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XAs Internships Fizzled, LA Bootstrapped a Startup Program for Disadvantaged Youth
Francesca Billington is a freelance reporter. Prior to that, she was a general assignment reporter for dot.LA and has also reported for KCRW, the Santa Monica Daily Press and local publications in New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.

For a lot of youth, 2020 was a lost summer. No internships, summer jobs looked bleak and graduation was dampened.
Joseph Hernandez Terrejon was one of them. Now, he runs a platform that connects barbers, hair stylists and makeup technicians with their clients in a safe environment.
Hernandez Terrejon, a 21-year-old Pasadena City College student, came up with the idea after his sister's hair salon closed and she began booking at-home appointments.
The app became a reality thanks to EmbarcLA, an entrepreneurship program for youth, developed with pre-accelerator program Startup Boost, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles mayor's office.
The program is run by Tania Mulry, co-director of Startup Boost LA, and Moaz Hamid, founder and CEO of health tech startup MVMT.AI. It aims to demystify the world of tech to youth who often don't get access to such training. Judene Small, the managing partner of CHIENET and co-founder of RootsxWings Digital, is also a co-director.
"Many said they are the first in their family to go to college and some had a family member running a small business," Hamid told dot.LA.
Hamid has run incubator programs and accelerators before, but those usually accept around 10 internships or 30 people per class. Within 24 hours of announcing EmbarcLA, over 110 students had applied. The program accepted all of them and began class the next morning.
To build a program schedule, Hamid took cues from the students. Over 90% of them came from low-income households and a few from foster care, he said.
The five-week workshop connected students, aged 16 to 24, with entrepreneurs and company founders through virtual classes, panels and mentorship. It was such a hit that Hamid said he expects the sessions to keep monthly sessions going until the next summer program 2021.
By the time Hernandez Terrejon joined, he had already sketched the prototype of an app that would essentially run like a ride-sharing platform for barbers, hair stylists and makeup technicians.
"[My sister] started doing hair appointments at home, getting more clients than she would in the salon," Hernandez Terrejon said. "And right away something in my head clicked."
At the end of August, he pitched the idea over Zoom to L.A.'s mayor during a demo day hosted by EmbarcLA.
Hernandez Terrejon learned about the program after the Chamber of Commerce canceled their 'LA Tech Pipeline' summer program. He had applied for a position at Snapchat through the program. He said workshops at EmbarcLA taught him how to research the market and demographics of his app idea, "so I could be able to present it to anyone, whether it be the mayor, investors or a business."
EmbarcLA participants pitch L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti their ideas over Zoom..
One panel explored how to become an innovator while working a job at a big company. Another talk led by actor, musician and playwright Marcus Harmon took up writing as a form of entrepreneurship.
Some students tuned in from bathrooms or closets, wherever they could find quiet space. And when Hamid heard several relied on their phone's data plans to join sessions, the directors switched from a data-heavy program to Zoom, which requires less bandwidth.
Hernandez Terrejon, who studies design, recently passed his app design along to programmers. One company, called Squire, offers a similar product to his but so far it only books appointments for barbers.
"I'm never going to forget when one of the guest speakers that said 10 years ago nobody thought strangers would be picking up strangers to drop them off places," Hernandez Terrejon said. "Nothing is impossible in the tech industry, especially when you're an entrepreneur."
Two other participants in EmbarcLA, Alan David and his brother Orlando Leon, plan to apply what they learned this summer to their family's food truck business. UCLA grad Rayvonn Anthony Sanchez Rodriguez Lee, now a student at Santa Monica College, developed an idea for a nonprofit college and career mentorship program for high schoolers.
The program was supported by investors, executives and programs including Techstars Los Angeles, Los Angeles Cleantech fund and Grid 110.
***This story was updated to include future program dates, the L.A. mayor's office and co-director Judene Small.
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Francesca Billington is a freelance reporter. Prior to that, she was a general assignment reporter for dot.LA and has also reported for KCRW, the Santa Monica Daily Press and local publications in New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
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Astroforge Raises $13M To Mine Asteroids
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Y Combinator startup Astroforge wants to use its new $13 million seed round to mine asteroids.
The Huntington Beach-based company aims to become the first company to bring asteroid resources back to Earth, TechCrunch reported Thursday. Initialized Capital led the funding round and was joined by investors Seven Seven Six, EarthRise, Aera VC, Liquid 2 and Soma.
“When you look at the opportunity here—and the opportunity really is to mine the universe—this is such a huge opportunity that investors are willing to make the bet on a longer time horizon,” Astroforge co-founder Matt Gialich told TechCrunch.
