By All Means

Serial entrepreneur Houston White’s business endeavors include barber shop, apparel collection that has been featured by Target and JCPenney, a coffee cafe and product brand, and housing development. But he’s building something bigger than all of that combined. He’s building community.

“Culture plus capacity,” was White’s pitch to U.S. Bank, which invested in his vision. “It’s my belief that in Black communities, the smallest institutions have the greatest impact…church, barbershop. Typically, folks start big and trickle down. In community development, you’ve got to start small and level up. Let’s start with things we can do.”

What White wants to do is build a neighborhood where Black culture and Black owned businesses thrive. White’s Camdentown, as he calls the Weber-Camden area of North Minneapolis, is a place where people of all backgrounds can shop, meet for coffee, get a haircut, and live—together, at various income levels. They key, he says: it has to be fueled by Black entrepreneurs.

“I believe that Black Minnesota’s been held back because we have not unleashed human potential,” White says. “Entrepreneurs are the one missing link.”

White’s Get Down Coffee Co. will open in the fall of 2021 adjacent to White’s barbershop and store, all in a predominantly Black part of town that has lacked the sort of resources and attractions to draw visitors. Phase two of White’s expansion includes a 12-unit market rate apartment building next door. “I am a firm believer that we can’t concentrate poverty,” White says. “You need mix of incomes, race, and it has to be Black led in order to really move community forward. If we want better schools, we need to create a mix of incomes.”

The vision struck White earlier In his career. “I had done what I hoped I’d never do: get successful and leave my community. I was become a wealthy Black man and my giveback was money. I spent no time in the inner city. I realized I had no connection to a village like it was growing up for me in Mississippi. I had to figure out how to grow as an entrepreneur and maintain connection to my tribe.”

White was entrepreneurial from his days biking the neighborhood giving haircuts. Spending summers in Mississippi and the school year in Minneapolis was a “cultural collision” that White says gave him a broader perspective on race and meant he ‘didn’t grow up with an inferiority complex.” Today, he fields calls from the governor of Minnesota and the CEO of Target. And as White scales his own business, he’s plotting out the opportunity to create a local legacy much bigger than himself.

“It’s going to take a radical shift in way people think about what Black people need, and it’s much more than a job.”

After our conversation with White, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate Dean Laura Dunham shares White’s believe in the importance of entrepreneurship as a tool to build both wealth and community.

“Small businesses play an important role in upward mobility,” Dunham says. “Business owners have much higher levels of wealth.”

Challenging economic times often lead to business formation and Dunham notes a spike during the Covid-19 pandemic of Black-led startups. But disparities in funding for Black entrepreneurs persist.

“Give people a bit of bandwidth and capital,” Dunham says. “They have the insight, experience and knowledge to see needs to be filled.”

Manolo Blahnik. Jimmy Choo. Christian Louboutin. Marion Parke. It takes moxie, clear vision, and a major investment to launch a luxury footwear brand with no experience in the field. But Marion Parke has something those other designers don’t: a medical degree. As a podiatric surgeon, Parke, who counts First Lady Jill Biden as a fan of her collection, spent a lot of time thinking about shoes. “Every patient consultation led to talking about shoes,” she recalls, “because everyone is there for a foot problem.”

That’s when inspiration struck the Oklahoma native: her knowledge of the foot and biomechanics, combined with her love of fashion helped her see the opportunity to create a luxury footwear brand that delivers on both style and comfort. “The novel concept was doing it in an elevated and tasteful way—that didn’t scream you’re wearing a shoe that’s designed by a doctor.”

She launched in 2015 and Bloomingdale’s became the brand’s first major retailer. Parke learned the business through trial and error: pattern making, production, wholesaling, e-commerce, branding. Heading into 2020, Marion Parke shoes were sold through nearly 50 boutiques and stores including fashion sites like Shop Bop.

But the Covid-19 pandemic caused a major disruption—not only in distribution, but in shopping habits. Suddenly, in early 2020, no one needed heels. Marion Parke made the decision to skip an entire season of heels and stilettos, instead broadening the collection to include flats, sandals and wedges for the first time. “Covid fast-tracked that for us,” says Parke, a mother of three who suddenly found herself trying to save her brand while homeschooling her young children. “We had to think about what women’s activities were like.”

Now with the backing of investors who are experienced in the shoe industry as the owners of Minnetonka Moccasin, Marion Parke brought on its first CEO in late 2020 to “professionalize the business.” The move allows Parke to focus on what she loves most: design.

