This student thought Shark Tank was a scam when they invited him on the show, now he’s working on his third startup
Jason Li started selling comics in high school for lunch money — he ended up founding a phone repair business and getting recruited by Shark Tank. Now a college student, the “Entrepreneurship Kid” can’t run from his passion.
Jason Li was a 6-year-old kid in Los Gatos Calif. on an exciting school field trip: The students were allowed to bring their iPods. Immigrants from China earlier that year, Li’s family was still adjusting — he didn’t know what an iPod was. Instead he brought his dad’s CD player, along with two albums by quintessential American artists Michael Bolton and Kenny G. What exquisite taste for a 6-year-old.
Nine years later, Li was a sophomore in high school who received an iPod touch as a gift from his parents. He was so excited! And of course — like many high schoolers — he broke the screen within two weeks.
But unlike most high schoolers, Li handled the problem himself. He bought a screen-fixing kit on Ebay and fixed it. Then he started fixing screens for other kids at a small fee.
Li never wanted to be an entrepreneur — it just happened. It started when he wanted to earn his own lunch money, which he initially tried to do by drawing comics.
“In high school I wanted to be independent,” Li said. “I realized my parents were working hard and I didn’t want to be dependent on them. I wanted to make lunch money myself: $2 per day to get pizza.”
The phone repair business paid for his daily pizza … and then some. Li developed a website for the business, named iReTron, and his customers multiplied. Pretty soon people were sending in their phones from all over California, and he expanded the business model to buying and reselling used electronics.
Then iReTron was noticed by Shark Tank.
“I actually thought it was a scam, because my parents don’t have cable T.V., so I don’t watch T.V.,” Li said. “When I saw that this Shark Tank T.V. show approached me I thought ‘Man, this is definitely a scam trying to get my money.’ But I started looking at the episodes and realized it was legit.”
Li still initially declined the opportunity because he didn’t think iReTron was ready. Luckily a year later he received another chance when approached by the same producer. This time he took it.
Suddenly Li had a first-class ticket to L.A. for his pitch to Mark Cuban and co., which resulted in a $100,000 investment. The episode aired in April of 2014. That same day Li received his acceptance letter to the University of Chicago. You might think this was his peak, but Li was just getting started.
Li is now an incoming senior economics and computer science student at U Chicago, and the profits from iReTron help pay his tuition. But Li is not slowing down: He has worked on two more startups during college.
The first was UProspie, a social platform that increases accessibility to higher education for low-income students. Using the slogan “Meet Yourself,” the goal is for prospective students to meet college undergraduates with similar interests to themselves. As the company’s founder and CEO, Li assembled a team of students, managed the launch process and raised $60 thousand through various student competitions.
The website had about 10,000 users at its peak, yet Li’s group had to temporarily stall its operations after becoming busy with other projects. Li is still passionate about the platform’s mission.
“I still do have plans for starting it up again, because I think that the issue that we’re trying to solve is such low-hanging fruit,” Li said. “If you understand education and you can apply technology to that space effectively, there’s so much you can do.”
This past summer Li had to decide whether to pursue a traditional internship at a hedge fund, or take his chances on another startup. His choice is tangible with the startup Flipside, a media platform that presents readers with multiple viewpoints in a digestible manner.
“I still struggle with that a little bit today: How much do I want to invest myself learning in a corporate environment versus learning on my own, doing my own projects?” Li said. “It’s a weird problem to have.”
But Li has no regrets. Flipside officially launched in early September, yet its success was evident far beforehand. The company won a $20 thousand grant from Chicago Booth Social New Venture Challenge, $10 thousand from Polsky Summer Acceleratorand was a Stanford BASES Challenge finalist.
What makes the media platform unique is the technology that helps break down the information; this is what the students developed. Li said media is a good place for Flipside to train their developed algorithms and models because there is often not a clear distinction between opinion and news pieces. With today’s heated political climate, Li thinks Flipside can help synthesize information for viewers.
But in the future, Li thinks Flipside’s technology can be used in other areas. It could help lawyers better understand a document, or help teachers easily determine what books should be recommended for various reading levels.
Li has big plans for all his projects, but in the meantime, he is finishing up his degree at U Chicago. When he isn’t launching incredible startups, Li spends his time working on student club EDGE Entrepreneurship, volunteering with nonprofit Moneythink and sharing his knowledge with other aspiring student entrepreneurs. Li has been a guest lecturer at the University of Iowa, mentor at Q-ZERØ and speaker forTEDxUChicago.
“My ideal is to keep learning; that’s the highest priority for me. I never want to get left behind in terms of what I can do,” Li said. “I want to learn as much as possible and expand myself as a human being.”
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