There’s a new breed of startups sprouting in Brooklyn. And get this — the founders aren’t computer geeks. Instead of spending their 20s gaming and building software, these entrepreneurs were busy serving our country and its interests on land, air and sea.
Heads up, New York, here come the veterans — be they from the Air Force, Army, Navy, Coast Guard or Marines. Honorably discharged from the military, they’re now gearing up to join the innovation economy at New York University’s Veterans Entrepreneurship Training (VET) program held at the Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn.
The 14-week program helps them take the entrepreneurial qualities they gained in the service — commitment to completing a mission, focus, agility and positive thinking —and supplements them with lectures and learning experiences. The result: They leave with what they need to bring their ideas to life.
“With a startup, there are lots of moving parts in the deck, from legal to logistics to creating pitches. We learned about all of those and more,” says Ramon Ortiz, a 32-year-old Coast Guard veteran from Staten Island who co-founded Powder Keg Club, a nutritional -supplement distribution firm.
Ortiz and his co-founder Matthew Ross, a 30-year-old US Marine Corps veteran, completed VET in December, and they are already in business selling Powder Keg Club subscriptions. A subscription provides weight-lifters, fitness buffs and other customers with 30 units of premixed and prepackaged powders — BCAA, glutamine, and creatine — on a monthly basis.
Ross says it would have been difficult to launch the business this well and this quickly without the team of professors, guest lecturers and others at VET.
“We had a knowledge base that was always accessible,” Ross says. Not just that, but the community members around the program — successful startup founders, fellow program members and other veterans — proved priceless, say the pair.
“They told us what they thought of our ideas and shared the lessons they had learned [while creating their own startups], so that we don’t repeat their mistakes,” says Ross.
“The program gave us everything we needed to execute,” says Ortiz.
That’s a sentiment echoed by 33-year-old VET graduate Christopher Shaw. The former Army captain and armed reconnaissance helicopter pilot who did two tours in Afghanistan founded CORE Leader, a “military-proven” leadership development and team-building service that is delivered via a patent-pending mobile obstacle course. Shaw says that CORE Leader went from idea to operating business in just six months. It counts New York-based employers including Rabt, Social-Effort, Manhattan College, NYU’s Stern Business School and others among its customers.
Former Marine Capt. Mario Mangiameli credits VET for helping take the company he co-founded, Integrated Health Technologies, from “zero to finish” in 14 weeks.
The 36-year-old Brooklyn resident, who did two tours in Iraq and was a counterterrorism adviser for US Homeland Security, is currently in discussion with manufacturers about making Integrated’s product, a bottle that tests water for impurities and pollution in real time and then filters it so that it is safe for consumption.
“It would be a real-time solution for communities like Flint, Michigan,” says Mangiameli, who added that it could also bring peace to parents who worry about the lead pipes that are present in many schools across the country.
Week 14 of the VET program features “demo day” where the veterans pitch their startups before, and get feedback from, an audience of faculty mentors, local government officials, the chamber of commerce and potential investors. “Getting plugged in like this is invaluable,” says Mangiameli.