The beginning...

Hey everyone, I'm Kevin Ting, a first year EE grad student at UCLA.  I grew up in Dallas, TX and went to school at Rice University, down in Houston, TX.  A few months ago, when Fall quarter first started, I was going through a pretty rough time, so I started obsessing over innovation in order to block out the other stuff.

I came up with a lot of different ideas ranging from vehicular ad-hoc networks, mobile health, and web services.  However after a lot of ideas were shot down, I came up with the current one, which has to do with sharing goods between college students (think Couchsurfing combined with Craigslist). After talking to a lot of people, I decided that this idea was the one I wanted to swing for the fences with.

I then proceeded to go to a lot of various mixers and entrepreneurial events, just to see what UCLA had to offer.  I know Rice had some but I never had the urge to attend these events until now.  It turns out UCLA has a TON of resources for entrepreneurs - TEC, ITA, Anderson mixers, etc.  Through these events, I learned that LA has maybe the fastest growing start-up scene in the nation!!

I saw advertisements for the ITA Venture competition several times in the beginning of the quarter and knew that such an event would be VERY fun to compete in.  However, I was always half-hearted about it because I didn't really have a good idea, nor a solid team to compete with yet.

As the quarter drew on, the idea evolved more and more as I talked with more people around the lab, back home, and at mixers.  I realized that this idea had a real shot to be something special.  So the next big step was for me to find some co-founders.  Fortunately, the lab I worked in has some very talented EE/CS majors who knew a lot of web/mobile programming.  I was able to convince my good friends Jason and Chenguang to join.  However, I still felt like I needed one more dedicated co-founder to make this development team complete.

After sending out a lot of ads, I was contacted by Scot who said he was interested in joining the team.  He ended up being the perfect match for us (business AND technical acumen) so we brought him on the starting team immediately.  Now, we just need a MBA student to join us in order to complete the team for the ITA competition.

It'd also be nice to have a graphics designer, UI/UX designer, and dedicated market/publicity manager, but that might be asking for too much right now haha.  The quarter is almost over so we are in the final push for course projects and exams, but during Winter Break, some of us will get started with the beginning foundations of the web site.

I'm really excited to get this thing rolling, and if you have any advice or questions, don't hesitate to contact me!!