Max Leisten, a UNC-Chapel Hill MBA alumnus and founder of startup Protopia, worked with Innovate Carolina to launch Ask an Innovator, a free, digital tool that allows students and faculty to get entrepreneurial advice from Carolina-connected experts.
The world is all about connections – in our personal lives, in our professional lives, abroad and within our communities. And the way we connect and build relationships shifts and changes each day. Couldn’t we all use a professional utopia, a better way to connect and work?
A “professional utopia” is just what Max Leisten had in mind when he created Protopia, a startup featuring an app that uses artificial intelligence to help innovative institutions – including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – harness the power of alumni networks to support the student journey. Through its novel digital platform, Protopia’s technology matches the best, most qualified alumni startup founders and entrepreneurial friends of the University with students in need of guidance and support when working on their own ventures.
“Protopia makes networking in high-affinity communities easy. We connect alumni, students and universities because we’ve found that asking for help can be really hard for most human beings,” says Leisten, an MBA alumnus of Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. “Helping someone is probably one of the best emotions we can feel as humans, but many times we’re busy with our daily lives. You want to make sure you make an impact, and we’ve built technology that reduces the friction of doing just that.”
Leisten and his team worked with Innovate Carolina, in partnership with the Entrepreneurship Center at the business school, to launch Ask an Innovator, a simple, yet powerful online platform that makes it easy for students and faculty to send questions to a Carolina-connected community of innovators and experts who are ready to assist.
“Ask an Innovator is an invaluable, easy-to-use tool for Carolina students, faculty and alumni,” says Sheryl Waddell, interim director of economic development at Innovate Carolina, UNC-Chapel Hill’s university-wide initiative for innovation and entrepreneurship. “Enterprising UNC innovators can quickly get answers to their most pressing questions, while subject matter experts are able to give back in a meaningful, impactful way. Students and faculty can take their ideas further, faster with the help of these experienced, Carolina-connected innovators and entrepreneurs in our community.”
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Waddell was instrumental in working with Leisten and the Protopia team to develop and launch Ask an Innovator, which is free for Carolina faculty and students.
“We work with organizations on the leading edge of what it means to connect, and Innovative Carolina fit that bill,” says Leisten. “Student innovators have a vision of doing something different, and it can be really hard to find someone you believe has good advice for you due to barriers around age, experience or even geographical area.”
Students can submit questions via Ask an Innovator for help with their startups, career paths or even networking guidance. Protopia’s AI technology mines the Carolina-connected system to find and recruit the best, available experts. Once a connection is made, those experts can choose how they can help – whether its’s through a phone call, a Zoom meeting or an email connection.
“The driver behind Protopia is that there’s a difference between formal mentoring, which can add really tight expectations on someone, and informal mentoring, where people meet organically around interests and skills,” says Leisten. “I’ve had experiences on both sides, and I believe that informal mentoring relationships develop better because informal mentoring requires that both parties continue to express an interest and desire to continue the relationship.”
Up until five years ago, Leisten had spent more than 20 years building B2B software apps. Feeling burned out from the work, he began to have conversations with friends and colleagues and realized that most were struggling with their careers and couldn’t figure out how to make the right connections to move forward on their current career path or even to take a different career path. Leisten soon discovered he could use his skillsets to help his friends by sharing their resumes in a unique way.
“I felt like a million dollars and thought I don’t know how I’m going to make money doing this, but I feel great doing it, and I can make an impact,” said Leisten. “I realized I could do what I love: building software that helps people.”
Drawing on his own mentoring experiences, Leisten understands that graduates are more likely to help someone from their alma mater because they remember the tremendous experience they had in school, and it’s a way for them to feel that again by giving back.
“Although it’s been a while since getting my MBA, if I look back, the biggest value is the networks and connections you establish,” says Leisten. “I actually spoke to fellow graduates recently to check in because we were really forged together by that shared experience. For me, that really goes back to if there’s enough interest for people to connect and if you make it simpler, a lot more is going to happen.”
And with the COVID-19 pandemic, Protopia became that much more valuable for students. Many had internships rescinded or jobs postponed, and they didn’t know what to do next.
“It was incredibly rewarding to see that students and alumni were using us to establish connections that may not have come up in a traditional mentor relationship,” says Leisten. “It was a little bit of a validation that if we make connecting easy, people are more inclined to use it.”
Because Protopia is a digital platform, it offers what traditional mentorships cannot – a wider pool of experts for students and faculty as well as an easier way to make that initial connection. Ask an Innovator has seen success among student and faculty innovators and experts with questions such as “How do I discover what my potential customers need?”, “How do I find the right manufacturing partner?”, and “How do I balance my startup role with my academic responsibilities?”
And although some connections forged through Ask an Innovator might only be needed for a short time, other connections endure.
“Our goal is to not try to be prescriptive, because it’s all about human beings,” says Leisten. “Protopia does not match on superficial factors. We hope we are making it easier to ask for help.”
While Leisten and the Protopia team have had success working with a variety of schools, including Duke University, Emory University, Ohio State University, NC State University and the University of Michigan among others, the team is already looking ahead to the future of mentoring and the changing ways in which humans connect.
“What if there is a way to use Alexa to ask for help trying to find work at Google in their Seattle office? Using natural language interfaces with social channels such as LinkedIn or Facebook for mentoring could be cool,” says Leisten. “As long as people need help and advice, how do I make it easy to unleash the energy and passion we have around helping someone? For Protopia, that is the true North, and that’s how we hope to be different. We don’t want to lose sight that it’s all about humans.”
Ready to try out Ask an Innovator? Visit askaninnovator.protopia.co. Have questions about how you can get involved with Ask an Innovator as a mentor? Email askaninnovator@unc.edu.
| UNC-CH