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BRILLIANT! JUMBO ENTREPRENEURS AND THEIR BIG IDEAS
League of Kitchens
BIG IDEA: New York City immigrants lead cooking workshops for groups of four or five in their homes. New Yorkers enjoy culinary adventures from all over the world, and the immigrants gain income. Gross, who grew up savoring the food her Korean grandmother used to make, decided after her grandmother’s death that she wanted to cook some of it herself. “I began using cookbooks and the Internet. Everything I made was good but not as good as how my grandmother made it,” she told ABC News. “So I sort of had this fantasy of “Wouldn’t it be great if there was this other Korean grandmother who I could learn from?”
STATUS: League of Kitchens, launched in February 2014, has already garnered raves. Conde Nast Traveler proclaimed that its workshops “might just be the coolest foodie thing to do in the city.” The business currently employs instructors from Argentina, Trinidad, Greece, Bangladesh, Korea, Afghanistan, India, and Lebanon. Groups can sign up for either a full workshop, with three and a half hours of instruction and a full dinner ($149 per person), or a shorter session consisting of one and a half hours of instruction and a small meal ($95 per person). And while carnivores will be well served, vegetarians will be, too, with, for example, traditional Trinidadian katchourie, fritters made from yellow split peas and served with mango chutney. leagueofkitchens.com
Threads Worldwide
BIG IDEA: Creating partnerships between women in developing countries who craft beautiful jewelry and accessories—like the edgy, asymmetrical Tien bracelet (made in Vietnam) or the Mandovi purse (made in India), which is fashioned from recycled seat belts—and women in the United States who can sell such creations by hosting special “threads parties” in their communities. “We focus on women because they put ninety percent of their income back into their family,” Yost explained in the Pioneer Business Review.
STATUS: Yost founded the Denver-based Threads Worldwide in November of 2011 with her friends and fellow travel enthusiasts Lindsay Herron and Kara Weigand. Their artisan partners—in Cambodia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, and Vietnam—are thriving. The artisans in Ecuador, for example, make twelve times more income than they had previously done. threadsworldwide.com
HackerNest
BIG IDEA: A nonprofit devoted to creating supportive, Silicon Valley-like communities outside of Silicon Valley. HackerNest sponsors hardware hackathons, job fairs, and other events, including casual, friendly gatherings where the focus is on connecting and having fun with peers, not networking. “We wanted to remove the cold interaction created by wanting to seem bigger than you are, and strip away the pretentiousness of business-oriented events,” Beh told the Canadian tech news website BetaKit.
STATUS: When Beh and his entrepreneur brother JJ, along with their techie colleague Robin Toop, started HackerNest in Toronto in 2011, it was “a few nerds talking over drinks,” as their website puts it. Since then, splinter cells have run more than one hundred forty events in twenty different cities in eleven different countries. Currently, a “coders teaching coders” project is in the works to allow HackerNest communities across the globe to share expertise. hackernest.com