🌌Quantum Social, Warm Intros, Burning Man
Staying sharp, Q&A w/ Evan Quinn, Updates, Tools, Fall plans..?
Welcome to edition 10 of The Void. This one’s jam-packed with new products, trends, and more. Enjoy 🤗!
SO many people entered their quarantine with the goal of “learning Spanish” or “finally picking up <insert language here>”. Acquiring a language is a serious commitment - it takes time, exposure, and continued practice. Duolingo doesn’t always cut it, and to be honest, they teach you some weird phrases:
Duo needs to see a therapist!
Brushing up on my German takes a backseat to other things going on, but there’s a Chrome Plugin that makes it easy to multitask, stay immersed in my learning and not lose my Deutschkenntnis.
Toucan is a free platform that helps people learn new things as they go about their day browsing the web. Currently, Toucan supports Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian.
Users can play around with various difficulty levels, inline translations, quizzes or games to track their progress. Also, the founders are awesome. Highly recommend checking it out!
Social CPG w/ Evan Quinn
Evan is the CEO and Co-founder of hiyo, a DTC beverage startup supercharging the social drinking, wellness and the nolo spaces.
What career moves led you to where you are now?
Prior to becoming a beverage entrepreneur, I spent my early career at Guggenheim Partners working in the structured real estate finance group for 4 years. In 2018, I decided to apply to business school and was fortunate to be admitted to UCLA Anderson. That July, I did some soul searching. Business school is a great place to re-evaluate priorities and make a career pivot. I concluded that to become the best professional version of myself, I needed to deeply commit to entrepreneurship. By pursuing my entrepreneurial dream, I would be able to grow tremendously from my failures (and successes) while developing unwavering grit and self-belief.
The idea of hiyo came when my co-founder George and I both took some time staying sober last year. We both come from families with alcohol dependencies, so we committed to a sober stint out of solidarity—and frankly—we felt awesome. While we still have a drink now and again, we continue to prioritize our health. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to do that while out with friends when drinking is the default. The worst part of staying sober are the options: sugary mocktails or painfully boring soda and limes. George and I thought there had to be a better way to get a similar mood-enhancing effect that people seek from alcohol but from healthy, functional ingredients. And like that, hiyo was born!
At the moment, how do you measure success and where are you thinking of taking your company in the future?
Success looks different at different times. Through our current lens as a pre-revenue business, success for us is launching hiyo. In order to bring our vision to life, our founding team is constantly moving the needle closer to that event. That being said, success is a moving target and something we’ll evaluate often as our company grows. There is a balance of having long-term goals while taking care of the day-to-day. For example, there will be a time when we position hiyo as an attractive target to be picked up by multiple national distributors. Prior to doing that, we are planning to establish ourselves and generate excitement in our Los Angeles backyard.
From our genesis, hiyo was created to change the way that people drink for the better. We are motivated to make it easier for people to tell alcohol “not tonight” by giving them a high-quality option that did not exist before. We understand that everyone needs to relieve stress from this crazy world, but we don’t need to sacrifice our wellbeing in the process. Our long-term goal is to make sober fun, and empower people to feel happy in your own.
What is the biggest challenge you've run into in starting a CPG company? What advice would you give other early founders operating in the space?
The biggest challenge we are facing with hiyo is getting people to understand what exactly our drink is. It’s a challenge is because it’s a unique product in a relatively new category (the low and no-alcohol segment). With ingredients like adaptogens and botanical terpenes, there is a learning curve as opposed to being another tequila brand or organic juice company that consumers easily understand.
I have two pieces of advice. Being an entrepreneur is a grind. It’ll demand all of you day-in and day-out, so you must be prepared to fully dedicate yourself to your business. The advice here is to be cognizant of when you’re having your good days and when you’re having your bad days. Maximize your good days and get the most you can out of the bad days. Second, try to find product-market fit as early as you can. In CPG this means knowing your product’s competitive advantage and who it will truly resonate with - those people will become your early adopters or “sticky” customers. For hiyo, we are addressing the gap that health-conscious consumers face when seeking alcohol alternatives in social settings by introducing “better-for-you” social tonics with mood-enhancing functionality.
What have you been working on since March? Any exciting projects or hobbies?