“In fashion you’re expected to see the future, to know what women want a year before they want it. The stakes have never been higher,” Parke says. I believe that our relationship with clothing has changed. Women have gotten comfortable, and they want something more functional, more wearable. I believe women aren’t going to want to go back to the traditional high heel….we want to show that we’re here to support women, so that you’re not distracted by shoes at the most important moments in your life.”

Following our conversation with Parke, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Marketing professor Steve Vuolo explains the four key components to clarity of positioning that help a brand gain traction.

Clarity: “Clarity is the art of sacrifice. You’re not going to be relevant to some in order to be really important to others.”

Target: “Know who you’re marketing to.”

Frame of reference: “Understand the arena in which your product is competing.”

Market differentiation: “What reason do consumers have to believe your claim? In Marion Parke’s case, being a doctor gives her instant credibility. Plus, her shoes being manufactured in Italy adds believability.”

"It's amazing how many entrepreneurs don't take the time to write these things out," Vuolo says. "Think about the persona of your brand."

Before the boutique fitness craze that landed spinning studios and bootcamp gyms on every corner, there was Steele Fitness, a team of personal trainers who would show up at your home in a BMW and provide one-on-one fitness training. Behind the VIP service was an ambitious entrepreneur named Steele Smiley, whose first exercise in creating a brand was remaking himself into the businessman he wanted to be.

“In 2000, I said: I need to become a different person in order to manifest my life,” Smiley says. “You have to play the part.”

Since selling Steele Fitness to the private equity firm that owned global chain Snap Fitness, Smiley moved into the business of healthy eating. First came salad chain Crisp & Green, and in April 2021, he launched his newest venture, a fast casual plant-based burger shop called Stalk & Spade. “Plant-based eating is the future,” Smiley says. The first Stalk & Spade opened in Wayzata, Minn., where all of Smiley’s businesses have launched. But he’s thinking big.

“Ultimately, our goal is to be the fastest growing restaurant chain in American history,” Smiley says.

He plans to grow Stalk & Spade through franchising, just as he’s done with Crisp & Green, which will soon surpass 60 locations in eight states. But Crisp & Green didn’t take off until the pandemic, thanks to Smiley’s early investment in digital ordering technology, which made it easy to pivot to online purchases when in-store dining shut down in March of 2020. Before Covid-19, 7 percent of customers used the app. Now, Smiley says, more than 60 percent of Crisp & Green orders come through the app. Online orders are holding steady even as dining in returns

Smiley talks about his approach to building companies, and the challenges and opportunities of working ahead of lifestyle trends.

“Ultimately you’re only as successful as your ability to listen to your inner voice,” he says. “The times when I’ve made wrong decisions, I haven’t listened to it.”

Following our conversation with Smiley, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. Associate Professor Mark Spriggs offers franchising advice. “A franchise system is all about replicating the corporate model. The founder has to create a reliable business model that can be learned and operated quickly by a franchisee.” The question for Stalk & Spade, he says, is, “will this concept travel…without Steele?”

Seena Hodges is that person everyone calls when they want to learn about racism and equity building. When they want to get woke.

“I always love having the conversation, helping people unpack the things they don’t see, I just don’t want to do it for free.” Hodges parlayed her background in nonprofit, social justice, marketing and theater work into The Woke Coach, a Minneapolis-based agency that offers programs for businesses and individuals designed to help them understand bias and become antiracist. Launched in 2018, demand for The Woke Coach’s services skyrocketed following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd.

“Once you start to see and witness, injustice you can’t unsee it. And it’s absolutely everywhere,” Hodges says. “At this point there’s really no denying that we have to have these conversations. We have a moral imperative to put our best foot forward.”

Hodges shares the personal journey that led her to the work, and the challenge of a job she can’t ever leave at the office.

“While I do this work—the work of creating equitable environments—for a living, I’m always impacted by what’s happening in the world, when someone is murdered, when someone puts it on Facebook,” Hodges says. “Sometimes white folks can put their own desire for learning ahead of the feelings of other people. I want to encourage people to have more grace around their process even when they’re seeking to learn. It’s been hundreds of years that we’ve lived with inequity and the circumstance of blatant racism, and it’s going to take us some time to get out of here.”

The key to lasting change, Hodges says, is self-awareness. “We talk about leaders being strong, visionary, empathetic. What we’ve never said is a leader has to be antiracist. You don’t learn that in business school. It’s something you have to really internalize.”

