High School Students Win Opportunity to Start Business

BUILD Press Release, by Anne Diaz

MENLO PARK, CA: On Saturday, May 13, in front of an audience of over three hundred people at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, iWear, a youth-run business created by five high school freshmen from Woodside High School, won first place in a youth business plan competition. Judged by a panel that read that like a “who’s who” of the Silicon Valley (including the co-founder of Ofoto, Google’s Deputy General Counsel, Yahoo’s Vice President of Global Brand Marketing, and Apple’s Vice President of their Worldwide Online Store), the five youth entrepreneurs beat out twenty-six other teen businesses for a cash prize and automatic acceptance into a youth business incubator.

Four teams advanced to the Final Round from the morning’s first round of competition. The event was run by BUILD, a non profit organization that teaches low income youth from the Bay Area how to start their own businesses. Entrepreneurship is the vehicle used by the multiple year BUILD program to provide students with real-world experience that prepares them for college and the professional world.

The eighty-plus youth comprising the teams that competed in Saturday’s event have all been learning the basics of entrepreneurship through the BUILD class taught at their high schools—Menlo-Atherton, Woodside, Sequoia, Carlmont, Oakland Technical High School and Lionel Wilson College Preparatory – over the course of the school year. Their written plans and presentations were prepared with the help of mentors, volunteer professionals who met with students once a week to hone their public speaking, writing, and math skills. The BUILD 7th Annual Business Plan Competition was the culmination of a year’s worth of hard work.

"BUILD uses entrepreneurship as a vehicle to teach under-performing students the academic skills they need to become college bound. At the same time, the students are learning perseverance, integrity, creativity, poise, and proficiency in math and communication," said BUILD founder and President Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, a Stanford Law School graduate and recently named Ashoka Fellow.

iWear’s winning business plan details a process by which members of the team plan to make customized iPod cases. They plan to sell their cases at school and various local community events.

Members of the first-place team include CEO Gabriella Tripolsky, COO Jeannette Yoo, CFO Adam Weisberg, VP of Manufacturing and Design Luis Ortiz, and VP of Marketing and Sales Monica Mejia. The students will be sophomores Woodside High School next year, and will be running their business out of BUILD’s Youth Business Incubator, located on the border between East Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

Zephyr Productions, the second-place winner, plans to host safe rap battle competitions for students at Oakland Technical High School. Team members include CEO Miguel Means, COO Byron Overshown, CFO Danny Thai, VP of Manufacturing and Design Luke Joachim, and VP of marketing and Sales Richard Lo, all students at Oakland Technical High School.

Of the other two winning teams in the Final Round of competition, Herstory Now represents Lionel Wilson College Preparatory and hopes to promote the empowerment of women through messages on t-shirts. NeckWear, started by Carlmont High School students, will offer necklaces with interchangeable pendants and dog tags.

The BUILD business plan competition, the seventh such annual event, was sponsored this year by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP; Montgomery Law Group, LLP; Morgan Stanley; NetSuite; Wells Fargo; Goldman Sachs & Co.; the Gray Family; and the Sand Hill Foundation. Judges and competition attendees included Silicon Valley senior executives, educators, and community leaders.

Previous business plan winners have gone on to Columbia, Stanford, Harvard and University of California at Berkeley, and others are upper-level high school students still running their businesses from BUILD's incubator. The other 22 teams that competed Saturday may apply for acceptance into the incubator through interviews and written essays.