Area college students get boost from Springfield nonprofit to pursue their business dreams

By DUSTY CHRISTENSEN

@dustyc123

Published: 05-06-2017 12:00 AM

SOUTH HADLEY — After planning a trip to Spain with her girlfriend last year, travel-crazy Mount Holyoke College senior Carly Forcade came to the realization that there was no place where LGBTQ globetrotters like herself could go for recommendations and advice.

So, in November, the 23-year-old created The Travel Unicorn, a forum for LGBTQ travelers to share their experiences. The idea quickly gained momentum; The Travel Unicorn’s Instagram now has some 16,400 followers, and Forcade has created a website and online store with Travel Unicorn merchandise.

When she graduates later this month, Forcade is planning to make her startup a full-time job. She hopes to begin work on an app and to start developing partnerships with travel companies.

“I’m really excited, but it’s definitely nerve-wracking,” she said of diving head-first into the business world. Forcade has turned down several other job offers to focus on her company.

“My thought process was, ‘Why not?’” she said, sitting on the dorm room bed where she currently uses her phone and laptop to work on The Travel Unicorn.

Forcade’s confidence is buoyed in part by the fact that she won’t be going it alone this summer.

Forcade’s burgeoning company is one of 20 selected to be part of the inaugural Collegiate Accelerator program run by Valley Venture Mentors, a Springfield nonprofit focused on entrepreneurship in western Massachusetts.

Designed to give students and recent graduates a summer to work full time on their startup, the program consists of training, lectures and advice from experts. Students receive a stipend of $2,000 so they can focus full time on developing their company through the program, which runs from mid-June through August.

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“Basically they’re getting a paid internship to work on their startup,” Valley Ventures CEO Liz Roberts said.

Valley Ventures program

Valley Ventures has been mentoring entrepreneurs in western Massachusetts since 2011, and this month is graduating its third cohort from its Startup Accelerator program, Roberts said. This year, students like Forcade will be the first to take part in an accelerator geared toward college startups. Roberts said the program is meant to help them through the initial stages of starting a company.

“Entrepreneurship can be lonely and isolating, and you might not have the support in your family or your peer group,” she said. “So there’s really that support, and tools and a clear path to success.”

Another large focus of the nonprofit, Roberts added, is to increase diversity in a sector of the economy disproportionately occupied by white men; of the 36 startups in Valley Venture’s current regular accelerator cohort, 65 percent are women-led companies and 50 are led by people of color, according to Roberts.

The students that the nonprofit chose for the Collegiate Accelerator come from nine different colleges, and their companies range from a startup working on “a super-hydrophobic liquid repellent” to a service that would bring familiar foods from home to Nepalese people living in the United States.

Other projects

One member of the incoming cohort is Jessica Innis, who will graduate from Smith College in the coming weeks with a chemistry major and economics minor.

“But everyone who knows me wouldn’t remember that I’m either one of those things,” she said.

That’s because the 21-year-old has been an entrepreneur at heart since she was in high school, and seems to be juggling several projects at any given time. Last fall, Innis put lots of energy into the media company she will be developing during the Collegiate Accelerator program.

The startup is called redflowers, and seeks to “uplift and provide a designated space for black identities and black women to learn, grow, and define themselves in society, not according to popular stereotypes or tropes that exist in today’s media.”

What that means in part is producing “highly controversial” film and photography addressing not just the black American experience but what being black means globally, Innis said.

Another idea she’s working on is a monthly subscription for a self-care box geared toward black women.

With the opportunity that Valley Ventures is providing, Innis said she’s most excited about being connected with potential investors, and already has an idea of how much funding she would need to get her business running.

Innis spent a previous summer at the Silicon Valley-based, for-profit Draper University, where she learned a lot about entrepreneurship. But she said most Silicon Valley startups are tech-related, and that the Pioneer Valley may be well suited to her kind of business.

“I think it’ll be interesting to be around people that are more used to socially innovative projects,” she said.

Of course, there are some tech startups among Valley Venture’s first college cohort.

Jacob Ayers, a 19-year-old finishing his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is CEO of a small team hoping to break into the virtual and augmented reality business.

Together with company vice president Efran Himel and programmer Jason Valladares, Ayers founded Socialopolis, which he described as “trying to combine the technology from Pokémon Go and bring it into social media.”

Socialopolis, like many companies in the program, is in its very earliest stage: a concept with an excited and ambitious team behind it. Ayers said they are still looking for more team members to begin working on the technology itself.

Ayers admitted that there might be competition in the augmented and virtual reality fields, but he said his goal above all else is to make a product that changes the world in some meaningful way.

“Whatever we can pull off successfully to do that, that’s all we want to do in the end,” he said.

For many college students like Ayers, the Collegiate Accelerator provides an opportunity to take something that’s just a big idea and attempt to make it a sustainable business.

That’s what 23-year-old Sunny Lee is hoping to do with The Schwa Company.

“It’s basically Airbnb or Uber for translators,” said Lee, who will soon graduate from Smith College with a double major in east Asian studies and linguistics.

The idea is that through an app, users could connect in real time with translators to help them with any task, from reading ingredients on a food’s packaging to helping them navigate a difficult situation in a foreign language.

Though it’s just an idea now, Lee said the app would probably pay translators by the minute, and would charge a service fee for using the platform. But before all that, Lee needs to find a team that can help her move past the concept stage.

“I really hope to make connections and to be able to find people to join my team, and especially people who are programmers because I had a hard time just recruiting people on my campus,” Lee said about her expectations for this summer.

Lee said she was excited to get into the Collegiate Accelerator. She thought her idea had a good chance of being accepted, but wasn’t sure she would make it through the competitive application process.

“So when I saw the email, I was really happy,” she said. “I felt like, ‘OK, this is the start of the company.’”

Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.

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