for a while now we've been thinking about starting a blank fund, an interesting innovative way to give back. we didn't want to just do the generic 10% of your shirt is going to the [insert charity name here]. we find this somewhat disconnected. we wanted to do something innovative, and we wanted to actually have some involvement in it. supporting charities is important. we're all about that, but i feel we should be able to leverage our brand, brains and reach and actually get involved in something really cool. we're inspired by companies like TOMS shoes that gives a pair of their shoes to a child in africa, for every pair bought.
we then realized that we love young guys doing cool shit. so we want to support that. they're super small contributions, we're a startup, we've got no money. but we did want to build a culture of creating social wealth, as well as financial, and we wanted to do it right from the start. so who are our first couple of blank fundees?
first we have neil parikh, a brown university junior studying an intersection of commerce, organizational dynamics and biotechnology. he has the typical future-leader-of-the-universe over-achieving work background having spent months as a product developer for a platform to help healthcare leaders to better connect, a researcher for lab detecting toxins in water supplies using conductance measurement of cellular lysis as a reporter, and a research associate in the robotics academy at the NASA goddard space flight center.
neil was tweeting for a ticket to the boston startup weekend this past weekend, as someone whose previously received free tickets to paid events that i've really enjoyed, i thought this might be an interesting one for blank fund. startup weekend is a two-day extreme startup fest - walk in with an idea, pitch it to an audience, find team members, agile develop it, leave with a startup. we paid for a ticket, he had a great weekend, i'll post his personal post he wrote for us of it tomorrow.
from sponsored ticket, our next endeavor was a sick free shirt to jason evanish at greenhorn boston. jason is a great promoter of young people starting companies in boston. his organization greenhorn is an online hub of events, blogs, video of knowledge, information and connection points for the young boston aspiring entrepreneur. when he reached out and asked if we could support him with a really individual and unique greenhorn boston/ blank label custom men's dress shirt, we were more than happy to promote his visibility, and support his great work.
if you have any other cool ideas that we could support or if you have your own case that you think fits with us, feel free to leave a comment or ping us directly at sayhi (at) blank-label.com. remember, young guys doing cool shit is our mantra for this ...
this post was written by blank fund founder fan bi, supporting young guys doing cool shit since young guys became cool and doing cool shit was newsworthy. fan's also a blogger for our co-creation blog, and is Blank Label's chief executive.
