From Broke to a Billionaire

by Eli Lazar

Okay, I’m not really broke and I’m definitely not a billionaire yet, but the events from the past few days have set up the potential for both to become a reality. Even stranger, on paper (i.e. a resume) they sum up to a loss; I took a step back from drifting into the “billionaire sunset,” but in my fall, I somehow managed to fall forward.

So enough of the vagueness, a friend (Robin Chin) and myself came up with an idea to create a type of mobile interface for a stationary PC. The rest went pretty quick. An overheard conversation at an Asian restaurant, a few chats with some friends, then three electrical engineers later (Jessica Ruyle, John Sartori, and Erica Daley), our team (now) of five entered an entrepreneurial competition called Cozad at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. We made a working prototype and found ourselves in the Cozad finals trying to win a whole bunch of different prizes. However, it turned out we were better at building stuff than trying to sell it, because we got tore up during the Q&A of our presentation for our business model.

But life has a strange way of bringing you where you want to go. We ended up connecting with one of the judges, Larry Chiang, who invited us to a post-competition workshop. This is where the light bulbs really started to turn on. We learned about the importance of exposing our product to the public; the who’s, how’s, and why’s of bringing something created in your home to being sold in a store. It is not about what you can do, but how you show people you can do it. We also ended up getting invited by Larry Chiang to a reverse VC pitch event in Austin, Tx. Stay tuned, because we are not even close to being done yet.

My friend Robin and I building the prototype (left) and our team presenting on competition day