March feels like it was years ago. Though COVID-19 has created so many challenges—and perhaps this is the eternal optimist in me speaking—I have been grateful for the clarity that it has created in my life. Taking out travel time and working from home has allowed me to optimize my life by focusing on my work and my health. I have my dual monitors at home and just a few feet away I have my weights and kettlebells. It’s a work, workout, play, work, sleep environment. My sole goal since March has been to prepare hiyo for launch and I’m finally excited to say we are opening our fundraising round to fund that launch. If we can launch hiyo successfully in a market plagued by the pandemic, then we will thrive when normal markets prevail.
*Thanks Evan for taking the time to give us the scoop on hiyo & your background! When can I try some😋? The team is raising, reach out to me for an intro!
What’s New With Practicum?
Student Empowerment Hackathon
This past weekend, interns from our community came together to form teams and compete in an internal hackathon. Even during the final lap of their summer project development, they were up to the challenge of creating new products to empower students (Practicum mission-inspired). Here are three amazing projects prototyped by our incredible interns in less than 48 hours:
Stugru — Engaging, focusing, and connecting students to form virtual study groups in the new era of Zoom University. Don’t have a friend in your new class? Stugru’s got your back.
Created by: Aakif Hussaini, Grace Jiang, Sara Liu
Feedback Hero — Zoom plugin that automatically polls students about the pace of lecture and tracks participation. Goodbye awkward interruptions in the middle of lectures.
Created by: Kevin Huang, Nick Morrison
Student Sublets — Online marketplace specifically geared towards students to post and find sublets. Super useful for students scrambling to find off-campus housing in the fall!
Created by: Kirti Desai, Akshar Patel, Madison Ronchetto, Cody Um
Summer Showcase
To see what these talented teams built over the course of more than two months (not just two days!), register to attend our first-ever (virtual) Summer Showcase on August 24th at 8:00 EST.
7 teams. 60+ interns. 1 awesome showcase. Click here to register!
Tech Trends & Startups We’re Watching
Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is expected to grow at a 15% CAGR over the next 6 years as companies work to get ahead of the next major disruption
Wifi 6 is starting to become a threat to 5G - but is there a world where they can coexist?
Ripplink (Bootstrapped) 🔗 - supercharge your business relationships by automating your networking workflow. They’re hiring & raising a pre-seed round - shoot me an email if you want an intro!
Metafy ($100K, Pre-Seed) 👾 - monetize your gaming talent with 1:1 coaching. Set your price, availability, and share your URL.
Iothic ($1.83M, Seed) 🔒 - decentralized, point-to-point quantum-resistant authentication for large IoT systems, security and infrastructure projects.
Virtually (Undisclosed, Seed) 🎓 - fully-customizable solution for teaching online. Live conferencing, payment-processing, and student management brought together in one place.
NoCode Tools of The Week
Neuton - Visual neural nets and AutoML to enable data science integration
Stacky - Connect all your social media accounts to one sticky landing page
Softr - Responsive website blocks with optionality for custom code
Directual (Low-code) - develop a comprehensive backend for web, mobile or IoT apps in days instead of weeks/months
Our Light Bulbs 💡
-Epic Games launched a direct payments campaign (and a lawsuit) against Apple
-2020 is the year of the SPAC and some think it might be here to stay, challenging conventional IPOs
-Amazon Braket launched a general-use, hands-on quantum computing service
-Uber Eats has eclipsed its ridesharing counterpart, Uber, in the wake of the pandemic, but it doesn’t look like it will be profitable any time soon
-Mercedes and Nvidia team up and vow to release an autonomous car by 2024
-Burning Man Festival will be digital in 2020, making use of VR to pave the way for new types of social experiences in the COVID era
-“The 4 stages of company growth and what breaks at each stage” with Laura Caimi of ServiceNow
Thing of the week
New movies, series, books, restaurants, bars, and podcasts curated by friends and people you trust :)
Warm intros are unmatched. The folks at Friendspire want to bring that feeling beyond just meeting new people.
Over a bowl of ramen, the co-founders came up with an idea to optimize how we discover new content, beyond online reviews from complete strangers or bots.
With the app, users can find inspiration from curated top ten lists, follow featured users to see what folks are reviewing and consuming, save things for later to keep them on the backburner, build a library of their favorites things, and more.
Might as well check out some cool stuff while you’re stuck at home. As long as you think your friends have good taste, that is.
P.S. What are you doing & where are you located this fall? Student, founder, investor, etc., we’d love to hear from those reading our weekly wrap-ups!
If you missed the last newsletter, find it here!
Hi! 👋 Thanks for reading The Void. We’re Zach and Jack, Partners @ Practicum and Students @ WashU + Georgetown. Leave some feedback, find us on LinkedIn/Twitter or contact us!