TroyLabs Weekly: Launch Is Lit
“We provide Trojan founders with an all-in-one framework to get their startups off the ground.” 🚀
Week of March 15-21: Startup News, Pitching, & Hiring Opportunities
Dear Reader,
We are thrilled to announce our accelerator's biggest event of the year - LAUNCH- is back on March 24th!
Join our top 6 Trojan startups, as they pitch their hearts out! We want you to hear from some of the most innovative minds on campus and have them share their passion for the biggest problems we have all witnessed!
All registrants will be entered into a raffle to win multiple $20 Amazon gift cards!
Click this link to support your fellow Trojan Founders and RSVP for the event!
Enjoy the Read and Fight On! ✌🏻
The Latest in Startups💡
Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, listen in as they unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Backed by YC, Vendease is building Amazon Prime for restaurants in Africa
For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business can easily run out of money or have considerable savings.
Big Tech Could Emerge Stronger From Covid-19
While the rest of the economy is tanking from the crippling impact of coronavirus, business at the biggest technology companies is holding steady — even thriving. With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the pandemic has deepened reliance on services from the technology industry’s most prominent companies while accelerating trends that were already benefiting them.
Get Plugged 🔌
Fanzia - Software Engineer (Laravel, CSS, HTML, MySQL)
One of our build companies is hiring, reach out to please send us a resume at fanzia.app@gmail.com and tell us a bit about yourself!
PCV Prize - Penn Climate Ventures Pitch Competition (Deadline March 29)
Do you have what it takes to take on climate change? If so, register for the PCV Prize, a climate pitch competition for a chance to win money and receive access to industry mentors and VCs.
EthSign - Front End Developer (React.JS, Website3.JS or other UI/UX skills)
Ethsign is a decentralized, versioned, and consensus-based electronic agreements signing application built on Ethereum and IPFS.
Johnson and Johnson-Eversana Consulting - Business Technology Analyst
Contact: tgavin@usc.edu for more details
📚Weekly Resources: Pitching
YCombinator: How To Pitch Your Startup
In this lecture, YC Partner Kevin Hale goes over how to package up your idea and communicate it to an investor. He shares his tips on how to craft your pitch in a clear and concise way that effectively grabs your audience's attention.
Entrepreneur: Telling Your Startup Story
Investors reportedly look at pitch decks for only 3 minutes and 44 seconds, and for every 1,000 pitches an investor hears, they only fund 100 companies.
TechCrunch: How To Pitch Your Startup In 60 Seconds Flat
“Show me a person who never made a mistake, and I will show you a person who never did anything.”
Hint: Show passion. Fast. (0 – 20 seconds)
Startup Highlight 👔
Elysian
Most individuals are either uncomfortable with death topics, too busy to plan, or don’t know where to start. Elysian is an end-of-life marketplace and planning tool that aims to reduce friction when arranging services for loved ones that have recently passed.
The current death care market is antiquated, confusing, and non-sustainable. Traditional burials can cost a family between $7,000 and $12,000. This includes viewing and burial, basic service fees, transporting remains to a funeral home, a casket, embalming, and other preparation. The average cost of a funeral with cremation is $6,000 to $7,000. It doesn’t have to be this way. This market needs to easily promote products and services that are transparent, ethical, and good for the environment.
Death causes adverse environmental impacts that are avoidable. For example, embalming bodies meet temporary aesthetic purposes for the living. But as soon as a body is placed in the ground, the toxins are absorbed into the ground. The process is also expensive. About 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid are buried in U.S. cemeteries every year. Ten acres of a typical cemetery contain nearly 1,000 tons of casket steel, 20,000 tons of concrete in burial vaults, and enough wood used in coffins to build 40 homes. The maintenance of cemeteries also causes a negative impact.
The deathcare market has the potential to make death easier for families through technology while improving the environment. Elysian will be part of that solution.
Vincent Perez is the CEO of Elysian. He is a cross-functional strategist and entrepreneur with a passion for the intersection of technology, community organizing, and activism. Prior he conducted product strategy with Samsung and ventures research with Cleo Capital. Vincent experienced a tragic loss first-hand with the loss of his partner Shane Colombo taken by city-group gun violence in 2018.
Neilda Pacquing is the CPO of Elysian. Before grad school, she worked as Sr. UX/UI designer for Bank of America and Sephora, designing products between web, mobile, wearables, and in-store digital. She started a VR startup in 2018 and graduated from the Boost VC accelerator and Nasdaq Milestone Makers incubator in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Quote of the Day 💭
"Failure's a marker of success in its own right because you went out and tried something... If you really don't want to fail, go find a comfortable chair and stay there. Just don't go out and do anything."
- Whitney Wolfe Herd, Founder and CEO of Bumble