Becoming antiracist means being fearless. “We can’t focus on the why we can’t,” Hodges says. “We have to focus on the how we can. There’s always something any one person can do.”

For more perspective on how business can play a role in shifting broader conversations about race, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Nakeisha Lewis serves as associate dean of undergraduate and accelerated master’s programs. She quotes a survey that found 75 percent of professionals say their company has enhanced its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts this part year, but only 19 percent rate those efforts as effective.

"The real conversation is not just, can we have more conversations, but are those conversations leading to change." Action, she says, must involve building pipelines to support advancement of BIPOC employees, and more educational opportunities. “The business setting is an excellent place to start…to make the future of business more unapologetically equitable and inclusive.”

Special education teacher Angie Gallus made dog treats in class with her students as a way to help them learn job skills. They would bake, package, and sell to friends and family. When Angie reunited with a couple of former students who hadn’t been able to find jobs after graduation, she and her husband Kyle, also a special ed teacher, decided to fire up the oven again. The combination of producing treats that dogs love and creating jobs for individuals with disabilities made the Galluses realize: “There’s something bigger here.” On the spot, a company was born. They named it Finely’s after their own pocket shepherd. Brand motto: “Treat with kindness.”

That was 2016. For the first two years, they worked nights and weekends with their former students, and sold the treats at farmer’s markets, breweries, and online. Then came their viral accelerator: Ashton Kutcher heard about Finley’s commitment to being an inclusive employer. His A Plus news site published a story, which the actor/entrepreneur shared on his own social media, and the orders poured in. It prompted the Galluses to professionalize their packaging and step up manufacturing, paving the way for partnerships with regional grocers and pet specialty stores.

Toward the end of 2019, after three years of bootstrapping the brand, they raised a $650,000 seed round through friends and angels—many of whom the Galluses say have children with disabilities and deeply appreciated the brand’s mission. They were poised to begin 2020 with a launch in the Pacific Northwest. But before the product could reach shelves, stores shut down due to the Covid-19 outbreak in Seattle.

Flush with product, Finley’s pivoted to online, launching on Chewy.com and then Target.com. They also sell through Amazon. The pandemic turned out to be a great time to scale a dog treat brand. U.S. pet industry sales exceeded $100 billion for the first time ever in 2020 with pet food and treat sales leading the pack at $42 billion, according to the American Pet Products Association.

That wasn’t Finely’s only lucky break. With the capital they raised months before the pandemic, Finley’s had launched a line of trainer bites, just 3 calories each.

“We had no idea all of these dogs were going to get adopted, and then spend time with you on Zoom,” Kyle says. “The No. 1 thing people wanted was the dog off their laps and something to keep them happy.” Finley’s trainer bites outperformed the original biscuits last year in what Kyle describes as an “inferno of opportunity.”

Having proven itself online, Finley’s is prepping for major store growth in 2021 including select Target and Safeway/Albertsons stores. The grocer is supporting Finley's mission of inclusivity by waiving slotting fees that most brands pay to get on shelves.

In addition to hiring people with special needs, Finley’s added profit sharing to support the organizations that support its employees. “You can employ people with disabilities, but there are so many other barriers: transportation, job coaching. We want to give back to that as well.”

Angie’s advice to other employers that strive to be more inclusive: “Make sure you’re actually asking employees what they need.” Often, what they need is the opportunity. “Sometimes you can’t see potential until you give someone a chance.”

The Finley’s story made Associate Professor John McVea think about the value of work. In Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, McVea points out that there’s much to learn about work from a group that is often excluded from doing it.

“There’s this old idea that we work to earn and leisure is an escape from the drudgery.” A more modern take, says McVea, is careers of conviction: “We work for purpose and leisure is time to reflect. For people who are excluded, they don’t have the opportunity to continuously learn. Work is not just busy stuff, not just about making money. The actual act, the process of work transforms us.”

Dr. Jeremy Friese left a prestigious medical practice at Mayo Clinic to solve one of healthcare’s great headaches: the prior authorization process. Three years later, in December 2020, he sold his venture-backed AI technology company Verata Health to its biggest competitor, Olive, for $120 million. He brought almost the entire Verata team of around 60 with him, and took on the role of president of Olive’s Payer Market. His work to automate the administrative side of health care services continues, now with a much larger team. He’s yet to meet any of them in person or visit Olive’s Ohio headquarters. The entire acquisition transpired virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Verata, which was a “Zoom company” with employees spread around the country even pre-Covid, saw the adoption of its software services accelerate during the pandemic. “One of the positives [out of this time] is the way our healthcare system has embraced a new way of working—the adoption of tele-health and a variety of other technologies. There’s a newfound appetite and willingness to bring in tech to solve problems.”

