Rajesh Karmani really hates food waste.   While studying at the University of Illinois, it was something he noticed on a daily basis, but after researching the topic of food waste a bit more, he quickly discovered the problem was much bigger than he thought.  He soon learned that the average American throws away 20 pounds of food every month. According to the Washington Post, the United States wastes enough food every day to fill up the Rose Bowl.  While 40 percent of the food produced in this country goes uneaten, 1 in 6 Americans deal with hunger on a daily basis.   An entrepreneur at heart, Raj saw opportunity where most saw inefficiency.

 Knowing there had to be a better way to connect the vast quantities of food surplus with the organizations that needed it most, Raj founded Zero Percent with that very goal in mind.  Utilizing his computer science background, Raj set out to build a convenient, safe, and efficient online food donation marketplace helping restaurants move surplus food to nearby soup kitchens and shelters.  “For me, Zero Percent was at the nexus of what comes natural to me, what felt right to me, and what interests me,” Raj explained. 

While Raj was trying to get his company off the ground in Champaign, just a few hours away, a program was being built to help startups just like Zero Percent. Operating out of co-working center 1871 in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, Impact Engine was created as a 16-week startup accelerator offering mentorship, support, and resources to companies addressing societal and environmental challenges.   When Zero Percent was accepted into Impact Engine’s second round of startups, Raj knew the opportunity would serve as the perfect chance to help him learn about his business at a rapid pace.  With the help of Impact Engine, Zero Percent is now working with over fifty nonprofits (Pacific Garden Mission, Franciscan Outreach, and Salvation Army to name a few) and is receiving regular food donations from well-known businesses and restaurants all over Chicago including Goddess and Grocer, Hannah’s Bretzel, and Dimo’s Pizza.  I got a chance to sit down with Raj to hear more about Zero Percent and how he began his crusade against food waste.

Q: Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I finished college in 2005, and I initially started doing some freelance consulting for companies in the UK, Pakistan, and the U.S., so that was my first jump into entrepreneurship.  I got admitted into a PhD program and for a while in that academic setting I got the chance to teach and do research.  I seriously considered pursuing an academic path, but I think during that time, entrepreneurship was aways in the back of my mind, but it just wasn’t getting the right outlet. 

Q: Both you and Caleb Phillips (CTO of Zero Percent) have very impressive backgrounds in computer science, so you have the technology side of the company pretty well covered. What has the learning process been like when it comes to running the business side of things?

We’re certainly learning a lot as we grow. Caleb came from a non-profit background, so he brought a lot in terms of knowing about food waste, food hunger, and non-profit management.  I was about to graduate and I came across this idea that combined my interests in technology, entrepreneurship, and volunteerism, but I knew I still had a lot to learn about business.

U of I has a great incubator program called EnterpriseWorks so we got space and membership there for six months.  It was a way to surround myself with smart entrepreneurs in the area.  As soon as that was ending and my graduation was approaching, we got the offer from Impact Engine and it could not have been a better fit considering it was based in Chicago and had a focus on social entrepreneurship.  They have been great at connecting us with mentors and advisors.  It’s a lot of learning every day, and there’s still plenty more to learn.

Q: When you are trying to get businesses and restaurants to use Zero Percent, how do you convince them to sign up?

Our early adopters are companies where green and sustainability is part of their culture.  These are businesses that have tried sustainability projects before but it did not work for them.  Then, we build upon those experiences and explain our additional benefits, like how these businesses can promote their food donations to their employees and customers.  We also explain the benefits of the data they receive from Zero Percent and the chance to create operating efficiencies and reduce costs such as trash hauling.

Q: With a business like this that depends so much on logistics, what are certain metrics you guys are constantly tracking and trying to improve upon?

At the crudest level we track how many pounds of food are rescued in a day.  We want to grow this from where we are now at 1,500 pounds per day to 15,000.  Doing so will give us operational and business metrics that we can show to potential customers and investors and convey what we do best, which is rescue pounds at the lowest cost, in the shortest amount of time, and in the safest way possible.  This is a hard problem because there are so many variables involved such as time, location, and size of delivery.  The real challenge is meeting those at the supplier side and the need side.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge of expanding this to cities across the country that need it just as badly as Chicago?

The challenge would be how to efficiently reach new donors. Restaurants are busy, time constrained, and cash strapped, so it is about finding more early adopters to help us grow.   We learned a lot in Champaign and Chicago, and we want to take what we’ve learned to help us scale here and grow to other communities.

With bowl season kicking off next week, millions of sports fans across the country are dreading the looming end of another exciting season of college football.  Even though you team not have made it to the historic Beef O’ Brady’s Bowl or the illustrious San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, you can always look forward to packing up the tailgating gear and heading back to campus next season. 

