When 14-year-old Taylor Rosenthal is not playing baseball as a first baseman and pitcher for Opelika High School, he is creating his own business. The freshman entrepreneur from Alabama is CEO of RecMed First Aid, a vending machine that dispenses first aid products instead of snacks. While in eighth grade, Rosenthal was assigned to brainstorm a business idea for the Young Entrepreneurs Academy, a program designed as a class for students interested in learning how to start their own small businesses.
“I played baseball for 10 years now and every time a kid got hurt at a travel ball tournament or something, nobody could find a Band-Aid and I kind of wanted to come up with something to help that,” Rosenthal said during an interview on FOX Business Network’s Varney & Co.
Rosenthal has reportedly earned a total of $100,000 in investments and told host Stuart Varney that he turned down a $30 million offer from a “major healthcare company” for his vending machine idea. When asked why he turned down the offer, Rosenthal said, “It took a while to think about it, but it felt like the time wasn’t right. We kind of wanted to grow and develop the company a little bit more and maybe later in the run it will be worth a little bit more.”
The original idea was to sell prepackaged first aid kits at sporting events, but Rosenthal soon realized he would have to pay someone to sell the product.
“I noticed how much it would cost to pay somebody at minimum wage to sit out at a tournament for six hours,” Rosenthal said.
The teen tech inventor exhibited his product at TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup conference in New York City, and plans to start distributing the machines in the fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment