Wright: Welcome to the Princeton Spark. My name is Wright Seneres. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Wright: This season of the Princeton Spark podcast will focus on the story of Adora, a uniquely Princeton startup that found opportunity even in a global health crisis, and achieved a dream exit.
Wright: This team of student entrepreneurs built a company that disrupted the college tour industry and enabled more lower-income prospective students to access more colleges across the nation.
Wright: But the founders of Adora, whom we’ll meet coming up, will be the first to say that they didn’t do it alone. With support from the Princeton entrepreneurial ecosystem, they launched, pivoted in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, scored some early successes, and then set themselves up for an acquisition by a terrific company. We’ll meet some of those key people who helped them along the way, and explore some of the lessons that any entrepreneur can take from their experience.
Wright: So if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the Princeton Spark in your podcast listening app of choice, so you don’t miss the rest of this fascinating story of Princeton student entrepreneurship.
Sound: Electronic Computer Processing
Wright: From the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, this is the Princeton Spark. I’m Wright Seneres.
Wright: The various people that make up the Princeton entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem have long been at work, taking risks to bring transformational ideas and companies to the world, in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity. These are the stories of Entrepreneurship the Princeton Way.
Wright: Our story begins with Ron.
Ron: Yeah, so my name is Ron Miasnik. I was one of the co-founders and CEO of Adora. And I'm currently the general manager for Adora at Full Measure Education after we got acquired by them. And I'm Princeton class of 2022.
Ron: I was very excited about starting something in Princeton. And I was very excited about some sort of entrepreneurial endeavor and had been, you know, I've been working with a couple various friends on various kinds of ideas and hacks and putting it all together. And we never, we never got traction, there was like three or four ideas that we, that I was trying to get off the ground and was not able to succeed. And then, kind of one day, a friend of mine, who was actually a few years below me in high school, was a friend of mine from back home in California. He came and visited Princeton, and he did the kind of classic campus visit process. He did the information session and did the campus tour. And he and I sat and he and I sat and got lunch afterwards. And I asked him how he enjoyed the visit, his Princeton visit. And he looked at me without flinching and said, honestly, it sucked.
Wright: Ouch!
Ron: And I asked him why. And he said something that made a lot of sense. And I guess the context is that this kid has been a physics genius ever since I've known him. And he looked at me, and he said, I've been on Princeton's campus for five hours. I did all the right things. And I know I want to study physics, and I haven't heard the word physics once. And that was really disappointing for him.
Wright: Houston, we’ve had a problem.
Emily: There are a lot of products out there to provide some sort of remote campus visit option.
Emily: I'm Emily Crosby, I'm the assistant dean for events and visitor management and Princeton's Office of Admission.
Emily: And most of them revolving around sort of a preset route that you build as a university, some with you know, 360 degree views or whatever information you'd like to populate with, with photos, or maybe video recordings, but not so many that were really functional on campus. And not many that I'd ever seen at all that were customizable. So the existing products seem to be very much like a fixed route, sort of tour that if you do it, you're either remote, or if you're on campus, your route is set for you. Pretty much in stone, there was not a lot of exploration, you know, outside of that.
Wright: Not a lot of exploration, outside of the fixed route, whether you were in-person for the traditional campus tour, or remote. Here’s Ron again.
Ron: And kind of based on that point of frustration, we ended me and I ended up a couple other friends who ended up being co founders, reach out to Princeton's admissions office, and and share that experience with them, and ended up learning a lot about how they thought about campus visits, and virtual engagement, and admissions and yield, and all and recruitment and all these types of dynamics and realize that there was probably something we could do about it.
Wright: Ron and two of his friends, Raya and Joseph, had taken this problem to the Princeton Admissions Office. And soon after that, they returned with an idea. Here is Emily again.
Emily: I remember, we met at East Pyne in the cafe, we sat at a little table. And Ron and Raya and Joseph had this idea for an app that was customizable. And that was kind of the lead, because they had had their own experiences on campus tours, where they didn't quite get the information that they were seeking.
Wright: Ron’s friend’s problem, going on a college tour, but not hearing anything about his intended field of study, wasn’t an isolated incident. Here’s Emily again.
Emily: And it resonated with me because being in this industry, no matter where you are, you get that feedback a lot that as a university, you're giving a tour that's hopefully going to appeal to everyone, give them general information. But everybody's always coming on tour hoping for, you know, very detailed information about the program that they're seeking to study. So I was very excited that they had, you know, locked in on this idea to provide something that was very absent in the industry.
Wright: With the problem sketched out, Ron, Raya and Joseph set out to solve it.
Emily: So what Ron was proposing was an app that would help them to navigate a campus that's a little tricky to navigate, if you've never been here before, put all the students interests into a tour that was customized for them with 1000s of options, as in terms of routes customize the amount of time, and it really filled a gap in terms of what do we do for the students and families who can't come on our tour, who can't visit, during the hours that we're providing the tours, because we're pretty locked in on business hours, we do have weekend tours. But we know there's a lot of people who, who can't take the time off to come to campus or can only visit on certain days when we might not be offering visits.
Wright: This season, we’ll trace the steps that the Adora team took, from that little cafe table, to the big acquisition. And we’ll explore the various ways Princeton supported Adora. But how did Ron get to the starting line of this journey? That’s after the break.
