On a Saturday last month, Dunn School in Los Olivos hosted a large group of budding entrepreneurs from around the country, who polished their presentation skills pitches for their business and product ideas.

On March 1, for the second straight year, Dunn hosted the regional competition for the Diamond Challenge, a competition billed as “The Ultimate High School Entrepreneur Challenge.”

Dunn Head of School Kalyan Balaven welcomed the competitors and help up the event as an example of what his school and the schools represented are trying to convey.

“This event is the perfect example of how education and innovation intersect,” he said. “The students here are not just dreamers, they are architects of our future.”

Although Dunn did not have any students who competed in the Diamond Challenge, the event matches up well with the efforts of the school to teach the philosophies and practices of business and entrepreneurship.

Dunn teacher Chad Stacy oversees the program as the Director of Entrepreneurship and explained how it works.

“At the heart of program is our student-run store 24/7 convenience store, where students can get food and snacks and other needs and pay electronically,” he said. “It’s our main revenue producer, and it’s where our new students are put to learn the basics. It’s real hands-on.”

Stacy said as the students get older, they can branch off into different areas.

“We can offer additional entrepreneurial courses, where the students can propose and make their own products and sell them in their own store,” he said. “And we have students invest some of the money they make from the store in the stock market and see how that can grow.”

Meanwhile, the competition offered a wide range of business ideas and concepts for the judges to evaluate. Presentations were made in two “pitch rooms” representing two categories: Business Innovation and Social Innovation.

In the Business room, judges heard pitches for many different ideas including those for The Chess Mate, a service to find willing players for chess that includes the ability to organize tournaments and look at tutorials to become a better player. There was also a proposal for a company called (eye)deal, that can detect eye disease remotely with an online camera. And there was Fizzle, proposing a device to installed in stoves to keep them from overheating and causing fires.

“I actually had a neighbor in the San Jose area who had his home damaged because his stove caught fire,” said Ishaan Mandala, who teamed with his Silver Creek High classmates Adarsh Sharma and Tanish Srinivas for the presentation.“So I started thinking about how we could help prevent that, and came up with this.”

Over in the Social Innovation room, threat of fire was also the inspiration for a concept called SkyScouts, which was proposed as a system to predict wildfires, so they can be dealt with before they do too much damage. The judges for that part of the competition also heard pitches for MeloSign (with the slogan “Making Music Tangible”), whose creators envision a way for the hearing-impaired to truly enjoy music, with visual cues on a screen and a wearable device on the wrist with hoptic vibrations to allow the person to feel the beat of the music.

Also in the Social category was Rhythmiq, billed as an all-encompassing online tool for professional, amateur, and aspiring dancers that would be a search engine for affordable training and dance studios, and online help to learn dance steps and create your own routines with the help of AI.

David Zheng, Russell Qian, and Suri Li, who all got to know each other through their dance experience were at Dunn to present their idea.

“This presentation and how we did it is kind of recent, but the idea kind of hatched with me about two and a half years ago,” Zheng said. “I was trying to get into auditions for K-pop and while doing that I realized there were so many talented people who just didn’t have a way to get their foot in the door. So I started looking for a way to create something for that, and meeting up with my partners, we tried to find an all-inclusive tool to help dancers and performers.”

After all the pitches were done, the students heard from the event’s keynote speaker Autumn Badelt-Fanning, a Dunn School alumna who created a mobile veterinary business in Paso Robles and now manages a vineyard in that town with her husband. She told the audience about her difficulties getting the mobile veterinary business off the ground before it was successful, and presented it as a lesson to not get discouraged if thing don’t work right away.

At the end, the winners were announced in each category who would advance to the Limitless World Summit in Wilmington, Delaware, on May 1-2.

The winner in the Business Innovation category was Soundwave, the creator of an AI accent moderator for foreign call centers to help they and the customers better understand one another. The winner if the Social Innovation category was GradeWithAI, which use AI technology to modernize methods for grading and “empowering educators to educate.”

