Launch Pad

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Karl Ulrich's Elevator Pitch of the Month for June is AnaOno.

Comfortable, sexy bras for breast cancer survivors, from a woman who is a survivor herself. Founder Dana Donofree's story is a classic example of solving your own problem--and perfect illustration of why we need more women entrepreneurs and VCs. Listen to the full interview for more of her terrific story of building the company, how her experience as a fashion designer dovetailed into this new career, and especially the story of where the name AnaOno came from (it’s a very funny story).

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You’re sitting down to dinner and realize you’d like to have a glass of wine with your meal—but there’s no wine in the house. What do you do? In a few key cities, mainly in California, instead of having to run out to a liquor store, you can now pull out your smart phone, and that bottle of wine will magically appear at your door in about a half hour.

Of course, it’s not magic. It’s Saucey, an on-demand alcohol delivery startup. Listen to Karl Ulrich and Chris talk about the pain of working in a heavily regulated industry, like alcohol, and why Chris was convinced that there was a desire for Saucey that Instacart just didn't meet.

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MindBodyGreen is the result of Jason Wachob almost getting back surgery.

Jason started yoga instead, and “that led me down a rabbit hole. I started to look at things like sleep and stress and nutrition, the environment, and made a lot of changes in my life.” He changed how he ate. Ultimately, “over the course of six months I completely healed, and I think yoga played a large role in that healing process.”

This was a life changing moment: “to me this idea of wellness was about living your best life, and it was nuanced, and it was this blend of mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and environmental wellbeing. And no one was covering it, and—MindBodyGreen. That’s the idea, was to really spread this message of living one’s best life with our unique lens, and do that through content. So it started with the first blog post, with me, back in 2009.”

From that one blog post, it took MindBodyGreen about two years to monetize, and three years to cross the 1 million reader mark—and that’s when they raised capital. These days the website boasts of “a readership of more than 15 million worldwide.” Listen to Karl Ulrich and Jason discuss the path of building a successful new media brand, and all the lessons Jason's learned from founding four companies.

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“Technology, data, people, you put those three together you can work magic.” George Karibian, WG’93, serial entrepreneur and founder of PaymentSense.

As a member of Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship’s Advisory Board, George was on campus for the Startup Showcase, and he took a few minutes to talk with Karl Ulrich about his fascinating life story, and in particular his takeaways from a tumultuous career as a serial entrepreneur, and currently the Founder and Director of PaymentSense (which George tells us processed about $6 billion of payments in the last year). We love George, of course, for all he does for entrepreneurship at Wharton and at Penn. But also because he says things like this about us: “Wharton has helped me out incredibly, much more than I ever imagined. Both the network and what I learned, it stays with you forever, and—and it continues, it doesn’t end there.”

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