By GREGORY ZELLER // Some innovators are born knowing what they’re meant to do. Some figure it out along the way. And some require a little divine intervention. There was never any doubt Stacey Foley would run her own business, at least not for Stacey Foley. But what kind of business? Even the entrepreneur didn’t know. Her path was illuminated, somewhat, by the Swarovski Crystal craze of the last decade. A big fan of the…
By GREGORY ZELLER // Before everyone and their brother was offering bus tours of Long Island’s brew pubs and vineyards, there was Tapped Enterprises. The Ronkonkoma-based brainchild of President Kevin Bowker actually launched in 2008, first as a purveyor of what the founder called “dorm décor” – posters, flags and other beer-themed accouterments for the college set. But by 2012, still years before leave-the-driving-to-us tours of Long Island’s craft-beverage scene were in vogue, the enterprise…
By GREGORY ZELLER // For entrepreneur Tianna Meilinger, it’s a family thing. The innovator carved her niche back in 2005, when she launched her first company – Vaya Bags, a Huntington Station-based manufacturer of custom bags and weatherproof coverings. But her craftsmanship goes back much further, to her early teens, when Meilinger started working for her dad. John Meilinger – “Miles,” to friends and loyal customers – was a self-employed craftsman who designed unique clothing…
By GREGORY ZELLER // The “flip” came around 2014, after Ashley John Heather and his wife, Diana, welcomed their third child. Heather, a Brit who emigrated to the United States around 2000, had lived his entire U.S. life in New York City. But it was two years since he’d sold his successful e-commerce startup Dotbox to NYC holding company MDC Partners, about that long since he’d bought the house in the Hamptons, a few too…
By GREGORY ZELLER // A pre-clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company is being fast-tracked toward a potential Alzheimer’s treatment, after taking a decidedly slow road. Stony Brook-based Avanti Biosciences Inc. actually launched in 2009, but was “dormant for a few years,” according to founder Gian Luca Araldi, “kind of an empty shell.” It was only in the last two years, when “I had some ideas I wanted to develop on my own,” that Araldi – a former senior…
By GREGORY ZELLER // Sydney Epstein wasn’t hungry for entrepreneurial success. She was just hungry. After graduating from Emerson College, the future business owner took a job as a TV and film production assistant in Los Angeles. At the top of her settling-into-a-new-place list was “finding my go-to restaurant, like I do in every city,” she told Innovate LI, so the self-described “food-obsessed millennial” did what millennials do. But Epstein quickly lost her appetite for…
By GREGORY ZELLER // In an age ruled by digital interfaces and computerized systems, Noreen Kazi and Nisha Bhalla may have cracked the code. Neither is, by education or inherent skill, a natural coder. But the entrepreneurial sisters are both scientists: Kazi studied physical therapy at Stony Brook University before pausing to raise a family, while Bhalla earned an MBA at Harvard University and made a career of launching high-tech startups for larger corporations, focused…
By GREGORY ZELLER // Perhaps Brian Fried should launch the re-inventors club. Boasting many notches on his toolbelt – several inventions, a few commercial scores and a pair of how-to books for the entrepreneurial tinkerer – Fried is founder of Inventors and Entrepreneur Clubs in both Nassau and Suffolk counties. The networking groups have exposed him to makers at various points on the invention spectrum, and he’s helped several find their way. Now, the corporate…
Hofstra University and Suffolk County Community College will split a $162,000 grant from Empire State Development to help aspiring small business owners. The funds will pay for counselors to help people interested in starting a small business. Topics include writing a business plan, obtaining loans and other financing and basic management. The program also helps minority- and women-owned businesses become certified to compete for government contracts and veterans wanting to start businesses. The schools have…
By GREGORY ZELLER // Have you ever wished you could get a gallon of organic milk from Whole Foods, a bag of kibble from Petco and your vitamins from CVS, without all the driving and crowds and checkout lines? According to Instacart, you probably have. Responding to “incredible demand” from Long Island residents, the San Francisco-based retail delivery service is expanding operations to include Nassau and Suffolk counties. Beginning Aug. 1, customers in 110 Long…
By GREGORY ZELLER // What’s in a name? Maybe everything, if you’re a startup in need of early-stage capital. A new study by researchers from Stony Brook University, Drexel University and Villanova University explores the effects of “name fluency” on investors – that is, the familiarity, uniqueness and phonetic influence of a company name, and how venture capitalists tend to react. By exploring “the two ways you can evaluate a name, two kinds of fluency,”…
By GREGORY ZELLER // These are busy days for William Biamonte, a forward-thinking entrepreneur with multiple oars in promising waters. Bustling Bill heads not one but two startups with breakout potential, each looking to capitalize on an industry that figures prominently on national levels. First there’s Green SulfCrete LLC, which is leveraging decades of Brookhaven National Laboratory research and multiple small-scale grants in its quest to remake the construction trades with sulfur polymer, a next-level…
By GREGORY ZELLER // As a writer of mystery novels, Barry Libin understands the creative process. (His “The Mystery of the Milton Manuscript,” in fact, may be the vanguard of an entirely new genre: historical-poetry adventure). As a successful entrepreneur, he understands the touch-and-go world of business formation (he sold off a prior startup, Manhasset-based BML Pharmaceuticals, for a “significant” sum back in 2005). And as a trained periodontist, the graduate of Stony Brook University’s…
By GREGORY ZELLER // Shlocker has hit the mother lode. In the shared-bathroom-retail-Nirvana equivalent of beaming up to the mothership, Bridgehampton-based Tula Industries LLC – distributor of the world’s first waterproof safe for protecting personal shower products from mooching roommates – has struck a deal with Bed Bath & Beyond, with the Shlocker landing this week on the national chain’s shelves, actual and virtual. Shlocker is also the world’s only waterproof anti-mooching safe, and it…
By GREGORY ZELLER // In the Big Data era, simply having data isn’t enough – it’s what you do with it that counts. That’s the thinking behind SFL Scientific LLC, a 2015 startup that puts the intelligence in “business intelligence” by not only crunching numbers, but helping clients understand what the algorithms and other data-driven discoveries really mean – and how best to capitalize on them. Technically headquartered in Boston, but with the bulk of…