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Everyone who lives on the Central Coast and goes to the beach has a good chance of ending up with tar on their feet.

John Harmon of Santa Barbara considered it just a nuisance until one day he saw a mother pouring gasoline on her child’s feet to get the tar off at Jalama Beach.

“It seemed a little dangerous to me and I thought there had to be a better way that was safe for the kid and for the environment,” Harmon said.

John Harmon said he makes the recipe for Oil Slick Beach Tar Remover by blending essential oils and citrus.

The idea became the project for his entrepreneurship course at Santa Barbara City College, where he developed Oil Slick Beach Tar Remover and won the 2015 New Venture Challenge through the Scheinfeld Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The $5,000 he received helped him launch his business.

“I walked into hotels, surf shops, retail stores all along the coast and got it started. It was four months later when the Refugio Oil Spill happened that really shot the business into the limelight. Of course the spill was terrible and I wish it never happened, but I was driving by Refugio after it happened and stopped to give the volunteers complimentary bottles for their own use. I just wanted to help out,” Harmon said.

Harmon said he uses his own recipe, blending essential oils and citrus, and then bottles it. It also works for removing wax from surfboards when wax gets caked on them, he added.

“While I will definitely continue Oil Slick, I realized soon after I launched that it was very limiting, as not all beaches have oil and tar such as ours. There’s a few places in Texas and Florida and I recently sold an order to a hotel in Singapore,” Harmon said.

His product is also seasonal, popular during the spring and summer with a lull in the winter when there aren’t as many people at the beach.

“I started thinking of other products I could make that were eco-friendly and would be marketable year-round,” he said.

He and his friend Billy Hanke Jr. have just created Anon Towelette Services, selling an eco-friendly towelette that can be used for a make-up remover, hand sanitizer, lens cleaner, nail polish remover, lotion and more. They are marketing that to the hotel industry.

“Hotels can customize the packaging to create their own towelette, and it’ll help them cut down on their linen costs such as towels, pillowcases and sheets that end up ruined from make-up stains,” Harmon said.

The towelette is made from a combination of bamboo and non-woven fabrics and is free of paraben chemicals, Harmon added.

The reason for the Anon name is that they want hotels or businesses to be able to brand the towelettes for marketing purposes and name recognition.

“We have several hotels already interested in this product and this is something that we can take literally around the world,” he said.

Harmon said he will always be thankful for the opportunities at the Scheinfeld Center. He has been asked several times to speak to incoming students about his product, and he loves sharing his passion of entrepreneurship with others.

“Creating your own business from the ground up is amazing. Even if it doesn’t succeed, never doubt yourself, as some of the best lessons come from making mistakes,” Harmon said.

For more information, log onto www.oilslickonline.com or www.anonwipes.com.

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Ron Gans, Chief Technology Officer of SecurePRO, Inc & Observables, will be speaking about Entrepreneurship in Santa Barbara during the Santa Ynez Valley Technology Club’s annual mixer from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 18 at Hotel Corque in Solvang.

If you are curious about starting a venture but not sure how to begin or trying to get an idea off the ground but need help, attendees of the mixer will get an overview of the Santa Barbara startup scene, resources that can help you, and what you should know before you dive into your own adventure.

Gans has been building and managing technology and people for more than three decades. He has been a participant, winner, organizer, mentor, and facilitator for Startup Weekends. He currently runs his own IoT and SaaS startup company and teaches Entrepreneurship at Antioch University.

David Baeza, ex-VP of Global Demand Generation at Citrix, CoFounder of VineRangers, Inc (imaging technology in winemaking), has built and lead efforts in marketing for very successful companies including Citrix GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, Lynda.com, and VineRangers Inc, a local imaging Santa Ynez Technology business used in winemaking.

Baeza’s topic will be “How to Own Your Game. Scaling from 1 to 1000”.

The event is $15 per person and tickets are available at the door or on Eventbrite. Hotel Corque is located at 420 Alisal Road in Solvang.

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