Host Lisa Kiefer interviews UC Berkeley freshmen Joe Gleason and John Siano about their startup company ActivityAssist, bringing the field trip into the 21st century by digitizing the permission slip, fees, and attendance process with a mobile app.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next
Speaker 2:stay in
Speaker 3:nor the snoop two method to the madness of vibe weekly public affairs show on k a l ex Berkley celebrating bay area innovators [00:00:30] and your host Lisa Kiefer. And today I'll be talking to two UC Berkeley students, John Siano and Joe Gleason about a startup they're involved with called [inaudible].
Speaker 2:Oh, activity assist.
Speaker 1:You two are probably the youngest innovators I've had on this show. Would [00:01:00] you just introduce yourselves and talk about what you're doing here at UC Berkeley? I'm Joe Gleason. I cofounded activity assist. I'm from South Philadelphia. I went to high school in North Philadelphia and I went to a school where teachers had to pay for their own paper for schools, whether that meant permission slips, whether that meant homework. All teachers have to go to staples, pay with their own credit card and buy their own paper. So when I was 15 years old, I got one of my friends from outside New York and we started a company that digitize the permission slips for field shifts, [00:01:30] proms, homecomings, and sporting events. How old were you at 15 you were in high school? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I started with my own, with our own physics teachers. Uh, and my friend was in a town outside Newark, New Jersey called in south orange and I started at a high school called central high school in North Philly.
Speaker 1:And you are? I'm John CNO. I'm, I'm from Cupertino, California. I'm also a freshman here at Berkeley. I actually met Joe here. Um, both freshmen. That's right. Yeah, that's incredible to me. Okay. That's how I met Joe [00:02:00] here. Um, you showed me activity assists and um, you know, I just recently got started with the team as the director of business development. So I'm, I'm pretty excited to, you know, join the team and help the uh, website grow. Let's back up a little bit. You started this in high school and you brought it here to UC Berkeley. Can you talk about that process just a little bit? That's right. So, uh, basically how that went is before I came to Berkeley, there was just me and my co founder and he's at the University of Illinois and I came over here to Berkeley all the way from the east coast.
Speaker 1:[00:02:30] And it was, we, we've always worked remotely. So that's never been a problem. But I think it's been interesting in that Berkeley has such a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation and you can find people and just tell your story and people will listen to you offer great criticism, great questions, and you can move on. It's such a great place to innovate and such a great place to share your story that it's, it's perfect for me. It was perfect for activity assist and that's the reason we're happy to announce we just raised $20,000 from the dorm room fund. Okay. So we need to explain [00:03:00] what is this dorm room fund? So the dorm room fund is a, a venture backed firm that invests in college startups across the country. They're based in the bay area in, uh, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and I think they're expanding. So they're growing from a backed by first round capital and they invest in college startups on their average investment is about 20 k and we're happy to announce that we're one of the more recent investments.
Speaker 1:Okay. I did a little bit of reading about the dorm room fund and they started in, is it 2012 [00:03:30] yeah, that's right. And they started in Philadelphia. Had you known about them at all when you had this idea in high school? So in my high school, a lot of my friends went to Penn just because of the nature of being so close to Penn. And I actually knew a couple of people on the dorm room fund in Philadelphia from my high school who had gone on and studied at Penn. And so I had known of the Dorm Room Fund for Awhile, but I knew activities just wasn't at the stage where we could raise the money that the money would be necessary. You know what, for what we need now [00:04:00] to build a brand name. Plus you were in high school, they didn't fund high school. Exactly. They didn't, they didn't fund high schoolers, you know, and we're surprised they even funded freshmen that were one of the youngest people that are funded.
