Launch Pad

Before they started work on Lia, neither Anna nor Bethany had a background in health devices or technology. So they had to start from square one: with a great idea and a lot of motivation.

Anna and Bethany conducted surveys with hundreds of thousands of women and did a huge amount of detailed market research to develop the product. “At the beginning, we had this formal idea of what a paper pregnancy test used by a woman would be and the basic research to understand how the technology could work,” Anna says. “From there, we had to research the technology and learn. [We took] about a year and a half from that concept phase to having a product with over 99% accuracy.”

Read Karl's Forbes piece on Lia Diagnostics here

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Have you ever had a curiosity about food from different cultures. It seems more and more specials about food are all over the place, showcasing the best authentic dishes countries have to offer. What if you could find all those mouthwatering dishes all in one place. That's exactly what Yummy Bazaar has set out to accomplish, providing foods from across the world at the click of a mouse.

Here's Rebecca's Elevator Pitch: "Yummy Bazaar is an online and mobile platform that's dedicated providing the largest selection of specialty food from around the world in one place and at great value."

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Glow is an ambitious enterprise that uniquely applies the power of data science to health. Our personal health tracking products illuminate health through data, and empower people with new information about their bodies.

Though we live in a time when people track everything from diet and weight to the number of steps taken each day, it remains taboo to talk openly about some of the most critical phases of development: menstruation, sex, fertility, pregnancy, parenthood, and beyond.

Here's Mike's elevator pitch: "We are the largest mobile platform for women's health."

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There was a time when children couldn't wait until Saturday morning to sit down in front of the television and waste half a day watching cartoons. Today -- almost everywhere you turn -- there's another platform that delivers content, so much so that it's hard to keep up with all of them. Platforms like YouTube, Netflix and Amazon all deliver high-quality content that's accessible to anyone for free or at a low monthly cost, offering a large selection of shows catered towards younger audiences. The question PocketWatch aims to answer is exactly how much of that content is truly engaging and educational?

To start, here's Chris Williams', CEO & Founder of PocketWatch's Elevator Pitch: "We are branded kids studio and we celebrate the new digital stars and formats [that] the kids are really passionate about and we bring them to kids everywhere."

Listen to Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, speak with Chris about how companies like Viacom see the potential in child-produced content.

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Anki originated a decade ago as a group of Ph.D. students who spent their weekends brainstorming and collaborating. "Every Saturday we'd get together and we would just work the entire day," Mark says. Their first product: a toy car. "We've built a very viable business that started out with a kind of autonomous toy cars, shrunk down to slot car sizes."

The fascinating thing is that Anki didn't stop here. Mark and his team understood this successful product as a stepping stone. Their strategy: "Let's go into a segment where we can have a huge impact today and build an increasingly sophisticated robotics platform with an increasingly sophisticated stack of technologies to take on harder and harder challenges in consumer robotics."

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Here’s Adriana’s elevator pitch for Lilu: “We are making breastfeeding more compatible with the lifestyle of the modern mom.... We have developed the first pumping bra that mimics expert recommended breast massaging techniques to help nursing mothers breast pump 30-200% more milk, hands free and hassle free.”

Adriana explains that “over 80% of mothers start breastfeeding, and the vast majority are also returning to work within the first year of their baby’s life.” Once mothers are back at work, however, the pumping process can be so slow that it eats away as much as 25% of the workday. Pumping is also uncomfortable, and often doesn’t provide enough milk. Lilu aims to fix all of these problems.

The benefits here are twofold: 1) a product that makes pumping milk be a better experience for breastfeeding mothers; 2) the time savings and added convenience and comfort mean that mothers who return to work are able to spend more of their time working, so society as a whole benefits from their increased productivity.

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Karl Ulrich's Elevator Pitch for the Month of July is Lilu, founded by Adriana Vazquez Ortiz, GEN'16.

Elevator Pitch, from Adriana: “We are making breastfeeding more compatible with the lifestyle of the modern mom.... We have developed the first pumping bra that mimics expert recommended breast massaging techniques to help nursing mothers breast pump 30-200% more milk, hands free and hassle free.”

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If you’re at work right now, chances are you’ve got a phone on your desk that came with the job. If not, you’re one of the lucky few: according to Craig Walker, founder of Dialpad, there are about 190 million desk phones in the U.S.

Dialpad is aiming to change all that, by bringing down the desk phone, and bringing your business communications into the cloud so they can integrate with all your devices.

Here’s Craig’s elevator pitch: “We are all about business enterprise communications, and we believe that your personal communications are pretty good. You have chosen whether you use an iPhone or an Android, and what apps and tools you want to use. And then you get to work and a lot of times you are faced with this technology that was made for your parents, like a desk phone with a bunch of lights and blinking things on it. What we do is we built a business phone system fully in the cloud that uses your own mobile phone or your own laptop or your own tablet, or your desk phone if you want to have a desk phone as well, but basically moves all of that infrastructure into the cloud, makes you—for a modern mobile worker, being able to use the tools that you actually want to use for your business communications.”

Listen to Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, talk with Craig about how why he and his team are the best possible people to execute on this vision. (Hint: he and his two cofounders ran the engineering for Google Voice.) Plus much more about starting, funding, and growing this startup. 

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