The Generalist Edge: where builders refuse to specialize
The most dangerous career advice you’ll ever get is to pick a lane early.
Every conversation we had this semester pointed at the same thing. Alessio Grancini trained as an architect before he became one of the best AR engineers at Snapchat. Marly Kos cold emailed her way into a five-person beauty startup and ended up owning everything from supply chain to brand. Daniel Min got rejected from every finance job he wanted and built a career no job description could have predicted. Anna Shaposhnik took her design background to space robotics and won our TroyLabs Launch with it.
None of them optimized for a clean resume. They just kept following what they were actually good at, even when it didn’t fit a category.
The builders who win right now aren’t the ones who went deepest fastest. They’re the ones who connected things across domains that nobody else thought to connect.
That’s what this week’s newsletter is about.
🚀 LAUNCHed
Eight weeks of work. One stage. Tuesday night, our BUILD startups delivered.
LAUNCH is TroyLabs’ big semester-end pitch competition: the moment six founding teams get to show what they’ve actually built. Each startup spent the semester working alongside a dedicated TroyLabs team across product, engineering, design, marketing, and finance. This Tuesday was the cumulative result of all the teams’ hard work.
ORBES walked away with first place and $1,500! Founded by USC Iovine and Young Academy alum Anna Shaposhnik, ORBES is building the robot workforce for space, having already raised 400k to do so. Their free-flying drone ORB handles inspection and cinematic filming inside orbital environments, dangerous, expensive work that currently eats up astronaut time and costs the industry an estimated $300M a year. Anna’s pitch made the room feel the weight of that problem. Space infrastructure is broken, and the solution isn’t sending more humans up there.
“Our TroyLabs team is extremely skilled and made the presentation sing! The diversity of talent from graphics to finance to tech, helped us tune several parts of the business that continue to strengthen our pitch to customers and investors,” said Anna after her big win.
Summit, a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform incubated through LavaLab and accelerated with TroyLabs, won our Audience Choice Award. As AI becomes the new front door to discovery, Summit helps companies understand how models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude currently describe their brand and what it takes to show up in the answers. The pitch clicked with the room immediately and the team brought home $500 for winning over the audience!
Lucas R, Co-founder of Summit, reflects on the 8 weeks with us, “Growing this past semester with TroyLabs has been really rewarding, wearing plenty of different hats. Coming from a mechanical engineering background, the startup space has allowed me to explore what the future looks like beyond a 9-5, and TL has been a big part of that.”
We had the honor of being judged by Catherine Chen (CFO, Lightspeed Partners), Michael P. Stone (Founder, CEO and Investor at PROVE and C9 Partners), Megan Fulton (Founder, VioletX), Jordan Michaels (Founding Partner, Three Palms), and Eli Kia (GP, Fortify Ventures).
📅 DEMO is April 22nd
SoCal’s largest student-run entrepreneurship conference is one week away.
DEMO (est. 2017), presented by TroyLabs and sponsored by the USC Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, brings together 50+ startups, 100+ investors, and 1,000+ attendees for a full day of exhibitions, pitch competitions, and workshops.
A sneak peak into this year’s keynotes:
Evan Spiegel, Founder & CEO of Snap Inc., joins us for a panel on April 22nd from 2–3 PM at the USC Trojan Grand Ballroom, moderated by our DEMO team member Bálint Dobai. Evan co-founded Snap at 21 and built it into one of the defining platforms of the last decade.
Amy Liu, Founder & CEO of Tower 28 Beauty, joins us from 12–1 PM at the same venue, moderated by TroyLabs President Anastasia Ramirez. Amy built Tower 28 from scratch into one of the most beloved clean beauty brands of the last decade: rooted in accessibility, skin-first formulation, and genuine community.
RSVP is mandatory: doorlist.app/e/ddeSyII
TroyLabs DEMO 2026 x Framer Designathon
This year, TroyLabs is partnering with Framer, a no-code website builder valued at $150M+, for an exclusive designathon at DEMO.
Teams of 1–4 will receive a mock startup brief and compete to build the most compelling landing page from scratch in 60 minutes. Framer crash course included. AI tools, templates, and stock assets all fair game. Cash prizes and Framer swag up for grabs.
When: April 22 · 11:15 AM – 3:30 PM Where: USC TCC Ballroom
No experience required. Sign up here: doorlist.app/e/HBEZvDK
🎤 Recent TL Events
TL x Snapchat
He studied architecture in Italy. Then discovered Google Cardboard, and never looked back.
TroyLabs IGNITE hosted a fireside chat with Alessio Grancini, Senior AR Engineer at Snap Inc, where he builds the future of Spectacles and social AR experiences. The conversation, moderated by Badria Kazim (PM @ TroyLabs), covered his winding path from architecture school to one of the most influential AR platforms in the world.
Alessio’s background is a hybrid most engineers don’t have: trained in design, fluent in code. His take is that most technical people over-engineer simple problems, while most creative people can’t execute. The edge comes from treating technology as a medium to get somewhere, not as the destination itself.
On AR’s future: he sees glasses winning not because they’re flashy, but because they don’t pull you away from reality. The phone demands your full attention. Glasses sit inside your life. Real-time translation, contextual AI assistance, seamless voice interaction, these are the use cases he thinks actually stick.
The biggest unsolved problem? Getting basic computer tasks to feel natural on hardware like Spectacles. File management, messaging, terminal access are all friction that keeps power users from fully switching. That’s the gap he’s building toward.