Virgin Orbit veteran Gialich launched the company alongside his co-founder, SpaceX and NASA alum Jose Acain, in January; the four-person firm, which Gialich said is now hiring for seven more positions, hopes to successfully mine an asteroid by the end of the decade. The seed money will fund Astroforge’s first two missions, with its first being a demo flight scheduled for a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare launch next year.
While Astroforge is keeping the specifics of its technology close to the vest, the company told TechCrunch that it involves a “high-rated vacuum” and requires a zero-gravity environment, but won’t involve actually landing on the asteroid itself. The company is eyeing asteroids ranging from 20 meters to 1.5 kilometers in diameter that carry high concentrations of platinum-group metals, which limits its potential targets to less than 1 million of the 10 million asteroids near Earth.
Astroforge wouldn’t be the first to attempt this science fiction-esque endeavor, though commercial space mining has faced financial and logistical obstacles that no company has yet overcome. NASA, for its part, is counting on the private sector to realize the U.S.’s space mining ambitions, then-deputy administrator Jim Morhard told dot.LA in 2020.
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Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Illumix Founder Kirin Sinha On Using Math to Inform Creative Thinking
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
Kirin Sinha wanted to be a dancer. When injury dashed that dream, she turned to her other passion: math.
On this week’s episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, host Yasmin Nouri talks with the founder and CEO of augmented reality (AR) technology and media platform Illumix.
Sinha received degrees from MIT, the University of Cambridge and LSE and founded a nonprofit to help middle school girls with their math skills. She ventured into AR while perusing an MBA at Stanford. Since founding Illumix in 2017, Sinha has raised $13 million from investors including Lightspeed and Maveron Ventures.
Her background in mathematics informs how she problem solves as a CEO, she said. Both math and her dance background taught her to seek out creative solutions.
“A lot of people think that math is very rote and analytical, but at its core it's truly not,” Sinha said. “It's about being creative. It's about having this building block for expressing and understanding the world around you.”
That creativity is bolstered by habits her mother taught her, such as surrounding herself with affirmations drawn onto post-it notes to bolster her spirits. Working in AR, Sinha said she's aware that what people surround themselves with impacts their inner world.
“Your diet is the people around you,” she said. “It's what you surround yourself with. It's the images and the words that surround your day-to-day life. I really spend a lot of time thinking about how can you improve the wider sense of the word diet around you.”
A crucial part of Sinha’s diet is carving out time for a daily walk to dedicate time to ponder Illumix’s future. Reflecting on big-picture goals and challenges allows her to consider how AR changes the ways people engage with the space around them.
Hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast. Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
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Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
Rael Raises $35M To Grow Its Organic Feminine Care Brand
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Rael, a Buena Park-based organic feminine care and beauty brand, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Wednesday.
The funding was led by the venture arms of two Asian companies: Japanese gaming firm Colopl’s Colopl Next and South Korean conglomerate Shinsegae Group’s Signite Partners. Aarden Partners and ST Capital also participated, as did existing investors Mirae Asset and Unilever Ventures.
Rael described the new round—which takes its total funding to date to $59 million—as “the largest amount raised in the U.S. feminine care category to date.” The company said it plans to use the capital to grow its product offerings, retail partnerships and global marketing reach.
Having already branched into skincare products meant to combat hormonal acne, co-founder and CEO Yanghee Paik said Rael plans on further expanding beyond basic feminine care products. “We aspire to be a clean, holistic personal care brand for women, so we’re graduating from just being another organic feminine care company,” Paik told dot.LA.
Paik and her two co-founders, who are all Korean-American women, launched Rael in 2017 and started out by selling organic pads on Amazon. Paik said she was inspired by the products she would bring back home after trips to South Korea, where the organic category represents more than 30% of the feminine care market (compared to less than 10% of the U.S. market, according to Rael). The startup has since expanded into retail stores like Target and Walmart, and part of its new funding will be dedicated to further growing its retail presence.
These days, Rael is part of an increasing number of companies focused on organic feminine care, with brands like LOLA, The Honey Pot and The Flex Co. all offering organic menstrual products.
“The feminine care industry is not like beauty, which attracted a lot of investors initially,” Paik said. “People are noticing that it’s one of the markets that has not been noticed by investors as much, but has a lot of growth potential because it’s been dominated by big brands. Now there are female-founded smaller brands that are trying to make a difference there.”
As part of Rael’s growth efforts, the company has also brought in Lauren Consiglio, a former marketing executive at Unilever and L’Oreal, as its president.
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Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.