Startup Spotlight Q&A: Mindsets & Milestones

When Diondraya Taylor was a pre-med student, she experienced the difficulties firsthand women face in STEM. Rather than be deterred, she started a company to help girls develop the confidence and skills they need to succeed in male-dominated fields. Her company, Mindsets & Milestones produces learning curricula, teacher guides, and courses to equip the next generation of young women with the entrepreneurial skills and mindsets they need to bring their ideas to life.

According to Diondraya’s mentor Deanna Evans, Director of LaunchPad at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Draya’s dedication to executing her idea has been impressive! Mindset & Milestones is an inspiration to all female students who want to build their businesses. I am confident that Draya will become a leader in entrepreneurship education!”

Last spring, Diondraya was placed fourth at the Annual LaunchPad Pitch Competition, held at the Startup Grind Global Conference. We recently had the chance to connect with Diondraya and learn more about her experiences as a student entrepreneur.

Tell us about your company: What does it do?
Mindsets & Milestones is an education company that creates entrepreneurship curricula so that middle/high school girls can develop skills they can excel in male-dominated fields. Ultimately, we hope to shift gender inequity in most areas, like politics, science, and innovation. There aren't enough women in positions of power and authority, and the lack of women means we're all losing out on excellent and valuable solutions to our problems.

On a more granular level, our curricula help schools and educators teach their students 21st-century skills, like problem-solving, while providing social-emotional learning. We want our students not just to be great thinkers but also to be able to relate to each other, understand their feelings, and use these tools to live fulfilled and meaningful lives.

What was your inspiration? Did you have an aha moment?
I had an aha moment. When I started undergrad, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn’t have an easy time with the faculty and peers I met in my pre-med classes. I was frustrated: if I faced this in the workforce, why not find a career where I’d have an easier, happier time?

I started thinking about how hard it was for women to participate in STEM in a way they were heard, acknowledged, and validated. Digging into the problem, I kept asking, where are the women? Where’s the representation in politics? In companies? In innovation? In decision-making roles? All of that helped me think, “Wow, we need to have conversations with girls earlier and provide something concrete, like entrepreneurship, to help them explore new ideas and learn both hard and soft skills.”

When did you realize you wanted to become an entrepreneur?
I didn’t set out to start a business. I had an idea about helping girls through entrepreneurial education, so I started teaching myself about entrepreneurship. I worked with startups, picked up an entrepreneurship minor, and researched entrepreneurship curricula. And then I had to think about what I wanted to do. Was this a project? A non-profit? A business?

At the time, I was mentoring young girls who seemed to think having money was negative and that you had to make significant sacrifices to have a positive impact. I didn’t want that for them, so I decided that the project I was working on should be a real, sustainable business. I tried to set an example that something good, impactful, and important could still make money.

Congrats on making it to the finals of the LaunchPad Pitch Competition! Tell us about your experience.
Going back to the beginning, LaunchPad helped me start my business. I went to my campus LaunchPad with an idea. I met with a venture consultant who helped me realize that entrepreneurship was the best vehicle for what I wanted to do. Since then, I've worked with mentors and participated in the Fellowship. This helped me better understand how to balance impact goals with financial metrics and think about my business model and who my customers were.

The Annual Pitch Competition came up as I was starting to gain momentum, and I made it to the finals. It was such a great experience! I refined my pitch deck and elevator pitch leading up to and during the conference. Repetition is the best way to improve your pitch—whenever you hear something new, figure out a different way to hone it.

What milestones are you most proud of so far?
My first sale. It’s a story I tell my students to demonstrate how much entrepreneurship is about going with the flow.

I had this meeting with an organization and had one workbook, my first product, to show them. They said they wanted to buy my books, so what was the price? I didn’t have a price, so I made something up. They said great, do you have a volume discount? I had no other workbooks, but I said yes. They asked how many they needed to buy to get the discount, and I blurted out “50,” so they said they’d buy 50! I walked out with a sale and a plan to figure it out.

What are the biggest challenges you face as a student entrepreneur?
Being young means working harder to prove your professionalism and credibility. I remember the first time this fact stuck with me. I managed to make a meeting at City Hall with the Mayor’s advisor for small business development. I showed her my workbook. She said it was great, but she couldn’t work with me — I was too young, working without a team, and didn’t have enough traction to prove myself.

I felt overwhelmed when I left, like, “Why did I think I could do this?” But soon, I realized that she might’ve rejected me, but she also told me exactly what I needed before she could work with me. I had the playbook. Now I just had to do it.

What’s your vision for the future? What comes next for you and Mindsets & Milestones?
Our north star is gender equity. I think that’s not just a women’s but everybody’s issue. We need to help children of all genders identify women as leaders, starting at an earlier age.

For now, I’m working on getting more curricula into girl schools and coed schools. My long-term vision is to have curricula in schools worldwide so that girls everywhere can see entrepreneurship as a way to move beyond where they’re at, regardless of their starting point.

What advice would you give to other students considering pursuing entrepreneurship?
I’ll recycle a piece of advice from a LaunchPad mentor: Wait until you have a problem to fix it. I used to worry about everything, like, “I don’t have anything automated. What happens when we have 100 customers?” And my mentor said, “That would be a great problem to worry about how to get that problem, not what happens if it comes true.”