and play in a powerful new way. We know how to entice kids to play games. We’ve built some of the most popular gaming sites on the web by making fun, free games that compete (we admit it) with homework for kids’ attention. We’ve used that expertise for a greater good. Our first product, MathGames is driven by the belief that if students applied even a fraction of their free time to math, it would amount to something significant — something that could change their lives.
The first thing children learn is how to play. With MathGames, they play to learn.
The most fun I’ve had so far has been building and testing the user experience to motivate students to keep answering questions. Our efforts have been so successful that we now have more than 75,000 students using MathGames.com and they’ve answered more than five million math questions to date. A recent highlight was when TeachMe was accepted to join a leading accelerator in the education technology sector in Silicon Valley.