Personal experience and a news story led to the creation of startups by (l) Ryan O’Donnell ’11 and (r) Sasha Surkin ’21. (photos: submitted)
Two NCSSM alumni – Ryan O’Donnell ’11, the co-founder and CEO of startup Sunlight, and Sasha Surkin ’21, founder and CEO of WeyeZE (pronounced “Wise”) – were among seven entrepreneurs recently awarded grants by NC IDEA, a private foundation committed to supporting entrepreneurial ambition and economic empowerment in North Carolina. The $50,000 grants come with mentorship and guidance from established business professionals and will help O’Donnell and Surkin scale up their companies and mitigate some of the risks of navigating early-stage business development alone.
Fixing foster miscommunication issues
For O’Donnell, his company’s first product – a mobile app called Your Case Plan that focuses on foster care services – originated out of the disjointed and inconsistent experience he and his wife had while navigating the foster care system as foster parents. Disconnection between involved adult parties, O’Donnell says, often trickles down to the children in the system who are left in emotional or legal limbo or with unmet needs due to vital information that had “fallen through the cracks.”
“Urban counties face certain challenges with regard to foster services; rural counties, they’ve got their own. But it’s things like that, where communication just isn’t efficient, that lead to so many kids having to unnecessarily reside in the foster system longer than necessary.”
Your Case Plan helps resolve foster cases quicker, O’Donnell says, by functioning as a central communication tool and digital file cabinet. “With Your Case Plan, foster or biological parents or caregivers, case workers, and attorneys can all chat or do voice calls or video calls with each other, and keep track of all case notes, documentation, certificates, or upcoming appointments. So much in their case can be tracked in the app and be accessible as needed by the appropriate parties.”
O’Donnell is certain to note that Your Case Plan is not “prescriptive” of any particular outcome in foster cases except for what is in the very best interest of each child in the system. “Regardless of how a case is resolved,” he says, “whether a child returns to their biological family or is adopted, we want to make sure that there is transparency and accountability and that no one’s getting the short end of the stick because they’re just stuck navigating a complex system.”
The State of Oklahoma is the largest user of Your Case Plan at the moment, but O’Donnell says he’ll have big news to share soon that the NC IDEA grant will help facilitate.
Easier access to vision correction
The origins of WeyeZE, Sasha Surkin’s eyeglasses invention, can be traced back to Christmas of 2017 when, as a high school sophomore, she received a Sunday subscription to the New York Times.
There on the front pages of the Times, Surkin read how a lack of equitable access to vision care, especially for those without insurance or financial resources, caused a significant deficit in global economic productivity. The story resonated.
“As somebody who wears glasses, I know what an impact it’s had on my education and life trajectory,” she says. “It’s such a small thing that’s so overlooked.”
Surkin began to knock about ideas for how to address the problem.
Those foundational ideas of WeyeZE went with her to NCSSM where as a junior she applied for and received a grant from the NCSSM Foundation-managed Bowman-Brockman Endowment for Entrepreneurship and Advanced Research to further develop her ideas. That grant became the first of many she would receive for her emerging company.
The product Surkin developed is a glasses kit that enables the user to get a pair of corrective glasses at a fraction of the time required under the current system. She has two product lines, one each for near and farsightedness.
For people who lack access to corrective glasses, the kit can mean the difference between functional sight and debilitating vision. The kit can also be useful for those who simply want a secondary pair of glasses for emergencies, or a pair that can be worn in situations where a more expensive pair might easily become damaged.
Surkin has a pending patent on her product, and is continuing to pilot WeyeZE, working or having worked with organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club of Durham and Orange Counties, Northside Elementary School in Chapel Hill, and Prevent Blindness North Carolina. The grant from NC IDEA will help Surkin continue to develop and scale the product through the remaining pilot rounds into beginning their first pre-seed capital raise.
“Right now we are pre-market, still strategizing and building the sales funnel out,” she says. “It’s always an iterative process, but come the last quarter of this year, we will be launching direct-to-consumer while still growing business-to-business customers. For those that would like to, however, they can pre-order the product for nearsightedness by getting in touch with us through the ‘contact us’ link on our website.”
Though no longer NCSSM students, O’Donnell and Surkin still feel every day NCSSM’s influence on their professional and personal development, and credit their experience at the school with the successes they are now achieving.
“It was just an incredible place for me to grow,” Surkin says. “It helped shape me, helped me figure out what I wanted to do, and then it supported me. I’m so so grateful for that school, so so grateful for it.”
Says O’Donnell, “Everything has always been attributed to NCSSM. I can’t overstate that, really.”