Although he spent nearly 20 years in radiology at Mayo Clinic, Friese initially chose medical school with the goal of “solving systemic problems.” His first exposure to the stresses of health care came as a high school sophomore in South Dakota, when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. “So much time and angst is wasted sharing information among physicians and with payers,” Friese says. “It causes delays and uncertainty in care, and it hasn’t gotten a whole lot better in the last 20-30 years.”

“Helping the system get better through capitalism is something I’m wired to do.”

But along the way, Friese got drawn into patient care and became an internationally recognized doctor. All the while, he took on executive roles on the business side at Mayo and earned an MBA at Harvard. With patient paperwork piling up on his desk and keeping him out of the exam room, he decided to finally take the leap and step away from practice—and his doctor’s salary— to start Verata.

“To be an entrepreneur, you have to be a little crazy,” Friese acknowledges. “But I did know that it was a massive problem that would have a massive impact.”

Following our conversation with Friese, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where Daniel McLaughlin is a senior executive fellow whose research focuses on making healthcare work more effectively. McLaughlin sheds some light on the complexities of the prior authorization process. “Throughout the country there’s been a problem of over treatment or ineffective care.” Both ends of the spectrum add up to billions in waste, he says. “Insurance companies don’t want to pay for either so they set up a complicated system. There’s a real opportunity to use emerging tech tools to make the process easier and cheaper.”

The number of medical doctors seeking MBAs, particularly in St. Thomas’s health care business program, continues to grow, McLaughlin says. “There’s an increasing number of physicians who are so frustrated in practice, they want to figure out how to fix the healthcare system.”

Having reached her ultimate career goal before age 30—New York Times best-selling author; staff writer for ESPN—Maria Burns Ortiz turned her attention to a new challenge: promoting equitable education. She’s the co-founder of 7 Generation Games, a mission-based ed-tech startup focused on closing the math gap for students from Native American, Latino, and underserved and rural communities.

She started the company with her mom, Anna Maria De Mars, World Judo Champion turned educational psychology professor. Since her days as an eighth grade math teacher, De Mars wanted to make video games to teach kids math, but at the time, the technology didn’t exist. With Burns Ortiz’s career at a crossroads, her mom convinced her to take the money she would have spent on an MBA and invest it in starting a business.

Eight years later (five, full-time), 7 Generation Games counts more than 40,000 active uses in schools and homes across the country. The company recently received $1 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for Growing Math, a new learning platform aimed at helping meet the needs of students and educators in Arizona, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, and South Dakota.

“There’s a disconnect between what software companies think teachers need, and what they actually use,” says Burns Ortiz, who runs the company from Minneapolis with a team of 11 spread around the country. Although 7 Generation was focused on rural and underserved urban communities pre-pandemic, distance learning has heightened the awareness that “the digital divide is a lot greater than we thought.”

When schools closed in early 2020 due to Covid-19, 7 Generation lifted its paywall to get software to teachers. But in some of the communities it serves, nearly half the students don’t have Internet at home. “No one can learn from software they can’t use,” Burns Ortiz says. In the past year, 7 Generation more than doubled its offline game usage, from 40 to 85 percent of its collection.

“Making something that seems high tech run on something low tech is really hard,” Burns Ortiz says. “Maybe it’s not the coolest, 3D virtual world, but it runs on a phone.”

Despite early difficulties convincing investors, Burns Ortiz and her mom felt strongly about setting up 7 Generation as a for-profit company. “Social impact is not a charity,” Burns Ortiz says. “You can make a positive societal impact and also have that be a profitable enterprise. When it’s non-profit, often that doesn’t encourage people to go in and innovate on solutions.”

Her goal now? “I want 7 Generation to be as ubiquitous in the classroom as text books.”

After our conversation with Burns Ortiz, we go back to the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, where Kevin Henderson is a professor of management with a focus on universal design for learning. “We want to give everyone in the classroom an equal opportunity to succeed.” That starts with material that feels relevant to a wide variety of cultures and communities. “It’s so important for students to see themselves represented in curriculum.”