Speaker 1:So that is very exciting. Okay. So you knew about this fund and this fund was started by a company called first round capital. First round capital I think was the first company to invest in Uber. So they have this tradition of investing in very innovative and new ideas. So, um, they have [00:04:30] this division, I guess you'd call it, that controls the dorm room fund. That's right. How many projects have they funded across the United States? Universities? As of today? It's hundreds, hundreds, hundreds. I know my contacts from the bay area, Davey Bloom, Greg Guy, I connected us in the first place. I think they invested in an average of 10 a year per location. And that may, that number may fluctuate from year to year, but I think on average it's about 10 Raby last major across the country per location. So the four locations, [00:05:00] I would say 20 to 40 startups they invest in annually overall, nationwide.
Speaker 1:And so we're one of that group, which is really exciting and it is exciting. And so you know, all of the INS and outs of, so what did you need here at cal to continue? So one thing I knew I needed was as I'm studying, as we're all studying, I needed a team. You need great people to make a great company, uh, and you need great people to help sort of mellow the highs and lows of startups. And so I said, okay, I need to find these people. So I said, I need a marketing [00:05:30] guy, I need a business guy. Are you a business major? I am not a business major. How Nice your major know science and Engineering Major was, you can say, oh, what's that engineering. And I just loved material science. You know what material sciences, you can tell me it's the study of how everything is made.
Speaker 1:You found John. That's right. And um, what does it mean when you say you're a business development guy? So I help in outreach to schools, you know, such as like contacting schools, marketing, uh, finding teacher conferences. We can speak. I basically just to get the m word out for activity assist. [00:06:00] And uh, that's something that I've had experience with in the past. You know, in high school I worked on my own startup called study trove. And so I, I've kind of had a, where was this high school where you get to start doing a startup? Oh, it's called, it was called Cupertino high school. Just about 40 minutes away from here. I have to just intersect here and say I'm amazed that number one startups are happening in high school. So and also, and they continue on. I mean that's very exciting. So, so when I met Joe here, I was really impressed with how, how well activity assist the website was made, you know, he had all his numbers down [00:06:30] in terms of like budget, finance, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:The website, he thought of all like edge cases. Like we like to say we built a website with teachers for teachers. So the whole product came about because our teachers came to us and we were designing the website. We every step of the way we showed it to our own teachers. And so you were in this high school where you were living this application? Exactly. We were building it and living it. I like to say I live for you, the neat activity assessed and so did my partner, you know, at his high school out in New Jersey. So, okay, let's go, let's talk in detail about this product. [00:07:00] And before you go into detail about that, is it up and running here yet? So activity assist is fully operational. Is it operational here in California yet in California? No, we are not live in and the schools in California citing part.
Speaker 1:And that's what you're getting going here. So let's talk about the details of activity assist now. Great. So how it works is a teacher can basically go on our website, activity assist.com create activities like field trips, prompts those events, invite their students in chaperones to attend through the site [00:07:30] and then they can send permission slips to those parents, bypassing the kid. And then as a parent you can say your kid's been invited to attend the problem. You could sign and pay for that prom right from your email. No login required. So it's a, it's a completely online process. It's taking the old permission slip and modernizing. We're bringing the future into the 21st century. Okay. So how would a student, you know how in the old days you could, you could game some of these things and put a signature down for your parents. It wasn't your parents things, your, how are you getting around [00:08:00] any kind of fraudulent activity?
Speaker 1:So fraud is a good, is a good question. Uh, we sort of covered that with uh, on the student side if any student tries to intercept the parent email, you know, in sign and pay for themselves digitally. What we do at the beginning of any school onboarding, we send a form home, one form that says who we are, what we're doing, and we ask the parent to legally give them, give us the most accurate email address, the one they check most often and then they have to sign therefore covering our liability. So if a student does happen to [00:08:30] access the parent's email signing pay online, we're not liable. So, okay. Yeah. So you get an electronic signature. That's right. We use docusign. Yup. We take care of that online. And it's really nice because one thing we did is we, we launched a bunch of focus groups with parents and parents are the one thing they hate most, I don't know about you is the logins.
