From Start to Startup: Victor and Bound

The meeting starts in five minutes.

As you look up from your laptop, you sadly notice that the seats around you at the table are still unfilled.

You glance down at your watch.

Three minutes till the ‘start’ of the meeting. The ‘start’ will have to be delayed again by another ten minutes, since no one has arrived yet.

Your phone vibrates intensively in your pant’s pocket. You pulled it out, hoping to read a text message from your teammates saying that they are almost here.

“15 mins away,” the text reads.

Twenty minutes till the start of the meeting. If they aren’t reliable enough to arrive on time, then they aren’t reliable enough to provide an accurate ETA.

As you get back to browsing mindlessly on your laptop, you ask yourself:

“What if there was a way to keep people bound to arriving on time for meetings?”

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Cue Victor Luo. Victor is a 17-year-old high school student in Los Angeles, California. For any high school student, meetings are crucial to running clubs, getting group projects done, and being around those you care about the most. Victor understands the value of everyone arriving on time to a meeting, as teams are most productive when everyone is on the same page. Rather than be consumed by frustration and annoyance at his peers’ tardiness, he came up with a solution to the problem.

That solution is Bound. Bound is the social enterprise startup that seeks to incentivize being on time to meetings by allowing the group organizer to charge an amount of money per minute late to the tardy attendee. That fee credited to the group organizer and the other attendees who arrived on time.

Victor is Bound’s founder and CEO, and he has made it his mission to help cultivate timeliness in Generation Y’s and Millennials’ disposition. He knows that being at the helm of a startup as such an early age is head turning for some, but he’s used to taking large initiatives despite that. When he was fourteen, he took his first trip to China. Staying in a small, rural village for a week, he got to understand what life was like without modern life’s conveniences. What stuck with him the most were his interactions with village teenagers his age.

Most had to work on farms to help feed their families.

Victor was on a vacation to visit them.

Their farm work also prevented them from advancing their learning in China’s education system. Most rural families do not have the money to send their children to high school. When Victor compared this to his own educational upbringing, which is access to a free, public-funded education, he knew he had to make a change. He founded NEAR: Ningxia Education Aid Relief. Through NEAR, Victor worked with the village leader and family and friends back home to fundraise enough to sponsor three teenage villagers to attend high school for four years.

His ability to emphasize with those who are less fortunate allows him to create meaningful change in others’ lives abroad.

His ability to see a financial opportunity with his peers’ lateness allows him to make an impact domestically as well. Victor’s non-profit experience shows that he is able to bring different stakeholders to the table in a timely fashion in order to produce wonderful results. The power of being on time to these meetings assured these three teens would benefit from his non-profit work.

Surely, Victor’s ability to bring together his teammates and other stakeholders as he builds Bound will pay off in the long run. The founder’s approach to his startup is that by “gamifying” meet-ups, people will be incentivized to arrive on time.

Imagine having to pay your friends money because you were late to a group meeting. They would hold it over your head in a teasing, slightly competitive manner. Now the challenge becomes who can owe the other the least amount of money if they happen to be late to a meeting.

Bound is not about making a profit out of tardiness, but it’s for helping Millennials and Generation Y learn the value of being punctual to meetings If anything, this is Victor’s subtle attempt to making being on-time an attractive, cost and embarrassment-saving trait again!

While Victor grinds away at his progress with Bound, he feels that his young age has been an asset to him. Every time he goes to startup gatherings around Los Angeles or in the Bay Area, he is received warmly by older attendances who are pursuing their own ventures. Some have even offered to mentor the budding entrepreneur as he seeks to guide Bound to greater heights.

Despite his youth, Victor knows the value of time, and its impressive how he is trying to get his peers to recognize its importance too through his startup.

Who knows? Victor may help turn Millennials ad Generation Y into a more punctual group of folks.

Time will tell.

#StudentVoices

#Entrepreneurship 

If you enjoyed Victor's story on creating Bound, please feel free to checkout the app on his website! He appreciates any and all feedback!

Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda. Follow me on LinkedIn as well!

Frederick Daso is a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in Aerospace Engineering and minoring in Political Science. He is interested in learning more about or exploring opportunities in engineering, technology, management consulting, and/or journalism. Feel free to contact him at [email protected] to talk about the article!