Launch Pad

Before they started work on Lia, neither Anna nor Bethany had a background in health devices or technology. So they had to start from square one: with a great idea and a lot of motivation.Anna and Bethany conducted surveys with hundreds of thousands of women and did a huge amount of detailed market research to develop the product. “At the beginning, we had this formal idea of what a paper pregnancy test used by a woman would be and the basic research to understand how the technology could work,” Anna says. “From there, we had to research the technology and learn. [We took] about a year and a half from that concept phase to having a product with over 99% accuracy.”Read Karl's Forbes piece on Lia Diagnostics here See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Have you ever had a curiosity about food from different cultures. It seems more and more specials about food are all over the place, showcasing the best authentic dishes countries have to offer. What if you could find all those mouthwatering dishes all in one place. That's exactly what Yummy Bazaar has set out to accomplish, providing foods from across the world at the click of a mouse. Here's Rebecca's Elevator Pitch: "Yummy Bazaar is an online and mobile platform that's dedicated providing the largest selection of specialty food from around the world in one place and at great value." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Glow is an ambitious enterprise that uniquely applies the power of data science to health. Our personal health tracking products illuminate health through data, and empower people with new information about their bodies.Though we live in a time when people track everything from diet and weight to the number of steps taken each day, it remains taboo to talk openly about some of the most critical phases of development: menstruation, sex, fertility, pregnancy, parenthood, and beyond.Here's Mike's elevator pitch: "We are the largest mobile platform for women's health." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karl sits down with Travis Katz, co-founder of Trip.com and Vice President of Product at Skyscanner See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There was a time when children couldn't wait until Saturday morning to sit down in front of the television and waste half a day watching cartoons. Today -- almost everywhere you turn -- there's another platform that delivers content, so much so that it's hard to keep up with all of them. Platforms like YouTube, Netflix and Amazon all deliver high-quality content that's accessible to anyone for free or at a low monthly cost, offering a large selection of shows catered towards younger audiences. The question PocketWatch aims to answer is exactly how much of that content is truly engaging and educational?To start, here's Chris Williams', CEO & Founder of PocketWatch's Elevator Pitch: "We are branded kids studio and we celebrate the new digital stars and formats [that] the kids are really passionate about and we bring them to kids everywhere."Listen to Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, speak with Chris about how companies like Viacom see the potential in child-produced con

Here's Mark's elevator pitch for Anki: "Anki is a consumer robotics and AI company that takes a lot of the sophisticated science of robotics and applies it to mass-market consumer products." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Anki originated a decade ago as a group of Ph.D. students who spent their weekends brainstorming and collaborating. "Every Saturday we'd get together and we would just work the entire day," Mark says. Their first product: a toy car. "We've built a very viable business that started out with a kind of autonomous toy cars, shrunk down to slot car sizes."The fascinating thing is that Anki didn't stop here. Mark and his team understood this successful product as a stepping stone. Their strategy: "Let's go into a segment where we can have a huge impact today and build an increasingly sophisticated robotics platform with an increasingly sophisticated stack of technologies to take on harder and harder challenges in consumer robotics." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Here’s Adriana’s elevator pitch for Lilu: “We are making breastfeeding more compatible with the lifestyle of the modern mom.... We have developed the first pumping bra that mimics expert recommended breast massaging techniques to help nursing mothers breast pump 30-200% more milk, hands free and hassle free.”Adriana explains that “over 80% of mothers start breastfeeding, and the vast majority are also returning to work within the first year of their baby’s life.” Once mothers are back at work, however, the pumping process can be so slow that it eats away as much as 25% of the workday. Pumping is also uncomfortable, and often doesn’t provide enough milk. Lilu aims to fix all of these problems.The benefits here are twofold: 1) a product that makes pumping milk be a better experience for breastfeeding mothers; 2) the time savings and added convenience and comfort mean that mothers who return to work are able to spend more of their time working, so society as a whole benefits from their increased productivity. Se

Karl Ulrich's Elevator Pitch for the Month of July is Lilu, founded by Adriana Vazquez Ortiz, GEN'16.Elevator Pitch, from Adriana: “We are making breastfeeding more compatible with the lifestyle of the modern mom.... We have developed the first pumping bra that mimics expert recommended breast massaging techniques to help nursing mothers breast pump 30-200% more milk, hands free and hassle free.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’re at work right now, chances are you’ve got a phone on your desk that came with the job. If not, you’re one of the lucky few: according to Craig Walker, founder of Dialpad, there are about 190 million desk phones in the U.S. Dialpad is aiming to change all that, by bringing down the desk phone, and bringing your business communications into the cloud so they can integrate with all your devices. Here’s Craig’s elevator pitch: “We are all about business enterprise communications, and we believe that your personal communications are pretty good. You have chosen whether you use an iPhone or an Android, and what apps and tools you want to use. And then you get to work and a lot of times you are faced with this technology that was made for your parents, like a desk phone with a bunch of lights and blinking things on it. What we do is we built a business phone system fully in the cloud that uses your own mobile phone or your own laptop or your own tablet, or your desk phone if you want to have a desk phone a