Speaker 1:They absolutely hated login. So what we did is we did something pretty unique. We, we built a link that only works with that particular. So if I send you an email saying your son or daughter has been invited to attend the senior prom, [00:09:00] only you can access that link from your computer. No one else can access that link. If someone accidentally gets access to your inbox from another, like another place, they can't get it. That's really great security. That's where it's important. So, um, you've been at this since, what year was that? Must've been 2014. The summer of 2014. Okay. Did it become profitable out in Pennsylvania? So we've been actually working on this site for about a year and then we built a mobile app. And what the mobile app does is it lets chaperones, let's say on the day of the Prom, take attendance. So as a kid comes into, say John's coming [00:09:30] into the problem, I can tap them in on my phone and send an attendance report directly to my school.
Speaker 1:So there's no paper attendance list. It automatically updates to the system. And so we spent a whole bunch of time building that and then I sort of had to do the business and I did a lot of fundraising. So uh, in the beginning I started out, I self funded most of the business and I raised a lot of money from go fund me, uh, approximate about like 8,000 total among in that first round is now let's talk about what is go fund me. Go Fund me is an amazing website. Go check it out. Go Fund me.com. How it works is you go, [00:10:00] you, you make your campaign say ah, there's a lot of medical cases, a lot of educational cases. I know one, I know one friend who wanted to go to Pittsburgh and so he'd put on his, he launched the go fund me campaign advertising, how he loved robotics and how he wanted to go to Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1:So this is a crowd funding sec donation crowdfunding and he raised the money that he could use to live and go to school in Pittsburgh. So it's really amazing. And it sounds like it's geared toward educational and it's geared towards educational things. It's geared towards things that the people you know want to pay for to [00:10:30] in a, in a high school startup. So you started this and then you got the attention. How did you get this $20,000 raise from dorm room fund? So I spent probably the last two months of going to events, pitches, competitions, talking to everyone. I could try to fundraise this one where we have a goal right now, 50 k over the next 12 months. That's our fundraising goal. And we've raised 20 from the doormen fund. So how do we do it? I was going from competition and competition. I'd probably, I'd probably pitched to 35 vcs with 30 vcs trying to raise this money.
Speaker 1:[00:11:00] And you know, vcs were a small fish in a big pond. They don't want to invest in us. And so then we, we eventually found, I remembered, oh, the dorm room fund and then I tried to reach out. I knew a guy, I know a dorm room fund just to back up. It's run by students. That's right. It's run by Grad and undergraduate students at Berkeley and at Stanford, at least in the bay area. And so I knew a guy named [inaudible], his name's Brian Dunn. He manages the, this awesome consulting group at Berkeley called the two mead consulting group. It's an, it's an Israeli consulting group and he knew David Bloom who was sort of my [00:11:30] account rep at dorm room fund and he connected us last semester we chatted and got to know each other and then we reconnected this semester when I was fundraising and it just, it seemed like it worked and then we did a pitch, we made it and we're in, so you have 20,000 when did you get this money?
Speaker 1:How long ago? We got the sort of like the acceptance about two weeks ago and then we're getting the money. Right. So you're up and running now and you're reaching out. How are you using that money right now? So we have an itemized budget. A couple of things for launching an online advertising campaign, launching a direct mail campaign. [00:12:00] Direct mail is like sending pamphlets to, to schools, you know, seeing something that you can hold in your hand. Oh we're looking at, as John mentioned, Ed Tech Conferences and teacher conferences. We think this is a word of mouth game, sort of getting this in teacher's hands because of that. At the end of the day, the teacher is our best consumer. They're the ones who are benefiting from this. They're the ones who love it. And I've not met a teacher who hasn't loved this product. It's so simple. So we need to get into those conferences.