For students thinking about careers at the intersection of design and tech, his advice was blunt: don’t wait to build. Study the products you want to work on, find what’s missing, build something better, and show it to the people hiring. That’s how he got in the door.
For international students navigating visas: start documenting everything from day one. Think like a lawyer about your own achievements. The O-1 process rewards people who can tell a coherent story about why they’re extraordinary, so build the evidence before you need it.
Fireside chat w/ Daniel Min
Most people treat content like a lottery ticket. Post a few times, hope something blows up, give up when it doesn’t.
Daniel Min came to USC and dismantled that logic in real time.
The session got uncomfortable fast. Daniel didn’t come to validate anyone’s content strategy. He came to point out exactly why it wasn’t working. The biggest culprit: people waiting until they feel ready. The camera is already in your pocket. The gap between people who build audiences and people who don’t isn’t talent. It’s reps.
His framework for actually breaking through: stop trying to reach everyone. Find the one specific person your content is for and speak directly to them. The more specific the viewer, the more the content travels. Broad appeals to everyone but land with no one.
He also pushed back on the idea that distribution can save a bad product. It can’t. If the content isn’t good, the strategy doesn’t matter.
The moment that stuck: Daniel didn’t land his dream jobs out of school. Got rejected across the board. Ended up in a social media internship he considered a consolation prize. He chose to treat it like an opportunity instead. That reframe is what got him here.
TL x Summer Fridays
Marly Kos didn’t get a referral into Summer Fridays. She cold emailed the CEOs and told them exactly why they should hire her.
They did. She joined a five-person team.
Six years later, Summer Fridays has 150+ employees globally and Marly has touched nearly every part of that growth. Bizdev, supply chain, product testing, events, PR, branding. Her career path that doesn’t fit neatly into a job title.
What made the conversation interesting wasn’t the resume. It was how she got there. She’s not a technical person, but she got genuinely curious about product packaging design and that curiosity turned into real ownership. She didn’t decide in advance what she was allowed to care about, and that’s what kept opening doors.
The thing she’s most proud of isn’t the growth metrics. It’s the popups. Their first one had a handful of people show up. Now New Yorkers line up around the block in freezing weather for them. She could point to anything else and she still points to that.
The room also left with free products! Not a bad Tuesday :)
⚡Startup Spotlight
Last edition we dove into healthcare tech with Nara and Superpower. This week we’re highlighting three startups from TroyLabs’ accelerator this semester:
Crack’d Up
Eggs are one of the most consumed foods in the world. Nobody has ever made them exciting.
Crack’d Up is fixing that. Founded by students Aiden and Nik, Crack’d Up is the first line of flavor-infused whole liquid eggs. Same real eggs, same protein, same three minutes on the stove — but in flavors like French Toast, Buttermilk, and Chipotle.
It started the way the best consumer ideas do: two friends in a college kitchen who couldn’t find a breakfast that was fast, healthy, and actually tasted good. So they made their own.
The category is massive. The twist is simple.
But Cute
Most toy brands sell a product. But Cute is building a world.
Founded by USC master’s alum Mikey Schumacher, but cute is a collectible plush brand born from a place called Quirklandia, a fictional universe where being different isn’t a flaw, it’s the whole point. Each character is designed to celebrate imperfection through storytelling and quirky design, with IP built from the ground up to scale across media, licensing, and consumer products.
Mikey brings a rare combination to the table: a background in advertising, multiple design and utility patents, and years of product development across toy categories.
But cute is betting that imperfection is universally relatable and we are so excited to see it.
Drinkover
The hangover supplement space is full of products that mask symptoms. Drinkover is built to prevent them.
Founded by USC brothers Chris and Kyle Sheng, Drinkover is an anti-hangover supplement engineered around MonaFit, a patented, citrinin-free red yeast rice extract backed by 200+ peer-reviewed studies. The formula works in three stages: before you drink, while your body processes alcohol, and during recovery.
The insight behind it is simple but underserved: hangovers cost high performers up to 11 hours of their weekend and make them 25% less productive. Chris and Kyle weren’t willing to choose between living out their 20s and showing up sharp the next morning. So they built the thing that lets you do both.
🚀 Explore More of TroyLabs
In case you’re looking for something new to try out in TL next semester, here’s everything that we have to offer:
DEMO — SoCal’s Largest Entrepreneurship Conference
Interested in participating in SoCal’s largest entrepreneurship conference? Apply to DEMO as a startup to table, pitch, and compete—or attend as an audience member to connect with founders, builders, and investors across the LA startup ecosystem.
IGNITE — Startup Community
Want access to workshops, speaker events, and specialized curriculum designed to help you break into the startup ecosystem? **That’s IGNITE,** TroyLabs’ open community connecting students with founders, operators, and investors.
Internal Member
Have skills in design, marketing, finance, product management, or engineering, but don’t have your own startup idea yet? Join TroyLabs as an internal member and work on real startups alongside our teams.
BUILD — Startup Accelerator
Have a startup with an MVP and need a team to help you scale? Apply to BUILD, TroyLabs’ accelerator program where we match founders with talented student teams to help accelerate growth.
Would you like your startup to be featured in our next newsletter? Are you an alum with job openings or other exciting opportunities you’d like to share with the community? Email us at dmiao@usc.edu