Idea Napkin No. 2

          My name is Lirim and this is my story. I was born in a failing state of Yugoslavia 22 years ago and was name what in English translation from Albanian means “Liberation” as my nation was fighting peacefully to break away from the a federation they had forced to join about 100 years prior. My parents graduated from college amidst turmoil and uncertainty in mid 80s. Realizing the opportunity to provide currency exchange services given the very unstable Yugoslavian Dinar, my father took on his first entrepreneurial adventure which is was not exactly legal at the time. Ever since neither of my parents have held a paid job and regardless where the waves of life have taken them, they have seized thriving to do better and impact the society they have lived in meaningful ways, taking on a wide variety of ways to achieve just that. Growing up with them has made me no different in my dreams and aspirations. One unmet need that I have personally experienced while in college the past 4 years is the affordable textbooks. Having recently learned that the publishing companies use the same model as pharmaceuticals in developing and marketing their products, I was only further encouraged to do something to challenge the status-quo, which is making education, our most important societal duty, far too difficult for far too many people.  What I believe would the solution to this is a platform where everybody can list the books they have used and no longer need and in return get the books they need for up coming semester. Basically this will create an exchange market space for students, where the company that is organizing this exchange takes a small percentage of the transactions. I believe this platform would quickly become the name of the game because educational costs in United States are overall very high and students are always mindful to ways of cutting cost. I intend to bring together a group of individuals that are similarly passionate about what’s possible, and who have a diverse variety of skills to put in this project.

Feedback Memo

It is very humbling to be given such encouraging feedback by my fellow entrepreneurial gators.  Ben’s mentioning of the appreciation of this idea by general public is especially important to me, since I believe that our impact to the society as a whole is just as important to this venture as is the company’s profit seeking. It was also encouraging to find out that Tyler shares same frustrations with me with the way we share books currently. Yanira makes an important point that this idea has been around and it is interesting to find out why it wasn’t implemented yet; it makes me think I should do more in researching the feasibility of the idea.