Speaker 1:And then also I'm looking to hire a couple people. So that's our fundraising outside of school mentor [00:12:30] or Advice, I mean cause you know, you come into this bay area, there's a lot of teachers and what help are you getting? So what help am I getting? I think it all started back home. Uh, when I was in middle school. Eighth Grade, eighth grade, my mom started a company I called Jelly Arts LLC. It's an art product. It's for printmaking. And so when we were first starting out in eighth grade, she was, she was shipping out product four to five pieces a day. And I would come home everyday school ended at three 30. I would run home packing ship boxes, run to the post office [00:13:00] by four 30 cause I had to get the rent four 30 otherwise I couldn't sit about product for that thing. And I have that product for my mom's saw business from my basement every day for a year, you know, and I got to see her business grow and now it's a million dollar company.
Speaker 1:You know, it's, it's exciting, you know, after a lot of years. And I got to grow with that business, I got to see the mistakes she's made and she's totally been my advisor on this. Uh, my dad started a company too when he was younger. They've been my advisors. And so you grew up in a household like I did. We're a household of entrepreneurs. That's the only way around it, John. Yeah. So, um, you know, my household [00:13:30] also has been, you know, very proactive and know creating things. And um, so for example, when I was in high school, I mentioned I created my own educational startup called study trove. My parents were very active study trove. It's basically an essay edited being a website for schools and still operational. But through running that, I realized some of the mistakes that I made. And when talking to Joe, when he introduced me to activity assist, I realized a lot of those mistakes that I had made in the past, those were corrected in an activity assistant.
Speaker 1:That's what really attracted me to joining the activity assist team. I [00:14:00] was just really impressed with the product. Well, there's nothing like failure to help you understand what you need to do. You can always learn from your mistakes. And I like to say, what does it like to run a small company? Uh, this is what it's like. One day you get the dorm room fund and you leave the meeting and you're saying, oh my God, we're going to make it. We're going to be a $10 billion firm. We're going to have an IPO, it's going to be amazing. The next day you're gonna have a call with the customer. It's not going to go so well. You're going to leave that meeting and you're going to say we're going to dissolve and three months it's not going to work. All this stuff. So working [00:14:30] a startup is kind of like running a wave. You've got to sort of balance the, the ups and the downs and mellow it out. So on your good days you have to say, look, we're not, we're not there yet. And on your bad days you get, you got to say, oh well we got this going for us. And I like to say my blood pressure is going through the roof all the time.
Speaker 3:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to the method to the madness. [00:15:00] A biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Keifer, and today I'm interviewing two innovative UC Berkeley students, John Siano and Joe Gleason. They have a startup called activity assist that empowers teachers to create digital permission slips and send them off to parents instantly who can then grant permission and pay electronically while [00:15:30] letting chaperones take attendance on the day of the trip through their mobile app.
Speaker 1:Tell me what your immediate goals are and then later goals. Cause you know, you just, you're just getting started here in the bay. That's right. That's right. So our immediate goals are traction and that's just getting the word out schools and getting our name out and that's getting us in teachers hands. I'm willing to give this product away to, to schools for free in the intermediate time, uh, for this year, for [00:16:00] the remainder of this year so that we can get them for next year. You know, a lot of public schools finalize their budgets by July 1st so we're really pushing for that July 1st deadline. What do they have to pay to get started? Right. So we charge $500 per school per year. A but when you're first starting out, we're going to give it to you for 30 days. Try it with a couple of trips and make sure you like it and make sure it works with your data and then go for it.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's $500 per year per school. We don't charge per pupil. Well, you know, budgeting is really tough here in California public schools. [00:16:30] Are you also approaching private schools? We are. We are looking at private cause I was, you know, I mean they may not have that mudget budget after the field trip expenses to pay $500 sounds crazy, but it's a lot. So when I was first starting out, I did a lot of research, I did a lot of research and one thing that I found was that even these public school districts that are strapped for budget space, one place they are not strapped for, or they at least have a little bit more about room is their ed tech. They usually have 10 to 30 k available to [00:17:00] invest in things like this every year. So there's totally budget space and a lot of schools now for talking city schools that Ed tech budget space is not there.