Such weekend football trips have become an annual tradition for many college sports fans; however, hotels rooms can be hard to find in college towns during gameday weekends and the good old laws of supply and demand cause the prices of those few available rooms to skyrocket during those six or seven weekends each fall.  By connecting passionate college football fans with homeowners looking to make some extra income, University Football Rentals has steadily become a company focused on ensuring college football fans can have both an enjoyable and affordable trip to see their team play.

Started a few years ago to serve Notre Dame fans descending onto tiny South Bend, Indiana, University Football Rentals has worked with hundreds of willing homeowners living near stadiums to list their properties and rent them out to fans coming in for the weekend. UFR makes the listing process extremely easy for homeowners to post a few pictures of their property, set their rental price, and immediately start making money.  Meanwhile, families and friends looking for a place to stay can search the listings by price, size, or proximity to the stadium.  Staying at a house with amenities like big screen TVs, pool tables, and hot tubs makes for a much more enjoyable gameday experience than splitting the group up between two or three hotel rooms.

Recognizing that this same shortage of housing is plaguing dozens of college towns across the country, University Football Rentals has steadily expanded over the past few years.  Fans flocking to Lincoln, Athens, and other great college towns are heading to the company’s website to ensure they can have a more cost-effective and enjoyable gameday experience.  Just this past year, the company added both Oxford and Ann Arbor to a continually growing list of towns with available housing.  I sat down with Mike Doyle, the company’s VP of Business Development to talk expansion, entrepreneurship, and the business behind connecting homeowners and football junkies.  Check out the interview and University Football Rental's video below

Q: What is the biggest challenge of running a very involved business with a lot of moving parts all over the country with such a small team?
There are a lot of different challenges. One thing that I've had to get a lot better at is prioritizing and creating processes. At bigger firms, there are all sorts of processes in place for every imaginable scenario. That's not the case with us - as things come up, we deal with them. That's not scalable, however, and the more you grow, the more of a problem that becomes. I've tried to spend a good deal of time formalizing the things that I do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Creating a master schedule, guidelines on how to deal with different issues, etc. I think this will become increasingly important when we start expanding the team.

Q: What drew you to work at a company like University Football Rentals?
During senior year, while in the process of looking for jobs, I remember speaking with someone about working for smaller firms/startups. I may be butchering this, but the guy had a quote that was something along the lines of "At most big companies, you can't even reach the gas pedals. At startups, they throw you the keys and make you drive the car."

I think what was the most attractive to me was that I would have the freedom to try lots of different things, and would be able to directly see the impact of my work. If I tried a new strategy that worked out well, I could point to the financials and say that I caused that growth. On the other side of the coin, however, if things started going south, there's no way to pass the buck. On top of that, I really like the challenge of growing something new - granted, when I joined the company we were already well established at Notre Dame, but expanding to new towns is a challenge that I really enjoy.

Q: How has the dynamic between University football rentals and Ann Arbor/State College/etc football rentals evolved over time?
We decided early on to have local pages for each college that we would expand to. The thought process was that for our business, national brand awareness was not a major priority, as 99.9% of our customers are only going to rent homes in one town (PSU fans rent in State College, UGA alums in Athens, etc). That has also been hugely helpful on the SEO front, as our naming strategy has helped generate lots of organic traffic for our network of sites. For our homeowners, it seems to be meaningful that we are a national company with multiple locations - it shows that we are an established and legitimate business, even if we don't have many homes in that particular town.

Q: What are the benefits of renters and homeowners from using RLAC instead of something like Airbnb?
In the majority of the markets that we're entering, Airbnb does not have a huge presence. They're a great company, but it seems that their focus is on large vacation destinations and cities - not smaller college towns. Aside from that, however, we are extremely specific in who we are marketing towards. All of our marketing dollars that go towards renters are targeted at football fan sites, alumni clubs, etc. We know who our customer is and focus in on them with all of our outreach.

Additionally, we only rent out entire homes, while a lot of Airbnb is renting out bedrooms in a home. For these types of events, people are often coming back with large groups (meeting college friends, families coming back, etc) and thus renting an entire home seems to work really well.

Q: What makes for a great new market besides a big football town.  Why an Ann Arbor or State College over a West Lafayette or Madison?  
The things that we look for are a large alumni base, a passionate football following, and a small(er) urban area, one that does not have enough hotel rooms to support the influx of people that show up for major events (namely football games and graduation weekends). Ann Arbor and State College have been ideal for us, in that both Michigan and Penn State have storied programs with really devoted fans, and are in smaller towns. Somewhere like Columbus is tough in that it's more of an urban area, and thus lack of hotel rooms is less of an issue. The same is true of a place like Madison, Wisconsin - the demand for this service simply isn't as high in a place like that, as there more of the traditional options available.

Growing up in Chicago's south side and now growing a business in Chicago's tech hub, Chris Motley has come full circle. But when you dig a little deeper, it becomes clear that Motley was constantly carving out his own unique path towards becoming a CE0 and founder of a rapidly growing startup providing solutions to the job search process.

