Introducing Trent Bigelow, New Contributor To College Startup
When Ryan posted the request for volunteer contributors to College-Startup.com, I immediately jumped for the chance to step up my participation in one of my daily reads. The hope is that I, along with a few others, can help Ryan and Kitty make the blog even more interesting and engaging. You’ll have to let us know how we do on that…
In the meantime, I’d like to offer a quick background on who I am and what makes me, me.
I have been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember, probably starting with the quintessential lemonade stand from childhood. The only difference between my stand and the usual one, was that I had somehow organized a franchise structure involving many of the other neighborhood kids. It ensured collaboration instead of competition, kept everyone happy even on the bad days, and enabled each participant to focus on what they did best.
Not a lot has really changed since then. I’m currently serving as CEO of Luova Ventures, a group of early stage startups in Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Our basic mission is to identify and nurture three types of young companies and teams:
- Disruptive — ideas so revolutionary that they abruptly redefine the existing consumer experience. This often requires deep investment in breakthrough innovation, visionary team members, the right timing, and a whole lot of luck. These are the ventures that make up for really any loss elsewhere within the portfolio. The main challenge is finding the rare right idea with the even rarer founding partners.
- Niche — ideas that may have an initially small target market size, but are very focused and have easily achievable objectives. The focus on ease of use, radical relevancy, and sense of community enable these ventures to achieve rapid growth. These businesses must have low overhead and achieve sustainability quickly. We don’t expect our entrepreneurs to think big all the time, sometimes we want them to focus on answering underserved niche needs.
- Social — ideas that have a deep, positive impact on society and act as catalysts for progressive change. These businesses are the ones with bottom lines that are not strictly financial. From global warming, to poverty, to lagging education, to internet access there are countless of unmet social challenges. We want our businesses to empower people to become independent, safe, and fulfilled. We expect these ventures to break-even and remain sustainable, but beyond that, serving the social good is all we really want.
This is our vision — we’re really still in the beginning steps, but we’re on track. Expect exciting things to be announced here first. Also, I’m fascinated with consumer experience design and tipping point sort of stuff. Before starting ventures, my background is in mostly marketing, branding, and innovation strategy from my days at Hewlett-Packard’s unbelievable New Business Creation Unit. I swear it was like Skunk Works — and I still have to keep my mouth shut about all the sweet gadgets still unreleased! Anyway, expect insights and commentary from me in areas like these.
Beyond that, if you still want to learn more about me, you can check out my profile at an upcoming niche venture, Bigsight.
All right, that’s my intro to you guys. I really look forward to the chance to get to know everyone here a little better, and the discussions we’ll be sharing!
All the best,
-Trent.
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Trent,
Great to have you on board.
BTW, does Luova help out with startups in exchange for equity shares in the emerging company? My friend and I have what we think is an awesome startup idea, but we’d need help in the execution of the backend technology and site design. We’d love to talk with you about it. We’d load your company up with shares in the company, and maybe even a little seed money, if you’d be able to help us out. Let me know. ryan [at] college-startup.com