Speaker 1:But if we're talking suburban middle class, you know, family schools. What about Oakland Public Schools? Oakland public school, inner cities, inner city school districts, different story. I'm from Philadelphia, which is, I think it's the second worst public education system in the country behind Detroit. And I actually worked at a company in high school where we worked with teachers and principals to w [00:17:30] w we raised money for them or we gave money, we gave them grants. And one thing I got to do is I got to meet principals. I remember one story I heard was someone was, had a meeting with the principal. They were walking down this hallway in their high school in South Philly high and they would walk in a classroom and they would see the teacher at the desk with their feet on the desk with the magazine in their hands. The kids running aimlessly.
Speaker 1:They'd walk in another classroom pitch black textbooks piled from the floor to the ceiling, some three years old, never used. And so there's totally a misallocation of resources in city school districts. [00:18:00] And we recognize that. I definitely do coming from Philadelphia, and I want to sort of tackle that. I don't want teachers to have to pay for their own paper. It's ridiculous. If you're going to go on a field trip, it requires buses. There's a lot of other expenses besides the paper. So, so the buses bus drivers are actually paid. They have tenure. Usually they usually, they have an hourly schedule, so they're already running around with a sporting events in cities. I know, I know Philadelphia at least. Uh, there's bus drivers going around all the time because of the inner study supporting us spreading clubs. [00:18:30] Yeah. But do you get my drift here?
Speaker 1:I mean, when you're talking about inner city school, so number one, you have to assume, do they have buses? Do they have the budget? Do they have, can they send out a bunch of kids to, there's one thing we charge $500 per school per year for schools that can afford it. So for inner city schools, we're going to actually give activity system for free because we know that those school districts on average have 300, 400 schools. They can't afford a product like this, let alone something even cheaper so we can stand only stand to benefit [00:19:00] by giving it to them. So we're going to give it to them. It's a mutual benefit. They can save money on paper. Their teachers can save a bunch of time. What if you start to make money? I mean just theoretically this thing takes off like crazy. Who gets the money?
Speaker 1:Does do University of California Berkeley get any money or is it strictly go back into your pocket or does Dorm Room Fund get money? Activity assist is an LLC of New Jersey and so we're, we're a for profit private company us the money will go to the owners, just a funding round. They Invest 20 K in permits [00:19:30] or a note, which is a sort of a debt vehicle. So technically we owe them the money back. So you've paid us back and everything else is yours. So the Dome Room Fund is full of students as well? Yes it is. So if they're taking equity that students who are becoming vcs and making money on other student projects. So true. So I work, I work part time for a company called personal capital in San Francisco. And Mike, why are you studying? That's a different guy than say a better question is when do I sleep?
Speaker 1:And so on. My boss there were at the Dorm Room Fund at Berkeley, [00:20:00] he's a Hoss Grad and uh, and he always likes to say working with the dorm room fund is like working with for VC firm and you're managing the VC and firm as a kit, you know, which is like crazy, you know, cause your budget is kind of limitless and you can invest in all these cool companies, but you have to, you have to be careful, you have to be cautious and it's, you learn what it takes to invest and work in the investing world. So working for the government fund is a great opportunity. Anyone out there and then you get picked for that. Oh well it's kind of like you've got to network your way and you know, you gotta you gotta talk. So if you know someone, [00:20:30] you go talk to them, see what you can do.
Speaker 1:I definitely recommend it to anyone out there who's saying, oh, the Doberman fund sounds awesome. I should go do it. It's totally worth, yeah. Especially like business majors in this major house. Oh, MBAs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well even you guys, after you're done with this project, you could be on the Dome Dorm Room. Who knows? John, what do you think? I think it's a good idea possibly, but I'd rather focus on this for now. Okay. Let's get, John, let's talk to you a little bit. Um, what is your major here at cal? Um, I'm a business major and a computer science major. Are you bringing computer skills to activity [00:21:00] assist? I'm currently, I'm learning more and more so I'm hoping that, you know, like for example this summer I'm going to be scaling up a bit. So I hope to, you know, continually bring stuff to the company.
