1 Idea Origins According to Dr. Adriana Galvan of UCLA, the adolescent brain is thirsty for exploration, learning, and social relationships. This truth manifests itself in several forms: 4/10 teens want to start their companies, 8/10 want to be their own bosses, and a whopping 93% of teens want to volunteer and do good in their communities. However, those closest to society's problems are barred from entrepreneurship. According to the Center for Urban Future, low-income individuals, especially teens, often face numerous roadblocks when starting companies. These problems can include limited role models, schools that fail to promote entrepreneurship as a career path, financial illiteracy, and no access to capital. Thus, despite teens inherently entrepreneurial nature, starting their own companies or social ventures can seem impossible. Elix s Founder and Executive Director, Isabella Liu, discovered this phenomena herself in her freshman year of public high school. Her peers were consistently coming up with novel solutions to social problems undeterred by apparent complexities, and motivated by a raw optimism. Yet, there was no platform for Isabella or her friends to pursue their ventures. Isabella saw a need, and also identified a solution: a social impact incubator for teen entrepreneurs. Idea Specifics In building Elix, Isabella soon ran into the common problems of any entrepreneur. There was a lack of clarity in terms of where to begin building a company. Isabella s school declined to help build a curriculum or raise capital. Before her idea was even off the ground, it looked like a failure. Then, Isabella realized that the barriers she faced were transitive among entrepreneurs of all ages. She began to build her venture with the intent to help others from facing the same challenges that she did. After speaking with her peers at schools across the Bay Area, Isabella launched a social venture pitch competition, which failed quickly due to the lack of structure for her fellow entrepreneurs. Next, she tried to launch an incubator for teen nonprofits, which also failed because it was not financially sustainable. After sixteen long months of trial and error, Isabella finally landed upon the idea of Elix. Isabella brought on her moral sounding board and best friend, Haley Catton, her high school s resident computer whiz, Stash Pomichter, and her brilliantly analytical classmate, Andrew Yates. Together, they synthesized the lessons Isabella had
2 learned in her own business experience to create the Elix curriculum. The Elix Program The Elix Incubation Program lasts for 1-3 years and is comprised of four phases: Design, Launch, Tinker, and Surge. The Design phase helps incubatees become acquainted with the concept of social business, build incubatee teams, build social venture strategies and business plans, prototype, access legal counsel, construct and practice their pitching, discover their venture s brand, and develop an online presence. Next, Elix guides ventures through their Launch phase. From Launch, Elix s ventures emerge with seed money, VCs and angel investors, pilot their ventures, and begin to execute their Go-To-Market plan. During Tinker, Elix helps incubatees and their ventures optimize their impact by training our incubatees in decision analysis, hands-on leadership coaching, and emotional intelligence instruction. Also in Tinker, Elix helps improve team efficiency by allowing the team to access free management consultation. Finally, in Surge, Elix assists our ventures in implementing their strategic plans, and securing a long-term cash flow. Additionally, Elix pairs each of our incubatees with a mentor to show them the ropes of their respective fields. So far, we have been blessed to have CEOs, educators, serial entrepreneurs, and coders to volunteer their time. Furthermore, Elix is poised to start working with Dominican s Barowsky School of Business to develop the technical side of Elix s curriculum over the next two months. Elix s program is unique for a few reasons: 1) Elix is completely tuition free, promoting diversity in our incubatees socioeconomic backgrounds. In comparison, CATAPULT, our closest competitor, charges an all inclusive cost of $4,900 and only offers scholarships up to $2,250 1. 2) Elix s 1-3 year incubation program provides both security and freedom for our ventures to pursue audacious social change without fear of failure. In comparison, CATAPULT is a kin to summer camp that only lasts for six weeks. 3) Elix issues seed money to ventures ourselves through the Elix Innovation Fund, making prototyping and piloting much easier. We also provide a network 1 http://www.catapultideas.com/faqs