Wright: Hello podcast listener. I would love for you to send this podcast to a friend, but if you’re like me, and I know I am, I’m probably washing the dishes as I listen to this podcast. So you probably can’t quite send this to your friend right this second. That’s okay, just remember this handy dandy acronym and send it when you’re done the dishes. Ready? Here’s the acronym: S-P-A-R-K. Spark.
Send
Podcast
Along;
Recommend
Kindly
That’s: Send Podcast Along; Recommend Kindly. And send the Princeton Spark to a friend. Now on with the show.
Wright: Welcome back to the Princeton Spark. How did Ron Miasnik, Princeton undergrad and Adora co-founder get to the starting line of this particular entrepreneurial journey? We have to go back to school. Middle school. Here’s Ron.
Ron: I actually actually very much grew up around entrepreneurship and startups. So I, first of all, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was a very startup oriented place. So a lot of my, a lot of the adults that were around me in the careers that were around me, were very entrepreneurial folks. And actually, my dad is an entrepreneur, has been a serial entrepreneur his entire life.
Wright: We’ll come back to Ron’s dad in a moment, but first, here’s a middle school origin story.
Ron: and so I grew up with seeing the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and the experience and the fulfillment that it gave him. And from very early on, I also kind of adopted that bent from in middle school, I would always, I would organize, I organized summer camps for my siblings and their friends in the neighborhood. And, you know, charge every one of their friends, a couple, every one of my siblings, friend's parents a couple bucks to like, watch them in the afternoons. And then in high school, I started a couple clubs on campus, and I ended up starting a nonprofit to actually connect students in my high school with local startups and small businesses to work on different internship projects and ended up growing actually pretty large. And then and then, and then kind of continued from there.
Wright: Before we go back to the future at Princeton, here’s an even earlier origin story.
Guy: Sure, there's no doubt he grew up in a very entrepreneurial house. I'm Guy Miasnik. I'm Ron Miasnik's dad. That's my first job, actually, but besides that, I'm a serial entrepreneur, I started three companies, one successful, one not successful, and one more successful. And now I incubate and invest in young startups.
Guy: Actually, my company, the main company that I founded, was born, was co-founded in the same year that Ron was actually born. So I always looked at them as sort of my two children. And I would say, oddly enough, when it was acquired, it was at the same time that Ron left the house after high school to go to Princeton. So both basically, I've let go of both of them at the same time as well. So there was always a sort of a duality between building a company and raising a child. So Ron definitely experienced the entire journey of the entrepreneurship that I went through, in a very deep way. He was always really curious about what's going on, learning about the company, and what are investors and what is VC, and questions that sometimes surprised me even as a younger child, and later as he grew up. So definitely, I think he got some of the DNA as well.
Wright: When Ron was setting off on this particular entrepreneurial journey, here was Guy’s reaction:
Guy: I was excited for him. I was actually very excited because I believe that you learn so much from an entrepreneurial experience, regardless of where it goes, I was always and maybe that's the dad in me, try to sort of lower his expectations. And again, listen, the chances are, the vast chances are it will fail. So don't don't expect too much, but go for it. So definitely it was a sort of a combination of looking at another fellow entrepreneur. But also that fellow entrepreneur is actually my son, and you don't want them to get hurt. But I was very, very excited. I thought that the period of college in college is not just about education, right? It's not about just studying classes, it's about experiencing and about challenging yourself and going into, into areas that you wouldn't do otherwise, and you have the platform for it and Princeton is an incredible platform for it. So I was very excited to see him sort of venturing and trying some new challenges and so that was good. So lots of support actually from us.
Wright: Support structure number 1: home. A supportive home life is not always available to an entrepreneur, but it helps. It also helps that his dad was very experienced, but even Guy says:
Guy: In many respects, I try to have him come to me with questions rather than me sort of going actively to him and that was sort of the balance. So sometimes I had to hold back and say, don't say anything, they either come to either make the mistake or come to me and ask questions. And, you know, he did, that is something I would give Ron a lot of credit, he was willing to ask, and was it part of his curiosity and his was willing to listen as well, which is more than many entrepreneurs, are actually.
Wright: And many sons! Guy: oh, all sons (both laugh)
Wright: In Part 2 of our nine-part series on Adora, we’ll meet Raya Ward, who designed her own major at Princeton, which will figure prominently in Adora’s development.
Wright: The Princeton Spark is a production of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, which is Anne-Marie Maman, Don Seitz, Lauren Bender, Diane DeLorenzo, and produced by me, Wright Seneres.
Wright: Engineered by me on Zoom, working from home, and Dan Kearns at the Princeton Broadcast Center. Edited by Brandon Apter.
Wright: I designed the sound and music for this episode. Our theme music is by the Treadmills, who are me on guitar and bass, and John Damond on drums.
Wright: Special thanks to Alice Seneres, Scott Colan, Ron Miasnik, Emily Crosby, Guy Miasnik, and Heather Masse and Tiffany Novak at Creative Circle.
Wright: The comments and suggestions box is always open – send an email to
[email protected]. If there is a topic on entrepreneurship or a person that you would like to hear from, please let us know.
Wright: Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @princetonspark. You’ll find some extra content there, you can put some faces to the names and the voices that you heard on this episode, and more.
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Wright: The views expressed by our guests on the show are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council, the Office of the Dean for Research, Princeton Innovation, or Princeton University.
Wright: If you haven’t subscribed to the show yet, please do so wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.
