Running the Show: Stories from Commonwealth Entrepreneurs

Running the Show

Stories from Commonwealth Entrepreneurs

BY LILLIEN WALLER

Founding—and running—a business or organization is difficult even in the best of times. It puts your skills to the test and pushes your boundaries to discover, and develop, new ones. Statistics vary widely on how well start-ups fare in the first few years, whether they are primarily for- or nonprofit. But there’s no denying the outsize commitment, risk, and even humility it takes to run the show, as these student and alumni/ae entrepreneurs can attest.

Alex Li ’22, Raphael Yamamoto ’22, Vivian Ye ’22, and Sophia Ying ’22

Co-Founders, History2Us

“In a world where we no longer sit around the dinner table or around the campfire telling stories, we thought that it was really important to promote that kind of environment but adapt it to today’s digital society,” says Sophia Ying ’22 on the relevance of History2Us, an organization that collects, shares, and archives oral histories of everyday people.

In 2019 Sophia and co-founders Alex Li, Raphael Yamamoto, and Vivian Ye (all ’22) launched the organization as a way to more deeply connect with and better understand their own family heritages. But in the past two years—despite the limitations imposed by a pandemic—it became much more.

“We didn’t know about the stories of our grandparents and older generations in general, so we found that really sad. Even with all of the technologies available, their stories weren’t being preserved,” Alex says. “So we wanted to find a way to make that easily accessible. Our idea was to do oral histories where younger people would interview their grandparents. But we also wanted to broaden that perspective.” That meant moving beyond their own immediate family circles to hear and archive stories throughout their communities. The stories participants have recounted so far—of child- and adulthood, of living as an immigrant and losing loved ones—reveal both American and local history, from the Vietnam War draft to the cultural taboo around divorce to the Boston busing riots of the 1970s to the invisible yet palpable boundaries of racial segregation.

At first, the worsening pandemic made collecting narratives logistically difficult, occasionally impossible. But Vivian, Raphael, Sophia, and Alex were able to interview a nurse, who described the emotional toll of working with COVID patients, and an infectious-disease specialist, who discussed the tensions surrounding vaccination.

“One of the powerful things about oral history in particular is that it allows you to realize the humanity of the story,” Raphael says. “A lot of history is told to you, and it’s sort of distant. It feels disconnected because you’re hearing about it for the first time. But when you can hear actual personal stories of people going through these things, it makes the events a lot more real.” That sense of history-made-real has also given the four students an opportunity to reflect on their own lives, values, and aspirations—who they are and who they would like to become.

“You learn a lot about yourself,” says Alex. “By talking with these people, you’re struck by their perseverance. It can inspire you to try to be better.” Vivian agrees. “We had a couple of key questions that we were looking for answers to. But it turned into something a little more conversational, and so we mostly just heard stories about their lives and life lessons.”

The process of establishing History2Us as an organization—an archive with a website, still under development—came with its own learning curve as well. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was that there are so many ways in which you can tackle making an organization. And, because we had so many ideas, it was really hard to manage all of that,” Alex says. “So we made a master schedule and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to meet each Thursday.’ And I think a lot of

it was also realizing that it’s very easy to say what you want to do, but to actually implement that can be a lot harder.”

Commonwealth faculty like former history teacher Will HolubMoorman and math teacher Anna Moss ’06 helped ground the students’ focus by encouraging them to avail themselves of the many opportunities in Boston and connecting them with a radio journalist and a business professor at a local university. The four eased the workload by taking turns attending workshops through Harvard Innovation Labs, an opportunity they discovered with the help of Commonwealth alumna Joy Ding ’19. The program has provided them with an “arsenal” of resources, including tools and strategies for marketing, publicity, branding, and website development.

While feedback from friends, family, and the Commonwealth community has been positive, the reality is that all four students will graduate soon, moving on to college and, eventually, careers. Will History2Us move with them?

“We have discussed continuing this ourselves as we go into college,” Sophia replies. “It’ll certainly be a greater challenge across geographical and time barriers. But this is something really important to us all. And whether it’s us continuing it or finding other people to continue this initiative, I think you could see it going in a lot of different directions.”

Tamara Griggs ’89

Founder and Executive Director, Threadable Books

Threadable Books was the career-changing opportunity Tamara Griggs ’89 didn’t see coming. A specialist in eighteenth-century European history, she had been teaching at Harvard for six years before cofounding the business in 2018. “I was making a move to teach part-time, and my officemate had a connection to an investor,” Tamara explains, “who had been trying to find a historian to help him with a project. It all sounded a bit vague in the beginning, but I agreed to meet him for coffee to see if I could do some consulting work for him part-time. We ended up talking for about two hours.”

The investor turned out to be Peter Kolchinsky, a virologist, biotechnology investor, and cofounder of RA Capital Management in Boston. “He was reading presidential biographies at that point, and he had started to wonder whether anything existed to guide him or provide a different perspective than the one that was being given by the biographer,” Tamara says. “Together, we decided to create this new e-reader. Initially, I was just doing some research, but I converted to full-time as Executive Director, and [Kolchinsky] happily went back to his work in biotechnology so that I could run it.”

Threadable Books is an innovative e-reading platform that gives curious readers a way to learn, discuss, and share what they are reading inside the pages of the digital book. It’s “social,” but not in the way we’ve come to expect: historical and literary experts and authors serve as guides through each text, and anyone from solo readers to book clubs can weave threads and share insights within a book’s margins. The guides offer curated experiences for readers who seek context but not necessarily the scholarship found in footnotes.