3 of investors, angels, VCs, and grants for our incubatees. In comparison, most incubators do not offer seed money themselves. Elix Goals In order to be a force of good in the world ourselves, Elix has three fundamental goals: 1) Broaden access to entrepreneurship, allowing business to transcend socioeconomic status. Therefore, we have a policy that requires that we recruit at least half of our incubatees from schools with either a high rate of reduced price lunches compared to the national average, or a low graduation rate compared to the national average. 2) Teach our incubatees about sustainable, socially conscious entrepreneurship. We work with Design4Impact and the Decision Education Foundation in order to teach our incubatees design thinking and decision analysis. 3) Launch businesses that address a social problem and can create bold and lasting change. Every single venture we incubate has a social mission at its core. Elix Logistics In order for Elix to be financially sustainable, we incubate social ventures. This means that our ventures are socially motivated, but also self sustainable. Accordingly, we only incubate companies that plan to make a profit. We require that our social ventures give Elix 20% of their operating profits quarterly after being profitable for at least one quarter. These royalties are invested into the Elix Innovation Fund. Our EIF is then used to pay Elix s monthly operational costs, seed future social ventures, and provides a safety net for our incubated companies. For example, if one of our ventures needs an advance, the EIF can pay for it. Or, if one of our ventures would like to pursue a $2,000 prototype research and development project, EIF can help. Elix has very low operational costs. Our fixed costs total to be $390.00/month. Our fixed costs include our co-working office space at the MindTank Work Club, a
4 LinkedIn Learning subscription for the team to use, and our website s host (Squarespace). Our variable costs currently total to be about $100.00/month. These costs include our G-suite accounts, business cards, and ads on social media sites like Facebook. We foresee a fixed cost of $750 to become an LLC in Delaware. Additionally, we are working with Morrison and Forrester s pro bono legal team to secure 501(c)(3) status. They estimate that filing fees for 501(c)(3) status will total to be $1,025. Once we pay for our legal filing fees, all other money will be diverted to building the Elix curriculum, working with the fundraising site Mobilecause, and seeding our ventures. How We Reach Our Incubatees So far, Elix has been successful in reaching our target market of low-income, entrepreneurial teens through school administrators, counselors, and social media. However, we plan to expand our efforts by partnering with community organizations like Big Brother, Big Sister, Junior Achievement, and Spark. Additionally, though we recruit most leadership roles for our ventures directly, we also hope that our incubatees will attract their friends and peers to participate in their social ventures. This will allow our impact to have a ripple effect. Our Current State of Affairs and Our Goals Currently, Elix is incubating a total of six social ventures. Our incubated ventures are working to disrupt alternative energy, disaster relief, educational equity, food equity, and more. So far, our ventures have brought in a total of about $5,000 from the just the past two months. However, most are still in their Design phase. We are currently at half of our incubatee quota, and hope to be incubating at least 30 teens by March. Additionally, we have seen dozens of applications, but we have been trying to accept teens from mostly economically disadvantaged areas, so we have been relatively selective in order to create the biggest impact in low socioeconomic areas. In terms of funding, we have been primarily self-funded since August. However, we have received small donations from the Decision Education Foundation, and our families. Donations have totaled at $700.00 as our primary focus has been the actual launch of Elix.
5 The teen incubator market is roughly seven million dollars, and Elix believes that we can achieve a 15% penetration rate in that market over the next two years. Elix is already succeeding the San Francisco Bay Area, but we hope to expand when our directors reach college. Elix s program of Design, Launch, Tinker, and Surge is scalable and can be carried out anywhere there is a social problem, and teen innovators. Additionally, since Elix s true resources are our connection and network of investors, we believe that these benefits will carry over- regardless of geographic location. Our team hopes to partner with our respective future universities to achieve office space and recruit Elix mentors. By 2018, it is our goal to have Elix be in at least 5 locations, incubating over 150 teens, and about 20 social ventures. Our Impact According to U.S. Census Bureau, there were 41,731,233 youth age 10-19 in the United States in 2015. Clearly, Elix cannot reach every single young person. However, Elix can create a platform and curriculum that can be adopted across the country as clubs, classes, or other incubators to empower teens to be the change they want to see in the world. Already, we are watching our incubatees feel a greater sense of purpose and social responsibility as they take part in the Elix program. Already, we can see that teens crave the ability to create a company that does good for their community. At Elix, the ideas of pursuing entrepreneurship for a profit and doing something good for the world are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are complimentary. We, at Elix, want to help teens create financially sustainable solutions for the problems they see in their communities. We, at Elix, are ready to change the way the world does business.