This is the final installment in a three-part series about student startups that launched on College Hill.
After ambitious student entrepreneurs settle on an idea for their startup and receive initial funding, founders with their sights set on expanding their businesses beyond College Hill must begin to execute the pitch decks they worked so arduously to prepare.
In early 2024, Gene Oh ’24 returned from his study abroad semester in Seoul with 1,000 jelly sticks and an idea: What if quick relief from a hangover could come in the form of a tasty snack?
Inspired by innovative alcohol aid products in Korea, Oh and his co-founder Felix Lee ’26 created DAYGUARD — a hangover-relief gel stick. Since their founding, the brand has accumulated thousands of social media followers, garnered over $400,000 in fundraising from individual angel investors and since launched on Amazon and TikTok Shop.
“The first time I tried it, I fell in love with the portability, the convenience, the taste and most importantly — after I put it to the test one night — the efficacy,” Oh said.
While building their product, Oh and Lee launched local bottom-up research testing to better understand their target customers’ preferences. Oh distributed jelly sticks to partygoers at popular evening destinations that served alcohol, like the Graduate Center Bar. Willing participants filled out a questionnaire about their opinions on the prototype product. In the end, the founders aggregated data from over 500 students.
Besides offering a space for product and consumer research, Brown has also provided valuable early-stage guidance for founders like Emma Butler ’20, who was featured in Forbes’s 2024 30 Under 30 for Retail and E-Commerce.
Butler founded Liberare — an adaptive underwear brand — which has since been spotlighted on platforms like Vogue and introduced to major retailers like Victoria’s Secret, Nordstrom and Aerie.
“Hearing people say, ‘This is the first time I was ever able to get dressed in the last 20 years,’ or, ‘You’ve really designed a project that changed my life’... is just the most rewarding thing ever,” Butler told The Herald.
When she was studying visual arts and French and Francophone studies at Brown, Butler first honed her understanding of entrepreneurship through Breakthrough Lab, Brown’s summer startup incubator. She applied to the program without any previous entrepreneurship coursework, but held an excitement to build a product that addressed women’s chronic pain.
Butler first conceived of the idea after seeing how her mother — who suffered from long-term hand and shoulder pain — struggled to find easy-to-put-on underwear.
When navigating business development during the early stages of her venture ideation, Butler found strong support from her professors and peers, she said.
One night, during her senior year, Butler hosted a dinner party in her dorm with a group of students, who she described as the “smartest people” she knew at Brown.
“I put a whiteboard up, and I was like, ‘Can we brainstorm and talk about some of these issues that I’m having with the business model?’” she recalled.
Brown’s network of alums provided Butler with lots of support as she grew the company, even after she graduated in 2020. Through cold emailing or LinkedIn messaging, Butler connected with several alum investors and influential mentors, including Steph Korey Goodwin ’09, co-founder of travel and lifestyle brand Away, and children’s education venture Charmspring.
Korey Goodwin “is always willing to pick up the phone, always going to answer my questions and always has radical candor with the way that she speaks,” Butler said.
Another alum, Jack Schaeffer ’22, took “as many entrepreneurial classes as (he) could” while at Brown, often bringing a list of entrepreneurial ideas to meetings with former adjunct lecturer Jonas Clark, who also served as associate director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship.
He’d often say “you have to go find and validate an unmet need,” Schaeffer said. “We did that for two years together.”
Schaeffer went on to co-found MediCircle — a startup that “collects, certifies and redistributes unused medications” — with Eliza Sternlicht ’22.
Sternlicht was conducting research on anesthesia treatment improvement at Tufts Medical Center and discovered this unmet need to address wasted, unused medications.
“She grabbed me and said, ‘Jack, you’ve got to come check this out,’” Schaeffer recalled.
From there, the duo secured grants from the Nelson Center and conducted “thousands of bottom-up research interviews throughout the entire New England medical ecosystem,” Schaeffer said.
He added that since 2021, MediCircle has raised $3.2 million dollars in funding, reclaimed $30 million of medication and helped rewrite over a dozen state laws that regulate pharmaceutical redistribution.
MediCircle is “on track to build the national infrastructure for pharmaceutical redistribution to ensure that millions of patients have access to affordable medication,” Schaeffer said, highlighting the company’s plan to launch with many health system partners.
MediCircle, Liberare and day–guard — the company behind DAYGUARD — all previously won the Brown Venture prize, receiving financial support from the Nelson Center in their early stages of development.
Several months after winning the Brown Venture Prize, MediCircle was featured in a Boston Globe article. After the article was published, people began mailing MediCircle “unused medications with handwritten letters saying, ‘Please do not let this go to waste,’” Schaeffer said.
The senders did not realize the mailing address listed on MediCircle’s website was actually Schaeffer’s parents house in New Jersey. Schaeffer recalled waking up to a phone call from his mother, when she asked: “Why are people sending us cancer medication to our front door?”
In 2021, MediCircle was awarded $25,000 in pre-seed funding from Van Wickle Ventures, Brown’s student venture fund.
Many College Hill startups were also backed by Brown alum investors. Some of day–guard’s angel investors include Gabi Lewis ’13, founder of Magic Spoon, and Moon-Suk Oh ’06, a partner at Altos Ventures.
Gene Oh highlighted his appreciation for day–guard’s investor and mentor Marco de Leon ’12, co-founder of Rip Van. He called de Leon’s advice “gold.”
“People don’t realize how supportive the school is — both financially and from a mentorship position,” Gene Oh said. “If you demonstrate that you’re smart and you’re serious about what you’re building, (Brown alums) will be very happy to talk to you.”
