Akhil Aniff
Class of 2018
Business Development at
Root Insurance
Failing Forward
I was 18 years old when I started my first company. “Tutor Take Out” was an on-call tutoring service where students could request tutors to come to their dorms for a small fee. Starting my own company had been a lifelong dream, one that was slowly coming to realization. I started talking about the idea to as many students as possible and reached out to faculty at the Innovation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh to hear their thoughts on the idea. My team and I secured a spot at the Institute’s summer accelerator program with the hopes that they would help us develop a business model and launch our product in the upcoming fall semester. The rush of events that was transpiring was exciting but it was short lived. Fast forward two and a half years later and “Tutor Take Out” was still at the same spot as when we started. We had pivoted our product twice and we also had two failed launches within the Pitt community, each resulting in strong negative feedback from our users. It was the summer before my senior year and we were gearing up for a third launch in the upcoming fall but the lack of interest from potential investors and accelerator programs led to several of our developers quitting the team. This forced me to realize that the company was on track for another failure and that the best course of action would be to just “close shop” and not pursue the venture anymore.
I do not like giving up. I have always been a tenacious individual and this was particularly difficult because it had been a lifelong dream that I had invested so much time into. I had given up internships, study abroad programs, and research fellowships for three summers to invest myself full time into the company. I had sacrificed studying for exams so I could work on the product and lead team meetings. The company had always come first. All that time invested needed to be justified but all there was to show for it was a Google Drive filled with three years of notes, power point presentations, and repositories of code that would never get used again. I left Pittsburgh and spent the rest of the summer with my family, trying to make the most of what time I had left before my senior year started. My wounds were fresh but I realized that there had been some key reasons why my first venture had failed.
Neither myself nor anyone else on the team had a strong expertise in an area that was critical for the company’s success. Our initial team consisted of two engineering freshmen and one sophomore business student. While we had various levels of prior experience, no one had a deep understanding of a particular area that would have been an asset to the company. We also didn’t have any experts advising us, such as professionals in the college education software space or in the mobile application industry. The lack of this expertise caused us to build our product and business model on some faulty assumptions. We also lacked an understanding of how to develop and launch our product. With our first version of “Tutor Take Out”, we had done some superficial surveying to see if there was a need to be met and we had made some basic wireframes on paper and showed it to students to gauge their response. What we hadn’t done was create simple prototype that simulated the experience that we wanted our final product to have. This kind of data would have been immensely valuable in not only validating our product idea, but also getting a deeper insight into the needs of our users. Not taking this pragmatic approach resulted in us trying to launch an unneeded product for a year before realizing that a pivot was necessary. Our final shortcoming was our inability to grow cohesively as a team and in my own inability to be a proper leader. Throughout the two and a half years of we continuously cycled through various developers and interns who had agreed to work for the company but would leave within 3-6 months of joining. I realized that it was a lack of proper leadership and direction that caused this continuous recycling behavior. I didn’t know how to run a company and this lack of clarity had disseminated to the rest of the team and hurt our performance.
My goal has been, and will always be, to start my own company but I realize now that I don’t have the necessary foundation to do so. I believe that the University of Pittsburgh’s bioengineering graduate program will help me to fill the gaps that exist in my knowledge, specifically through the Medical Product Engineering track. Having taken several courses in the graduate program, I have already experienced how beneficial the curriculum can be to my professional career goals. I am currently enrolled in the Medical Product Ideation course and many of the ethnography concepts taught in that class have taught me about applying design thinking principles in the medical device industry. I’ve applied many of these principles not only in my project for the Ideation course but also in projects for my other classes. I believe that the internship requirement of the Professional Masters will also help me to learn how a company is run, which will help me manage a team of my own in my future ventures.
My first entrepreneurial experience was unsuccessful but it gave me some insights into what I needed to learn in order to be successful. The graduate program in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh can teach me those necessary skills. I believe that the Medical Product Engineering program will teach me how to bring innovative products to the marketplace as well as manage companies to execute exactly that. This will also be supplemented well with the vast cardiovascular expertise present at the university. All of these things will give me the foundation to fulfill my goal of launching my own company one day.