Deliver Initials Age with airSlate SignNow

Deliver esigning age

Graduating college is a major achievement for anyone. But imagine that within a year of graduating, you received $500,000 in funding for an idea you came up with in class. Seriously. That's what happened to 30 year old Josh Aviv, founder of SparkCharge. And his idea is a simple one. Professor came into class one day, said, you know, if you want to solve a huge problem for the world, solve the problem of infrastructure for electric vehicles. And he said if you're interested, you know, meet with me after class. And I was the only person to show up. Josh and his economics professor had their discussion in 2014 and eight years later, lack of EV charging infrastructure is still one of the biggest concerns among potential EV buyers. According to Autolists.com's annual Electric Vehicle Survey, range anxiety and lack of charging stations are among consumers top worries. If you wanted to really open the door to have freedom with the electric vehicle, be able to drive the electric vehicle virtually anywhere, you needed a charging system that could match that experience. SparkCharge provides on-demand charging for electric vehicles. You can select the time, the place, choose your vehicle, how much range you want, and with the push of a button, it gets brought to you. So the same way that you would order food from Uber Eats or GrubHub, is the same way that you can now have energy brought to your vehicle. There's three numbers to look out for in Josh's story: $4,500, the amount of prize money won in his first pitch competition. $500,000, the funding he received from his first investor. And 1 million, the number of miles that SparkCharge has delivered to its customers. Here's how Josh Aviv took a college idea and turned it into a $110 million company. For CNBC Make it, I'm Zach Green. This is Founder Effect. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, Josh says that business was always something in the back of his mind, possibly stemming from his family background. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He ran his own shipping and logistics company, and at the time I really didn't know what an entrepreneur was, right, or what an entrepreneur did. I didn't even think of him as an entrepreneur. I just thought, you know, that's his job. It wasn't really until I started my own business that I realized that I'd grown up around an entrepreneur practically in my early childhood. Josh attended Syracuse University in New York, where he majored in economics. When I arrived on Syracuse, I did not think I was going to start a business. So the class was environmental economics. The professor was Professor Peter Wilcoxen, and we started talking about the electric vehicle market and the problems that we were having with infrastructure now that we are now starting to see magnified ten times today, right? From those conversations went and started SparkCharge. To raise initial capital for his start-up, Josh entered...