Nothing says comfort like chicken soup, and now you can send that comfort to your far-away loved ones with Spoonful of Comfort.Company president Scott Gustafson explains: “Spoonful of Comfort is an on-line gifting platform that enables the sender to send a very personal message of comfort and care to a loved one living anywhere in the continental United States. It allows them to be able to serve up a personal message of care through the time tested product of chicken soup and other gourmet soups. We package them up in gift packages. We have gone to great lengths to create a real unique and personal out of box experience so the recipients are getting more than just a thought when they are actually going through something.”Listen to Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and Scott talk about making a personal connection in this digital world. Plus, get the inside story of Spoonful of Comfort’s Shark Tank appearance, which Scott credits with increasing the company growth from 50%

Karl Ulrich's Elevator Pitch for the Month of June is Daily Harvest, founded by Rachel Drori, C'04Elevator Pitch, from Rachel: “Daily Harvest makes ready to blend smoothies, ready to heat soups, chia parfaits, overnight oats, all of the incredible drool-worthy foods that you see all over Instagram, frozen, delivered to your door, and ready to eat in seconds.”  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When Rachel Drori, founder of Daily Harvest, was raising her Series A, she had an investor ask her this question: How do you plan to be a good mother and an entrepreneur?The bad news is, this is a situation that many female entrepreneurs still find themselves in. The good news is, Rachel came up with the perfect answer, and you can use it, too.In the hour-long conversation between Wharton Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation Karl Ulrich and Rachel Druri, Rachel impressed Karl over and over again with her entrepreneurial acumen, and they geeked out over everything from product-market fit to the best ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. If you like to get in the weeds on how to start and scale a company, this is the podcast for you.But Karl was especially impressed by her handling of investors. Here's just one example:When asked, “How do you plan to be a good mother and an entrepreneur?” here’s what Rachel did: “I thought, and I was very quiet, and I kind of went inside of myself, and

Just a few minutes into the conversation between Karl Ulrich, Wharton's Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and Gregory Lattieri, founder of Recycle Track Systems, Karl called RTS "the Uber of waste." Want to know why?Gregory explains RTS this way: "We are a technology company first, but we are in the waste and recycling industry. So really a garbage and recycling company without trucks.... We have taken the technology that has been in car service and has been in food and other sectors and we have built a technology platform that allows us to be a waste and recycling company across multiple cities and service our clients. And then the key factor as the business changes and sustainability and people look to do better and do more for the environment we track our recycling material to the appropriate facility."RTS gives companies essential transparency, both into when trucks will arrive for their waste, and into validation of the recycling material. Good for these clients--and good for the earth. Se

Listen now for the sheer amusement of hearing Wharton Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Karl Ulrich spend 10 minutes eating bugs: chocolate covered crickets, chile-lime crickets, and coconut brittle bugitos, which Karl describes as, "like peanut brittle, but it's larvae brittle." Don Bugito, founded by Monica Martinez, sells edible insects as a healthy, sustainable snack food. They're high in protein, Omega-3, fiber, and are extremely water-efficient to grow. The whole interview is a fascinating dive into Monica's unexpected entrepreneurial journey, and by the end, you'll want to snack some larvae brittle as well. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Summer Crenshaw explains Tilr: "Tilr is a mobile first technology that matches people’s skills to company job requirements to automate the recruitment process. So really we’re in the business of eliminating discrimination and closing the skill gap through our technology." One example she uses: a person who has been a restaurant server and a customer service representative has all the skills for a job as a bank teller--and that's the job Tilr matched her to. And the success rate is terrific. According to Summer, 60-70% of the people placed by Tilr are offered full time, permanent roles at the companies. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karl Ulrich talks with Startup Challenge Semifinalist & Welligence founder Seth Neel, GRW'20.Elevator Pitch, from Seth: “What Welligence does is we gather the richest dataset of upstream oil and gas data, we think, in the world--particularly in Latin America. And we build our own proprietary models to forecast well-by-well production, which is then combined into these pretty clean data tools for our clients to use and make better decisions.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karl Ulrich talks with Startup Challenge Semifinalist & SpectrumScores founder Philip Williams, C'15, M'20.Elevator Pitch, from Philip Williams: “SpectrumScores was founded as a way to empower LGBTQ patients to take care of their own health care by offering an intuitive ranking and review system for health care providers across disciplines, on the basis of their LGBT competence. By providing all of this information and leveraging the collective experience of the community, we hope to be able to connect these patients to the best providers to meet their unique needs.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karl Ulrich talks with Startup Challenge Semifinalist & MD Ally founder Shanel Fields, WG'19.Elevator Pitch, from Shanel: “MD Ally is a non-emergency 911 navigation solution that ensures the appropriate use of emergency resources by providing non-emergency callers with immediate access to medical guidance, transportation services, and then also scheduling into more appropriate sites of care.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karl Ulrich talks with Startup Challenge Semifinalist & Collecto founder Federika Longinotti-Buitoni, WG'18Elevator Pitch, from Federika: “Collecto is an online luxury retailer that offers an unparalleled gifting experience, and we do so by focusing on three things. The first is a unique product curation. The second is a specialized gift presentation. And the third is a high-touch customer service.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.