Upon graduating from Columbia, Chris began his career as a trader at Goldman Sachs.   After a few years, he switched gears and joined 1888 Mills, a global home and commercial textile manufacturer.  While at 1888 Mills, Chris served as Director of Global Strategy Sustainability and later became Executive Vice President, all while picking up an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

Frustrated with the inefficiencies he saw plaguing the job search process, Chris pitched an idea to solve the issue at Chicago’s 2011 Startup Weekend.  The idea captivated fellow attendee Kunal Parbadia, and a few months later the two co-founded Better Weekdays.

Touting itself as the GPS for Your Career Journey, Better Weekdays helps students and professionals navigate the tricky and frustrating job search process by matching their values with career opportunities.  JobScript, an online self-assessment and development tool created by the team at Better Weekdays helps you recognize your unique strengths and provides clarity and targeted professional development to the job search process.

Job seekers utilize comprehensive and validated feedback provided by JobScript, enabling them to develop a plan for their professional life.  Better Weekday users then go on a private job-matching platform providing opportunities aligned with their preferences and job compatibility.

Targeting students and alumni from top universities, Better Weekday’s currently offers it’s assessment for free to students from schools such as Northwestern, Michigan, and Notre Dame.  You can watch Chris discuss Better Weekdays during a recent Technori Pitch event here. To learn more about Chris and Better Weekdays, check out my interview with him below and check out their website betterweekdays.com

Q: What is wrong with the current model behind staffing and recruiting? In a word - everything! Specifically, resumes don’t adequately capture an individual or determine success.  Also, there is little objectivity in the current process. 

There are three big insights that validate what we are doing: 1) By the time one is 30, they will have had 4 different jobs - and there needs to be a platform to facilitate these inevitable transitions, 2) universities are not necessarily funded to provide career services to alumni, thereby fueling the current staffing/recruiting model and 3) companies that  traditionally recruit college graduates don't have access and visibility to certain campuses/alumni pools to objectively select quality talent in a cost effective way. Better Weekdays seeks to be the GPS for one's career journey - a private platform to help individuals actively manage their careers.  This enables us to provide our corporate customers with "best fit" candidates at half the cost of traditional sources. 

Q: What made you decide that culture fit is the most important determinant of success for a “better weekday”?
 We didn't decide culture fit is important - the market did - and as a result, it is a key component of our job matching process.  In established organizations, people tend to outgrow their jobs (in startups, it is the opposite).  Specifically, the rate at which employees acquire skills is much faster than the time it takes for their roles to change - leading to unhappiness and attrition.  If someone is a good fit - defined by their motivations, abilities and personality being aligned to their job and work environment - they will be happier and tend to stay longer.  With the cost of replacing an employee at 1.5x the salary, its easy to recognize the value an extra year can contribute to the bottom line.     

Q: Why the decision to initially focus on recent grads/alumni from top 50 universities?  
We no longer limit ourselves to top universities.  Originally, it was a function of focus and recognizing that the path to get more universities on board is least resistant when you have top universities on board.  Also, we wanted to leverage the admission standards of selective schools to entice companies to be interested in our value proposition.

Q: What makes JobScript better than your average Meyers Briggs Test that most students take to find out what occupation would fit their personality?
JobScript is a career assessment that takes the most holistic perspective of an individual in the context of finding meaningful work.  Other tools, including MBTI, were not specifically designed for this purpose.  It is also important to note that JobScript is only part of the "career DNA" that we capture from an individual.  We also capture their preferences and work experience, which, provides a very holistic picture of a candidate before the 1st interview.

Q: Since your company is focused on recruiting and hiring, what matters most to you as a founder and CEO when it comes to finding new employees?                                                              It is crucial that someone has the motivations, abilities, and personality for the job that they have to do at Better Weekdays.  We eat our own dog food - every current/potential employee goes through JobScript as part of the screening process.  

Q: If you could only ask a potential hire one or two questions, what would they be?                 1) What have you built and why (if they have not built anything - why did you make the choices you made thus far in your career journey)? and 2) Can you explain something to me that you know VERY well (ideally it should be related to the job they applied for)? 

 Q: Better Weekdays puts a good amount of focus on the idea of personality types and characteristic, what is the most important characteristic when it comes to being an entrepreneur?
 A key framework that underlies our technology is Career Archetypes.  There are 9. For example, Artistic Creativity, Human Development, and Process Efficiency.  These archetypes are the manifested by the combination of one's Motivations, Abilities and Personality (MAP) and we measure the dominant archetypes in every individual.  For an entrepreneur, my view is that Entrepreneurial Challenge, Motivational Energy and Strategic Decisions matter most.  I hope that I'm right, because those are my 3 dominant archetypes!