“Think of it as if you had someone sitting next to you while you’re reading who knows more about it than you do, but they’re not lording it over you,” says Tamara. “So, for example, you’re reading [Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass], and Douglass is writing about being threatened with being sold down South. A guide can point out why it was more dangerous for an enslaved person to be sold to Mississippi or Alabama rather than Maryland. They can provide historical context—a bigger picture—about what the writer is saying at that moment. Or they can point to something the writer couldn’t have known at the time that historians have since figured out.”

The platform includes classic texts in the public domain from the late eighteenth century to 1923, and Tamara hopes eventually to include contemporary fiction and nonfiction. But Threadable Books already boasts an impressive roster of guides, including Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times; Princeton historian Kevin Kruse writing on Martin Luther King, Jr.; and journalist and environmentalist Bill McKibben writing on James Hansen, the scientist whose 1988 congressional testimony helped broaden awareness around climate change.

Tamara points out her own learning experience as someone who had been “thoroughly embedded in academia” for most of her life. “Very quickly, I had to learn about software development and what that process entails. I had to develop ideas about what would be effective in an e-reading application. I knew how Kindle and Apple Books work, but I didn’t know the first thing about making an app.”

The real challenge, according to Tamara, has been determining what a reader might want if they’re reading a digital book and how to bring in another interesting perspective without bogging them down in extraneous research. “With the Internet, you could teach yourself almost anything. Problem is, how do you do that? We’re trying to figure out, in some sense, how to bring that to the reader in the application.”

Threadable Books’ full-time team consists of Tamara and historian Peter Pellizzari, an Americanist who joined in September 2020 as Managing Director and is now a Co-founder. Around that same time, Threadable hired a Boston software development company, Upstatement, to develop the mobile iOS app. Currently, Tamara

is focused on building out commentary for the e-reader and hopes to eventually develop a feature that would help solo readers find like-minded communities.

Regarding whether the free platform can turn a profit, Tamara says: “Fortunately, we are not really concerned about that right now. We want this to exist, and we want a new way of reading to exist. But it’s important to grow the audience before growing the company.”

With a formal launch pending, Threadable Books went live in August 2021.

Raphael Kohlberg '06

Founder and CEO, Rakoh

The U.S. fashion footwear market generated more than $90 billion in revenue in 2019. For Europe, that figure rests just north of 70 billion euros. Footwear is the single biggest segment of the global fashion industry, so it’s easy to wonder how a small, independent start-up could find its niche. Financial success notwithstanding, what if you just want to build a better boot? What if your primary goal is to create the best possible version of a shoe, making it as comfortable as it is stylish?

That’s what Raphael Kohlberg ’06 began to ask himself in 2018 while completing his M.B.A. at Harvard Business School. He was pondering whether to join a start-up or strike out on his own, and, ultimately, it came down to a personal pain point. While in graduate school, Raphael found that he needed to transition from a day of walking to evening social events. “I can’t be the first person whose feet hurt when they’re not wearing sneakers. I looked at a lot of brands that claimed they were comfortable and I tried them out, genuinely hoping they would be because I just wanted them for myself. And I was really disappointed. There were shoes that were comfortable, but I felt like they really weren’t stylish or that the style wasn’t classic.”

His decision? Rakoh, a footwear brand emphasizing timeless style, impeccable craft, and comfort.

The company’s flagship shoe is the “All Day Chelsea Boot,” handcrafted in Italy with leather or suede uppers, performance soles, soft leather lining, and above-standard comfort insoles. As Raphael explains, partnering with an Italian manufacturer for such a shoe—in Tuscany, the center of leather tanning and manufacturing—was itself a process.

“Shoes need many suppliers because there are a lot of pieces coming from different places, and every step in production needs a person; it’s not automated and there’s still so much artistry. It’s a combination of art and science. There are traditional methods and materials, and knowledge that is passed down from parent to child; it’s generational. But within the ecosystems where this knowledge exists, they are still making investments in new technology.”

Raphael scoured his network for advice from anyone who had started a fashion business and eventually connected with someone in Italy who had the right relationships and could make the necessary factory introductions. “These are factories that work with Ferragamo, Tom Ford—the biggest names in the business—and I’m just some person. I had to convince them that what I was proposing was a good idea.”

Designing the actual shoe is a collaborative process, Raphael explains. “My brand isn’t about inventing new-looking things. It’s about reworking things that are classic, so, by definition, they already exist. What are the details I definitely want to keep? What details are unnecessary or detract from the shoe being a classic or are trendier?”

It sounds simple, but Raphael points out that the cycle from concept to completed shoe is anything but. From creating “the last” (a foot-shaped form) and revising the design to testing shoe prototypes in the real world, creating a Rakoh boot requires a number of crucial decisions in design and construction, including sourcing the materials for and developing the comfort insole. And each step in the cycle must be repeated as often as it takes to get it just right. It can often come down to millimeters of difference between what works and what doesn’t. “If I want the shoe to be the perfect shoe, to me that means you want to wear it all the time, which means it needs to be comfortable,” he says.

The factory in Italy can make dozens of pairs of shoes a day. But typical considerations, like getting slotted in the factory’s schedule, have become subject to atypical conditions. The pandemic has given way to supply-chain delays, increasing production times dramatically. Raphael notes that what used to take a month to produce could easily take three months now.

He remains committed, however, to producing the best possible version of a Chelsea boot, and plans to expand into other apparel in the future. Sometimes the decisions he makes come at the expense of keeping costs lower, Raphael says, but he believes those decisions will, ultimately, make the product better. “I’m not sure how I’ll translate this into a selling point, but when someone buys my product and then actually wears it for a while, they’ll feel the difference. They might not know why, but they’ll feel it.” t

Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she is editor of the anthology American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (Stockport Flats). Lillien is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Kresge Artist Fellow in the Literary Arts. She lives in Detroit.