Speaker 1:Are you using big data on this or is it too early? Too early. Too early. But we have plans we have planned. Okay. So let's assume you s you start doing well and, and people get wind of your company. I know that some of the dorm room fund projects have gone on to y Combinator and other places like that and you know, taken off like a real company. Are you ready for something like that? What, [00:21:30] I mean, could this happen I think possibly a year from now that could be the best place for us to go? Quite honestly, you y Combinator is an excellent program. I like that they pick you or would you approach them? How does that work? You apply and they pick you, you interview, you go for it. That's how that works. It's a huge, it's a very small acceptance rate, uh, probably on the, on the level of Stanford's [inaudible] and uh, so yeah, you apply and I think next year wouldn't be great for us.
Speaker 1:We're not where we are. We're not where we need to be. Do you have numbers that show that what you're actually [00:22:00] saving schools yet? Yes. So, so why we even started this was because a physics teacher came to us and was managing his own trip. He spent two weeks trying to manage a physics trip and he tried to manage over $10,000 for one field trip and he had to waste two weeks of class time, prep time trying to deal with this. And so in terms of teacher time, we saved schools with the most money in terms of teacher time. So what that means is if the average teacher's salary is 60 k which it is in New Jersey, we can save you somewhere in the neighborhood of five to 6,000 in terms of teacher trial [00:22:30] opportunity costs, no, that's money. Not like liquid money, but that's money that teachers could otherwise spend in the classroom.
Speaker 1:You know? So there's a benefit there that you don't have to waste time passing on a trip for to every kid in my class and saying, Johnny, where's your trip form waiting two weeks for this, you know, trying to track it down. Instead you could set version subs out in the morning. Every parent can see it while they're at work in their email, send it back and you can be done in a day or two rather than weeks. Also in terms of managing it, it's really simple. All the payments run through the site so you can track all of that and it's all covered. [00:23:00] It's really something that's good. And what do you think the greatest challenges are here? You're a California and so what do you think your greatest challenges are going to be? Probably the greatest challenge that I see is just getting the word out to schools because everyone who's seen the product, they've loved it.
Speaker 1:You know, not only teachers but also conferences we've been at. They've also, this is a fantastic idea and we just need to get the word out so people know that this is a service that's offered. And I feel that once people, once we have like market saturation, everyone will want to jump on this product. It seems like in the public [00:23:30] school system you would go to, you know, the county offices or you know, the head person. Have you thought about going to Sacramento and the Department of Education and presenting to those people? So Sacramento and cities of that magnitude, we're not, we don't want to go into deep yet. You know the big cities because we want to sell, we want to sort of start out smaller and make sure that everything's working, you know, doing the kinks. Our targets are small public school districts right now and private schools on the individual basis.
Speaker 1:We want to start out with, you know, 20 schools fine [00:24:00] to the kinks and then see, okay, how can we get into central that you have that list right already, right? We have targets of your targets and you're beginning to, yes we are. You know, you obviously have this background in entrepreneurship and everything. When did it all become a reality for you? I like to say that it started out with Evan and I and our basements, Skype calls every day after school. We would mock up the website, we would design it. In the beginning we were designing this product as a tool for our teachers. It was not a business and so when did it become a business [00:24:30] and it's kind of like, I think it's kind of a gradual thing. I think that's when you start to talk about, oh, when you start to run focus groups with teachers and you say, Oh, and you're talking to them.
Speaker 1:I think the moment for me was when we sat down in a room of 30 30 teachers, showed it all to them anonymously. Each one of them said they loved it and that they needed it for their own, for themselves. You know, it was so simple. They could do it in five minutes and be done. Been pretty exciting. Oh, I was so excited to meet you. This was a high school basement runs Skype project. I like to say that [00:25:00] those teachers, every single one of them said they loved it and that to me was a moment we can tell entrepreneurs are, can be made or are, are you born an entrepreneur? I think it's totally a, a like a malting process. You have to go through the cauldron of becoming an entrepreneur because it's not as, yeah, you know, it's not as a, it's not as simple as like going and just like coming up with an idea.
