Launch Pad

Nothing says comfort like chicken soup, and now you can send that comfort to your far-away loved ones with Spoonful of Comfort.

Company president Scott Gustafson explains: “Spoonful of Comfort is an on-line gifting platform that enables the sender to send a very personal message of comfort and care to a loved one living anywhere in the continental United States. It allows them to be able to serve up a personal message of care through the time tested product of chicken soup and other gourmet soups. We package them up in gift packages. We have gone to great lengths to create a real unique and personal out of box experience so the recipients are getting more than just a thought when they are actually going through something.”

Listen to Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and Scott talk about making a personal connection in this digital world. Plus, get the inside story of Spoonful of Comfort’s Shark Tank appearance, which Scott credits with increasing the company growth from 50% a year to 80%: “We'll always speak highly of the experience, even though when you watch it it's maybe a little bit cringe-worthy.”

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Karl Ulrich's Elevator Pitch for the Month of June is Daily Harvest, founded by Rachel Drori, C'04

Elevator Pitch, from Rachel: “Daily Harvest makes ready to blend smoothies, ready to heat soups, chia parfaits, overnight oats, all of the incredible drool-worthy foods that you see all over Instagram, frozen, delivered to your door, and ready to eat in seconds.” 

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When Rachel Drori, founder of Daily Harvest, was raising her Series A, she had an investor ask her this question: How do you plan to be a good mother and an entrepreneur?

The bad news is, this is a situation that many female entrepreneurs still find themselves in. The good news is, Rachel came up with the perfect answer, and you can use it, too.

In the hour-long conversation between Wharton Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation Karl Ulrich and Rachel Druri, Rachel impressed Karl over and over again with her entrepreneurial acumen, and they geeked out over everything from product-market fit to the best ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. If you like to get in the weeds on how to start and scale a company, this is the podcast for you.

But Karl was especially impressed by her handling of investors. Here's just one example:

When asked, “How do you plan to be a good mother and an entrepreneur?” here’s what Rachel did: “I thought, and I was very quiet, and I kind of went inside of myself, and I flipped it, and I was so proud of this moment. What I said is, if what you are asking me is if I am 100% committed to making Daily Harvest successful then my answer is yes.”

This is brilliant, because she doesn’t fight back at this rude and ridiculous question. The temptation, of course, is to point out the absurdity, and the fact that no one ever asks male entrepreneurs how they plan to balance fatherhood with working on a company. Instead, Rachel stayed on task, and highlighted her unwavering dedication to her startup.

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Just a few minutes into the conversation between Karl Ulrich, Wharton's Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and Gregory Lattieri, founder of Recycle Track Systems, Karl called RTS "the Uber of waste." Want to know why?

Gregory explains RTS this way: "We are a technology company first, but we are in the waste and recycling industry. So really a garbage and recycling company without trucks.... We have taken the technology that has been in car service and has been in food and other sectors and we have built a technology platform that allows us to be a waste and recycling company across multiple cities and service our clients. And then the key factor as the business changes and sustainability and people look to do better and do more for the environment we track our recycling material to the appropriate facility."

RTS gives companies essential transparency, both into when trucks will arrive for their waste, and into validation of the recycling material. Good for these clients--and good for the earth.

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Karl Ulrich talks with Startup Challenge Semifinalist & Welligence founder Seth Neel, GRW'20.

Elevator Pitch, from Seth: “What Welligence does is we gather the richest dataset of upstream oil and gas data, we think, in the world--particularly in Latin America. And we build our own proprietary models to forecast well-by-well production, which is then combined into these pretty clean data tools for our clients to use and make better decisions.”

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Karl Ulrich talks with Startup Challenge Semifinalist & SpectrumScores founder Philip Williams, C'15, M'20.

Elevator Pitch, from Philip Williams: “SpectrumScores was founded as a way to empower LGBTQ patients to take care of their own health care by offering an intuitive ranking and review system for health care providers across disciplines, on the basis of their LGBT competence. By providing all of this information and leveraging the collective experience of the community, we hope to be able to connect these patients to the best providers to meet their unique needs.”

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