Ahlstrom Family Summer Startup Accelerator Virtual Demo Day!
Paul Ahlstrom
CEO & Co-Founder IsoTalent, Co-Founder TechBuzz, Author Nail It Then Scale It
Its time again to do the demo day of the Ahlstrom Family Summer Startup Accelerator. As with all things during the pandemic, our Demo Day will be virtual this year. While we have all collaborated with each other on each startup, this summer each of our family members led a different startup. Creating has been our happy place and a way to stay sane during the pandemic. With all the extra time on our hands, we may not have finished Tiger King but we did spend our our time building and the output of our Ahlstrom Family startup factory has been exceptionally prolific this year.
Paul Ahlstrom Jr. age 25 — HealthTree Univeristy. https://university.healthtree.org/ (You can click on the link above and enter as guest to see the HealthTree University classes.) https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulstrom/
HealthTree University is an astonishing project with a newly created LMS and complete educational curriculum that answers almost any question a myeloma patient could have about their disease. Paul Ahlstrom Jr. and myeloma patient Cynthia Palmieri Chmielewski co-led and created 15 complete educational courses with 200+ video classes taught by 70+ of the leading myeloma specialists in the world. (They have filmed over 400 video interviews of leading specialists.) The HealthTree LMS (learning management system) was built from the ground up by the HealthTree dev team and designed for use by elderly cancer patients. HTU has received sponsorship from 8 pharmaceutical companies and is making a life changing difference for thousands of cancer patients each week.
Megan Heaps age 23. Megan has graduated from the Ahlstrom Summer Startup Accelerator program as she has recently married Ben Heaps. We are happy for them! My favorite startup that Megan created was the 2017 Solar Eclipse Camp in Idaho. https://www.ksl.com/article/45487396/utah-family-turns-rexburg-eclipse-camp-site-into-fundraising-tool-for-cancer-treatment
Clark Ahlstrom age 21 — Clark's Super Photography
https://www.instagram.com/clarksuperphotography/ After spending the first part of the summer at US Marines Officer Candidate School, Clark came home and surprised us all with his creative side. He created Clark's Super Photography to focus on corporate photography— employee portraits for websites and product photography.
Sam Ahlstrom age 19. Sam's summer adventure was starting as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints serving in Austin Texas and then onto the Dominican Republic next year. Sam has been hard at work serving the people of the great state of Texas and learning what online missionary work looks like. Sam would love it if you would friend him on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/sam.ahlstrom.71
Reed Ahlstrom age 16 — created Wasatch Shred Shop, a mobile ski tuning business. Here is the Instagram page — https://www.instagram.com/wasatchshredshop/
Along with his cousins Dallin Bentley and JT Ahlstrom Reed created Wasatch Shred Shop. (Try to say that fast three times :-) The Wasatch Shred team comes to your home, picks up your skis, tunes them up and returns them to your home. (They can also do onsite Ski tuning.) This is a fun service business and these guys are passionate about skiing and pretty good at photography too. Website coming soon: https://www.wasatchshredshop.com/
Neal Ahlstrom age 13 — created Lemonati.co soap company, a natural soap business. https://www.lemonati.co/
Neal has been obsessed with perfecting his soap recipes over the summer. Lemonati soap uses natural ingredients (4 types of oils and essential oils) and the smells are so amazing people often call them flavors. As we are washing our hands more, I have found the soap doesn't dry out my skin and our family now uses it every day. Scents (flavors :-) include Creamsicle (vanilla orange), Lemon Bar, Pina Colada, Lime, Rain and more. Neal came up with the name "Lemonati" for his Lemonade stand. During the pandemic he pivoted and turned his Lemonati Lemonade stand into a soap business. (Turns out not many people want to buy lemonade from a kid on the side of the road during COVID.) The pivot totally worked! The soap makes a great gift for friends or family and they smell amazing!
Neal just launched his new online store and he did all the work to get it ready! (He even created a Secret Society Soap of the Month Club) https://www.lemonati.co
Jenny Myers Ahlstrom - In addition to her amazing work as a mom, wife and cancer warrior on HealthTree.org and MyelomaCrowd, my wife Jenny and her amazing dev team at HealthTree have created a Social Company Builder that has been cranking new innovative software platforms to help cancer patients. (Jenny is a force of nature and has seriously taken to this entrepreneurship thing.) So here are the projects that Jenny and team have created...
- LOIS CMS - A Community News Portal CMS System. (Here are some examples of websites built using the LOIS CMS - https://www.myelomacrowd.org/ - https://techbuzz.news/ - https://alscrowd.org/
- Discussion Thread Dialogue Platform. This project is led by JP Capdevila and integrated into the HealthTree platforms.
- Online Events management platform. This project is led by Jenny, Trent Staheli and Pablo Perez.
- HealthTree Univerity. https://university.healthtree.org this project is led by Cynthia Palmieri Chmielewski and Paul Ahlstrom Jr.
- Myeloma Coach & Mentor platform. This amazing project is led by Rozalynn Webster Hite Here's a link to the beta, the updated platform coming soon https://www.myelomacoach.org/
Paul Ahlstrom Sr. age ... old enough to know better — Sendmi.com is my main focus., Sendmi is a financial inclusion platform that address that gap of the unbanked and underbanked in the US. https://sendmi.com/
I am passionate about brining all employees inside the financial system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4LXSPIbT88&ab_channel=Sendmi
zCard.io I did work on a couple of fun summer startup projects this summer. One with my cousin Trent Staheli to eliminate the need for a physical business card — It's called zCard.io During COVID, nobody wants to get handed a business card, so just launch the zCard app or zCard.io website and point the QR code at their camera and your contact information magically shows up on their phone. http://zcard.io/
TechBuzz News. The second summer project was a Utah Tech News website called TechBuzz I created TechBuzz along with Robb Lifferth Mark Tullis Austin M. Craig, my son Paul Ahlstrom Jr. and my brother Marv Ahlstrom No need to be stressed out by left or right leaning media, TechBuzz is straight down the middle happy tech news! https://techbuzz.news/
Ok, that's a wrap for Summer of 2020 Ahlstrom Family Summer Startup Accelerator virtual demo day. Hope you enjoyed the projects. We will be back next year with more fun ideas. Please check check out each of the kids startups.
Product Director Strategic Marketing
3yThis is such a fantastic idea. Thanks for sharing Paul - how young were your kids when you started doing this?
Chief Operating Officer @ Converus Inc. | MBA, Finance
3yI'm always impressed with the many creative things you do.
Product Leader at Capital One | Driving Human & Data Platform Strategies in FinTech
3yI saw you talk about this at the Venture Fuel summit. What an inspirational idea. I wish more colleges would include curriculum like this to build more entrepreneurs.
Founder and CEO at All4Cure
3yWhat an awesome family!
Brand Master | Creative Mind | Learner | Doer | Husband & Dad | Cancer Fighter/Survivor
3yPaul Ahlstrom Thank you for sharing! That was an inspirational read! Having hit a few roadblocks the past year or so, I could feel a little fear start to creep into my actions... As a developer of ideas and products, I allowed the thought that my next venture "had to be" a homerun keep me from taking a swing or two... Or 10. This post helped me realize there are many levels to success and so many different ways to achieve it. I needed this.