Stories of an Entrepreneur’s Resourcefulness

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to hear Jewel Burks Solomon share her entrepreneurial journey and it was incredible. Reflecting on the Partpic story, the piece that stood out the most was her neverending resourcefulness. Setbacks, adversity, challenges — no match for her.

Within her journey, here are a few stories that stood out:

• Jewel joined a company’s management training program and was assigned to run a call center. Only, on a daily basis she was bothered by angry customers needing to solve a problem — what’s the name and number for this part? She came up with an idea for a software product that analyzed a picture to determine the part. Yet, management at the company had no interest in pursuing her idea. Hence, the idea for Partpic — a computer-vision system for identifying parts — was born.
• After investing her lifesavings in the idea, and running out of money, she started entering pitch competitions — anywhere and everywhere — as a way to fund the business. $250,000 and multiple pitch competition wins later, she had cash (bonus: it was mostly non-dilutive!).
• When she decided to raise money, she pinpointed Joanne Wilson as her desired angel investor. Instead of approaching Joanne directly, she worked her network and met with several entrepreneurs Joanne had already invested in, and then asked them to intro her to Joanne in the same week. Joanne was the first angel investor.
• Wanting to get on the radar of Amazon.com, she pointed out to the Amazon Web Services conference manager there weren’t enough women speakers, and she had just the person — her technical leader that was a machine learning expert. Amazon.com took her up the idea, her technical leader presented, and Amazon.com’s corporate development team was in the audience during the talk. After the talk, the corp dev team gave their business cards to the technical leader, who then gave the cards to Jewel. Jewel followed up and the rest is history — an acquisition by Amazon.com

Resourcefulness is one of the most important traits of successful entrepreneurs and Jewel’s story painted one of the most compelling pictures I’ve heard. Special thanks to Jewel for sharing her story and helping the next generation of entrepreneurs.