Bizzy Coffee isn’t like most other coffee brands. No coffee shops. No single serve bottles or cans or pods. Bizzy founders Alex French and Andrew Healy are singularly focused on a fast-growing segment of the coffee industry: cold brew. And by staying laser focused, they’ve become the best-selling cold brew brand on Amazon. Meanwhile, their grocery store presence is steadily growing. The momentum they have today is proof that picking a lane can pay off. Determination and a willingness to learning from failures can help. And caffeine is essential.

A born entrepreneur, French studied entrepreneurship and finance at the University of St. Thomas and tried as many as 20 different startup ideas before landing on Bizzy with his friend Healy. One of those early attempts was a snowboarding accessory called the Lifty. Its failure to take off gave them a key insight: “no one was searching for it.”

So French and Healy studied Google search trends to identify a consumable product people were actively looking for. At the time, the two recent college grads were making their own cold brew coffee at home to save money and it didn’t taste as smooth and sweet as the cold brew from their local coffee house. Both had serious day jobs—French was working in consumer research at General Mills; Healy in research and development engineering for St. Jude Medical. Pooling their knowledge, evenings were devoted to creating a better testing cold brew coffee for home brewers. According to Google, searches for cold brew were growing 100 percent annually.

“We just didn’t fully understand how challenging coffee was going to be,” French says. “But we wanted to create a new product for a new consumer entering the coffee category for the first time who doesn’t want to drink Folgers and wants a brand that resonates with their own personal belief system.”

Knowing that they were their own target market, French and Healy studied their shopping and consumption patterns. “And so we said to ourselves, let’s go sell something on the internet for the next generation of shopping.”

French shares many hard-learned lessons, like a product that sells well on the Internet does not easily translate to stores. The competition for shelf space is tough, and the wrong placement can ruin your odds. And creating a product with the intention of competing with the category leader only works if you can demonstrate that yours is a better value. Mistakes are part of the journey, French says.

“You only learn to be an entrepreneur by being an entrepreneur. You will fail, but the faster you fail, the faster you’ll succeed.”

For more perspective on the entrepreneurial journey, we go back the classroom with the University of St. Thomas Schulze School of Entrepreneurship where John McVea is an associate professor. “Anybody can say, ‘I like cold coffee.’ What Alex had to do was look at the world the way the market is, the way people are drinking coffee, and say, ‘how could we do that differently?’”

Aspiring entrepreneurs often get too hung up on coming up with an original idea, McVea says. “You don’t succeed because of an idea no one thought of. Probably millions of people thought the future is cold coffee. But that’s a far cry from understanding how you build a sustainable business to succeed at cold brew coffee.”

What’s even more important than the idea? “You have to love rigorous inquiry,” McVea says. “You have to be able to listen and empathize with others, and you have to enjoy problems coming at you. They love the journey more than the destination.”

Perhaps you’ve noticed when you hit the checkout button on your online purchases there’s often an option to buy now, pay later. It’s reverse layaway—you get the goods now, and you pay them off in a four or six interest free installments. No fees, no need for credit. Young consumers seem to love it and so buy now pay later is being embraced by more and more retailers, from small indie shops to the big direct to consumer brands like Peloton and Warby Parker.

The pandemic only accelerated adoption rates and analysts project buy now pay later solutions could rack up $680 billion in transaction volume worldwide by 2025. There are several big players in the field, like Afterpay and Affirm, which hit a $24 billion valuation after going public in January. But that hasn’t deterred Sezzle, a Minneapolis-based buy now pay later platform that went public on the Australian securities exchange in 2019 and continues to gain traction in the U.S.

“I want to win,” says Sezzle founder/CEO Charlie Youakim, who was featured on TCB's Tech 20 in 2020. “We’re still in last place in the payment space, even though we’re having success. That’s what drives me. I know we can beat them. We just have to keep on innovating and listening to our stakeholders.”

Yoaukim didn’t set out to create a payment platform. His is a winding founder’s tale that includes many startup signatures: sleeping on a couch, a fallout with a co-founder, a failure that eventually led to the big idea.

"Start small," he advises other founders. "Find that first customers. Make it work great. Listen to that customer. When they have issues, fix them. When they have ideas, do them. Keep on walking forward."

Sezzle launched in 2017 as a payment processing platform. Retailers liked the model because it was less expensive than credit card fees, but consumers didn’t latch on.