Speaker 1:There are a million ideas out there. A true entrepreneur doesn't need a hundred ideas and entrepreneur can [00:25:30] have zero ideas, but if they find someone with an idea, a true entrepreneur executes, they devote themselves, they grind, they talk to people, they know their consumer, and then they move forward. And that's what an entrepreneur does. They're an executioner. They're not an ideate an idea, you know they're an executioner. Okay. John, do you agree with that? I mean, what do you feel like, what is the definition to you of what you grew up in an entrepreneurial family? Do you think that you, it's natural or is it learned or can it be acquired? I've been, I'm going to go with [00:26:00] kind of a boring answer. I think it's kind of half and half. Just referring back to what Joe said, it's kind of like a call driven that there's going to be a lot of moments in which you feel, oh, this isn't working, or maybe my idea isn't as great as I thought it was.
Speaker 1:But if you keep pushing forward, you know, you keep developing your product, your keep learning from what the customers want and you just keep going. Then I think that's what can help you succeed in entrepreneurship. And just as Joe said, it's not just about the idea because anyone can can come up with a fantastic idea. You've got to go out there and execute and actually get it done, get sales, that type of stuff. [00:26:30] And besides execution, it's also a determination. Being an entrepreneur is taking those 4:00 AM nights. You know, if you have to meet a deadline, then you have to meet a deadline and no one's gonna come and cover you. You have to take care of it yourself, you know, so it's knowing that you, that you're fully responsible for it and you take ownership of it, but you love it. All the same.
Speaker 1:You love every moment. You'd have to love it. You have. So if you guys get incredibly rich, are you going to drop out of school? Don, you answered that first. Will you need school anymore? I think school would be a nice, a nice backup to [00:27:00] have. Um, right now we're doing a pretty good job of balancing it though. So, um, I guess we'll just wait and see to where this takes off. Um, but for now we're, we're doing pretty well in both school and activity assist. Yeah. So how would any interested listeners get ahold of you? So to anyone out there who's interested in working on the business side or on the back end or as a full stack developer, definitely go to our website, www.activityassist.com. Reach out to us on our contact us page. Check out how the product works. [00:27:30] If you're a parent, go to our website, see how we can save your school time.
Speaker 1:Talk to your teachers, talk to your friends, do see what you can do. See if you liked the product, go check out our video, I n to anyone out there who's just a young entrepreneur, definitely go and see what you can do. I would say if you have an idea and you have a, if you have a team, if you have some friends that you know, let's tackle this, do it. Don't hesitate. Take, take control. It's the greatest experience you'll ever have. And you and we should. They go look at dorm room fund. If they have traction, if they have a business model, if they have the team, [00:28:00] then later you can fundraise. I think in the beginning it's about how do we talk to our consumer, how do we make sure the market needs this product? And then it's how do we build a great team? Because like I said, you need great people for a great business. Yeah, I would say you don't just go out there and be proactive. I think it's better to fail and learn from that experience than just sit back, be complacent and not do anything and also go out there and be proactive. That's it. Well, Joe and John, thank you for being on this program today. You are absolutely the youngest entrepreneurs that had been on my program. I mean, I'm impressed. [00:28:30] So activity assist. Congratulations. Yeah,
Speaker 3:and good luck on your project. Very nice. And that was UC Berkeley students, John Siano and Joe Gleason. They're only freshmen, but they've started a company called activity assist and recently received $20,000 in funding from the dorm room fund. Their idea is to empower teachers to create digital permission slips and then [00:29:00] sending them off to parents instantly who can then grant permission and pay electronically while letting chaperones take attendance on the day of the trip through their mobile app. You've been listening to a method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show onK , a l ex Berkeley celebrating bay area. Innovators. Tune in again in two weeks at the same time.
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