Steve Fisher and Lee Moffie co-founders of State & Liberty Clothing Company in Ann Arbor want to give you the shirt off their back – literally! Selling professional dress shirts made for the athletic build was definitely finding a less traveled opportunity. And as two athletes, one they thought could take off.
Samantha Snabes learned to be creative, and persuasive when as a child she helped other students pull out loose teeth! She also learned about hardware, levers, and ingenuity! These lessons carried over into her love of space (she worked at NASA and Johnson Space Center), technology and problem solving. Today Samantha is co founder of Re3D.org, a Human Scale 3-D Printer manufacturing company and is this week’s guest on The Trep Talk. The company’s product can be found in 41 countries and had one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns to date!
Marc Hudson is used to delivering. As a ten year old, he delivered flowers at a Farmer’s Market and today as CEO and Co-founder of Quicken Loan’s spin off, Rocket Fiber, he is delivering gigabit Internet speed to the residence of the city of Detroit! Rocket Fiber has made Detroit one of three cities in the world offering ten-gigabit Internet connectivity!
Starting an Internet company in 1995, right at the start of the Internet explosion was Jon Dwoskin’s introduction to being an entrepreneur. He and his partners quickly realized they needed to learn all about business and start thinking big. They attended every event, listened to tapes by such gurus as Jim Rohn, Anthony Robbins, and Brian Tracy; and read business books – whatever they could to learn about business and grow the company bigger. And grow it did - so big in fact that they were sold to a Silicon Valley company two years after starting the business!
Amanda Signorelli, CEO of Techweek, defines the weeklong festival as ‘curated serendipity,’ in that every person that an attendee interacts with can really help them move into the next step of their journey. Entrepreneurs will be surrounded by like-minded peers that can really help accelerate their business to the next level or implement major changes within their current model to become more effective, or meet a founder, or investor – it’s really the place to be!
Brandon Boyd, of iMarketsLive, learned that to be successful you have to make sacrifices – for him it was selling his prized possession, his Michael Jordan rookie card. Can you feel the pain?
Bill Crane is the ‘star’ in his company, Industry Star. Bill has been a founder of several startups, including an Electric Vehicle company, a former venture capitalist and supply chain professional. His passion for bringing disruptive, innovative technology to market that has a positive impact on the world, has pushed him to excel in his field.
Finding opportunity and using his personality to be an entrepreneur started at a very young age for Paul Jenkins Jr., or as many know him, PJ. Being prepared for opportunity helped him rise to prominence in the event entertainment field. He found that the only thing standing in his way was how big could he dream! So he decided to dream big!
The Augmented Reality industry is ripe for the picking, and Christina York has her basket already full with her product, Spellbound. But it wasn’t so easy for her to load that basket! After a series of positive feedback, wins and accolades, the company suffered a series of ‘no’s’ when she was seeking funding. Rather than stall, she did what most entrepreneurs aren’t sure how to do; she chose to pivot.
