Craig Elbert and Akash Patel, the leading minds behind Care/of, are the special guests for our next fireside chat! Join us to hear about how they’re leveraging the direct-to-consumer model to simplify and personalize the vitamin supplements industry, with a key focus on marketing and growth. There will also be a moderated Q&A, refreshments, and tons of tactical insight. (You must bring a valid ID to enter)

Care/of believes that the one-size-fits-all approach to health is outdated. Enter their subscription vitamin service that provides customers with ultra-personalized vitamin packs based on their unique health goals, details about their diet and lifestyle, and values. It starts with an online quiz, whose algorithm recommends a set of supplements (over 1M combinations); each personalized box is then delivered to your door, and the Instagram-friendly product comes complete with your name and a fun fact on the packaging. Since it was founded in 2016, the startup has raised $42.2M from the likes of GSIP, Tusk Ventures, RRF Ventures and more, as they continue to expand into additional consumer health categories. Before Care/of, Craig was disrupting menswear at Bonobos, while Akash was building companies out of his dorm room, and they both are Wharton alum.

In our chat with Craig & Akash we’ll be deep diving into:

• How you can launch an MVP to test your brand and business model

• Marketing + Personalization: How Care/of builds "Word of Mouth" into every product

• The ethos behind their brand

• Maneuvering Instagram: How Care/of is driving growth w 170K+ followers

• How Care/of is distinguishing themselves in a competitive market

• $3M Seed to a $29 Series B: Lesson learned in scaling a startup

• The future of D2C and consumer health

Show Flow:

6:00 - 6:15: Networking and Refreshments

6:15 - 6:45: Fireside chat with Craig + Akash

6:45 - 7:15: Moderated Q&A 

7:15 - 7:30: Closing and Networking

Our first event for this October features HelloAva Co-Founders, Siqi Mou & Kailu Guan, who will be joining us to discuss how artificial intelligence is impacting the beauty industry! As always, there will be a moderated Q&A, refreshments, and tons of tactical insight. (You must bring a valid ID to enter)

In 2016, Siqi Mou and Kailu Guan founded HelloAva, an AI-powered platform that works like a skincare consultant to help people find the perfect products for their skincare routine. At certain points in their lives, both Mou and Guan faced issues with their skin, but they couldn't find a solution that was truly personalized for their individual needs. Enter HelloAva’s refreshing user experience that enables individuals to complete a quick skincare survey and send a selfie through its chatbot; then, an algorithm recommends the best products for each person, which are confirmed by licensed aestheticians and board-certified dermatologists. Since launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2017, HelloAva has over 70,000 users, sent over 1.6 million skincare consultation messages, and works with top beauty brands like L'Oréal, Caudalie, and Unilever. Besides founding HelloAva, Kailu’s background includes fashion design, AR, and wearable technology, and Siqi worked in investment banking, as a Bloomberg news anchor, and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2019.

In our chat with Siqi & Kailu we’ll be deep diving into:

• How they built + tested their MVP

• The balance between AI and Human expertise

• Embracing a “User-Centric” philosophy

• How HelloAva safely collects 26 data points and their impact on personalization

• Marketing strategies that enabled HelloAva to get over 70K users

• The future of AI in beauty

Show Flow:

• 6:00 - 6:15: Networking and Refreshments

• 6:15 - 6:45: Fireside chat with Siqi Mou & Kailu Guan

• 6:45 - 7:15: Moderated Q&A 

• 7:15 - 7:30: Closing and Networking

We’re extremely excited to be kicking off our fall event series with Vaidhy Murti, a seasoned entrepreneur, who has built two amazing mobile startups: Friendsy and Wit. Along with our fireside chat, there will be a moderated Q&A, refreshments, and tons of tactical insight. (You must bring a valid ID to enter)

Vaidhy Murti is the co-founder and CEO of both Friendsy and Wit. As a sophomore at Princeton University in 2012, Vaidhy founded Friendsy, a college-based social networking platform designed to connect students, enabling them to meet new friends, hookups, or dates on their campus. After building the app out of his dorm room, Friendsy launched at Princeton, followed by a huge success at Dartmouth, and ended up with 10,000 users within a year. Replicating their early success, they strategically expanded into other campuses, and had around 100,000 total users by the end of 2015. Friendsy ended up raising a total of $1M from Princeton’s accelerator, Lerer Hippeau, and Slow Ventures. 3 million matches, 100K MAU, and 300K total users later, the team decided to close the service in 2017. 

Vaidhy’s latest venture, Wit, is a winner-take-all social video app that has raised $250k from Fitz Gate Ventures. The video platform runs weekly contests and rewards users with cash prizes for their funny videos, and has started to roll out sponsored video contests with brands. Besides building his two mobile startups, Vaidhy also served as CTO of philanthropic platform DonorUP and founded a successful product development company.

In our chat with Vaidhy we’ll be deep diving into:

• How he launched Friendsy out of his dorm room

• Building a team: the ups and downs

• The power of platform exclusivity: How Facebook & Friendsy used it, and how you can too

• Expansion strategies that allowed Friendsy to grow over 100K MAU

• How Friendsy optimized for network effects

• The future of social networking and short-form content

Show Flow:

6:00 - 6:15: Networking and Refreshments

6:15 - 6:45: Fireside chat with Vaidhy Murti

6:45 - 7:15: Moderated Q&A 

7:15 - 7:30: Closing and Networking

This month we’re chatting with Lindon Gao, as he takes us through his startup journey with Caper! Along with our fireside chat, there will be a moderated Q&A, refreshments, and tons of tactical insight. (You must bring a valid ID to enter)

Lindon Gao is the Co-founder and CEO of Caper, a startup that is creating a frictionless consumer shopping experience by building smart shopping carts that are powered by deep learning and computer vision to enable cashierless checkout. Essentially, Caper is the cart-based point-of-sale system that aims to rival AmazonGo. Shoppers can simply place items into their Caper cart (which have built-in sensors/cameras that identify the items and tally a virtual basket) and once finished, they can conveniently pay on the cart and leave the store. The technology is currently deployed in a number of NY supermarkets and is piloting with 3 of the largest grocery companies in the world. To date, Caper has raised $3M in seed funding led by First Round Capital. Besides being a Y Combinator advisor and a part of the YC (W16) batch himself, Lindon has previously worked as an investment banker specializing in the retail and consumer M&A

In our chat with Lindon we’ll be deep diving into:

• What he took away from Y Combinator (besides capital ;)

• How he made a pivot from his previous startup and founded Caper

• The importance of user testing + finding Product-Market Fit

• How has design thinking shaped the user-experience and user-interface of Caper

• Data. Data. Data. How Caper could leverage data to help both brands and merchants

• How Caper’s technology is taking on AmazonGo

• The future of AI in retail

Show Flow:

6:00 - 6:15: Networking and Refreshments

6:15 - 6:45: Fireside chat with Lindon Gao

6:45 - 7:15: Moderated Q&A

7:15 - 7:30: Closing and Networking