Last Tuesday night I attended the January 2012 Technori pitch event where five new startups were pitching their companies and ideas to an auditorium packed with entrepreneurs, investors and tech enthusiasts. These pitch events are great networking opportunities to meet other people who share the same passion for entrepreneurship and new ventures. The five startups at last week’s event were: AttorneyFee.com, Phaxio, Moosejaw, Leap Year Project, and Georama. The two startups that really caught my attention were AttorneyFee.com and Leap Year Project.
AttorneyFee.com helps people find out the fair cost of legal work and they currently have a database of over 25,000 attorneys that list their fees. The unique aspect of the website is the ability to predict the price of any legal service in any location and the website also develops charts for you to see the distribution of attorney fees for your specific service and location. It seems to be a pretty well-funded startup, since they are ramping up with new hires and currently have over 20 million viewers a month, mostly through partnerships they have with other organizations and websites. There seem to be similar startups for the healthcare space in order to review different health services and procedures as well as doctors, but AttorneyFee.com claims to be the major player in the legal industry. Although I’ve never had the need for any legal services and hopefully won’t need to use the website to find any attorneys in the near future, it seems like a very valuable service for customers who might be overwhelmed with finding a local lawyer at a reasonable cost.
The other unique idea this month was a new non-profit organization called Leap Year Project. The goal of the organization is to convince individuals to take a risk this year in order to change their life, their community or the world for the better and share their experiences with the rest of the Leap Year Project community in order to inspire others to do the same. I think taking on this goal would be very rewarding for any individual, but my only suggestion is that it really shouldn’t be limited to just this year. This should be a goal that people should always have in their lives even if it is with smaller projects to help improve their lives and help the people around them. I still think it’s a great idea and I’ll be sure to read and follow the founder’s own Leap Year Project over the next few months.
As an investment banker for two years in NY, I had relatively little free time outside of work and keeping in touch with friends. In the few hours I did have on the occasional Saturday, I enjoyed volunteering through New YorkCares (Chicago friends can check out Chicago Cares). I had the opportunity to help out with a variety of activities that were often one-time commitments ranging from tutoring math and science skills, creating art projects with autistic students, and engaging in recreational activities with children with disabilities.
One of my favorite activities that I participated in more regularly was attending workouts with Achilles International because not only was I able to combine my passion for running with volunteering, but I also gained an appreciation for the positive perspectives on life in the face of hardships and challenges that individuals with disabilities faced. The mission of Achilles International is to enable people with all types of disabilities (including amputation, cerebral palsy, cancer, multiple sclerosis, organ transplants, paraplegia, stroke, traumatic brain injury and vision impairment) to participate in mainstream athletics in order to promote personal achievement, enhance self-esteem, and lower barriers to living a fulfilling life. I first became interested in helping people with disabilities after taking the biomedical engineering design course, "Devices for People with Disabilities” class my senior year in college. After enjoying my volunteer experiences with the New York chapter of Achilles International, I was disappointed when I found out that there was no chapter in Chicago. After contacting the national organization, I was able to gather a few other people interested in starting a chapter in Chicago, and I’m happy to announce that we are on track to launch the new chapter of Achilles Chicago this spring. If you’re interested in participating or getting involved, feel free to reach out to us at Achilles.chicago@gmail.com. I promise it will be a very rewarding and inspirational experience training and running marathons with Achilles members!
For a while now, I’ve been interested in getting involved in non-profits where I believe I can add value and really help improve, develop or expand the organization. When I first moved to Chicago, I didn’t know too much about the non-profits in the area, so I decided to create a profile on boardnetusa.org. Through this website, organizations that were looking for additional help from someone with my skill set and background could reach out with potential opportunities to get involved.
About a month later, I was fortunate enough to be contacted by the executive director of GlobalYouth for Education & Change. After learning a bit about each others' backgrounds and the goals of the organization, I was very excited about the opportunity to get involved and join the board. GYEC was founded in 2007, so it’s still a relatively young organization and we tend to view it more as a non-profit start-up because we are facing a lot of the same challenges that young businesses face when they are first starting out. Not only are we looking for sources of funding from high net worth individuals (i.e. angel investors), but we are also reaching out to celebrities, corporations, grants and even the PE/VC community. We also have a fairly large goals and a broad vision, so it’s important for us to prioritize our goals and projects, while really demonstrating measurable accomplishments that can lead to further funding and revenue in order to continue to expand our projects to other countries and expand our reach. Being a board member of GYEC has been a challenging and rewarding experience so far, but I look forward to helping the organization develop its strategic plan and continue to succeed by positively impacting the communities it targets. It’s also worth noting that yesterday, the WSJ came out with several articles in the Personal Journal section with interesting perspectives on non-profits that I recommend reading if you’re interested in learning more: “Before You Join ThatBoard…” and “Should Charities Operate Like Businesses?”