“We ran with the idea that [a digital payment option] was a preference," Youakim says. "But what if it’s not a preference? What if it’s a lack of access? We flipped the hypothesis. We had to build a credit system.”

Investors weren’t initially sold on the pivot. Youakim shares the process of winning them over, the advantages of going public in Australia, why buy now, pay later resonates with consumers, and how he’s placing purpose alongside profit with new products designed to help consumers build their credit scores. Everything is clicking now: Sezzle doubled its headcount in 2020 to more than 200 employees. The Minneapolis-based company just recently announced its certification as a B Corp, emphasizing its mission to "financially empower the next generation."

“You just keep on pushing ahead,” Youakim says of building a business. “It’s like mountain climbing. Know where the pinnacle is, and keep picking a path with the goal that you want to get to the top.”

Following our conversation with Youakim, we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. Consumer behavior expert Kim Sovell, a participating adjunct professor of marketing is tracking the rapid adoption of buy now pay later platforms, particularly among younger consumers. Usage skyrocketed from 2019 to 2020—200 percent among Gen Z; 86 percent among millennials. “It allows an individual to get immediate satisfaction out of a purchase but not go into debt.” But Sovell worries that the interest free, penalty free offers Sezzle and its competitors currently offer may evaporate. “I think they’ll start charging individuals that miss payments. I think that’s going to change. I also think people need to be aware: it does entice buying more.”

Growing up in and around computer labs, with a mother who was a trailblazer in computer sciences, Yu Sunny Han developed a knack for solving problems through technology. He built computer games as a kid and sold his first piece of software at age 12, requesting the $500 fee be paid in quarters to play arcade games.

Determined to chart his own course, Han chose chemistry as his college major but says “most of the problems I solved in school ended up leading me back to computer sciences.” So it happened that while working as a business consultant, he identified a problem in the manufacturing industry: a lack of modern business software to connect companies. “Manufacturing adopted so many aspects of technology first…20 years ago, but they haven’t changed since. And they expect it to be a painful process to update. I thought: what if all of these companies and people were connected: how much faster could we make stuff?”

Still, it took Han a year and a half to quit a good-paying job and start a company with his own savings. He didn't aspire to be an entrepreneur. “No one else was doing it, and it needed to get done.”

He built Fulcrum, a cloud-based software system that supports the business of manufacturing for a new generation of production. That’s everything from planning to quality control to inventory. Han estimates that as many as 12 million American manufacturers use outdated software. Fulcrum is poised to help the multi-trillion dollar industry take a giant leap forward, and that’s why investors are lining up. Fulcrum raised just over $3 million dollars in 2020 to expand its platform. He's listed on TCB's 2021 Tech 20.

The momentum didn’t happen overnight. “We started out too unfocused, trying to serve every industry,” Han says. “We honed in on where we knew how to deliver the most value.”

The number of customers on Fulcrum's platform multiplies every month and Han keeps hiring to stay ahead. The seed funding “added momentum to hire ahead of need.” In doing so, Han thinks as carefully about company culture as he does software—extra challenging in a pandemic, and with employees spread across the country. “There’s always so much to do, but we have to be able to say, no matter what, we’re going to get together online and play Among Us, or hang out on Zoom. We make time for every new hire to be grilled with questions from the team. We talk about everyone we lay off—what did they do well, and what could be better. What gels a team together is working on things, overcoming challenges, and being really transparent and honest with each other.”

A product of the Twin Cities tech community, Han saw the great potential of the ‘80s, in the heyday of Control Data and IBM, and watched it slip away as companies were acquired and tech talent moved to the coasts. But a new generation of modern software companies like Code 42, Jamf, and his own, coupled with new seed funds like Ryan Broshar’s Matchstick Ventures and Mary Grove’s Bread & Butter (both previously featured on By All Means), gives him hope for the future of tech in Minnesota. “I wish people would think bigger. It takes as much effort to build something small as something big, and the value is compounded greatly.”

After our conversation with Han we go Back to the Classroom with University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business professor Lisa Abendroth, academic director for Business in a Digital World. “Because of social media we take for granted the ease of connection today. He saw the pain points in manufacturing and how to deliver unique value to the market.”

Of course, it takes humans to build smart technology. Abendroth points out the power of building a collaborative team. “We often take for granted the importance of a Taco Tuesday or group Pictionary. You have to be cohesive and communicate. Sunny’s product is trying to do that, too.”