A service providing college students a safe walk home

The Lavin Entrepreneurship Program at the Foster School of Business is highly competitive for undergraduate entrepreneurs from all majors and disciplines across campus. Only the brightest, most passionate, and driven students are accepted into the cohort each year. By combining curriculum with hands-on learning, this program gives students the experience, skills, and know-how to succeed in their future business ventures.

Each year, Lavin Cohort members attend an annual retreat where they have the opportunity to engage with their peers and participate in the annual Pitch Competition. The Competition is grueling, with teams randomly formed and having only three hours to ideate and pitch an idea while creating a rigid plan for product-market validation. Judges come from the local startup community and the Bay Area.

For the 2021 Competition, I worked with Alexa Garay, Larry Jing, Beatrix Teng, and Viraj Goyal. Our team was diverse, with Viraj and Alexa being freshmen, and Larry, Beatrix, and I being sophomores. Our majors ranged from Business to Computer Science.

For around half of the Competition, we worked on coming up with an idea. The competition theme was centered around "Travel and Transportation." Teams were given the freedom to pursue any idea within the broadest terms of the theme. Our team immediately began with a discussion of some of the problems we face as college students. We spent much time discussing we might demystify the confusing System that is college-student health insurance. Realizing that our team lacked the experience to provide a rational and validatable solution, we decided to pivot.

Our next idea was the one we ended up going with. In our conversations about the problems we face, we talked about student experiences and safety on campus. We realized that there was a cultural issue with using the University Police Department's NightWalk System, specifically from the Greek System at large. We then conducted impromptu User Interviews with some Sorority Members at the event and found that walking alone was a major concern among college-age women.

This led us to develop the underpinnings of Halo. Halo, at its core, is a product designed to help students find "Angels" to walk with them late at night or for any particular reason. Anonymity is built into the app, with phone numbers being the primary data behind an account. Phone numbers are validated by account administrators who pay for the Halo service. Halo "Angels," when not on call, are located at strategic locations around campus where they can remain responsive to any student needs that may arise.

Once our team built out these foundations, I quickly got to work to build our brand identity and UI prototype (with only 1 hour remaining before the pitch). I selected a neo-Grotesk typeface by ITF that fit the clean aesthetic I wanted to drive in this design. In keeping with the "Heavenly" theme we were building for the app, I settled on a yellow-gold color scheme that is bright and readable. This theme also helped when I developed the iconography, which is, quite literally, a halo. The halo icon combines with the wordmark to create a unique and versatile brand across all communication mediums.

The Competition Experience was terrific, and our team placed 2nd out of over 10 other pitches.

TEAM

Rishab Balakrishnan

Alexa Garay

Larry Jing

Beatrix Teng

Viraj Goyal

ROLE

Designer

TOOLS

Adobe Illustrator • Figma

PURPOSE

2020 Lavin Entrepreneurship Program Pitch Competition

TIMELINE

November 2021 (3 Hour Challenge)

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