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Join us as we introduce each of the teams participating in our 2024 Summer Launchpad accelerator!
Latte is a gamified platform that helps higher-ed administrators run mentorship programs that are engaging, effective, and enjoyable for students.
Team Members: Jerry Chen (Stern ‘25) and Juntao Xu
Jerry Chen and Juntao Xu are both two-time immigrants, both immigrating to Canada at a young age and then to the United States in their teens. The two friends with mirrored paths met in Canada at a networking event. While Jerry took a two-hour train ride to the event, Juntao was already in the area in Toronto, after they both decided to attend the event on a why-not decision.
The pair prove to be a match made in entrepreneurial heaven. Juntao had known from an early age that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, and Jerry had an idea that he was ready to launch.
In Jerry’s sophomore year, he participated in four mentorship programs that were all riddled with the same frustrating problems: long match times, poor fit, lack of preparation, and too little resources for both the mentors and mentees. Although student mentorship programs were appealing conceptually, Jerry felt much could be done to improve how they were executed in practice. With Juntao’s eagerness and entrepreneurship experience, they began their journey to create Latte.
Below, Jerry shares the story behind the startup's beginnings:
In your own words, how do you describe Latte and its mission to someone new for the first time?
We're a gamified mentorship platform that connects young professionals like ourselves with career mentors. Now, the way that we do that is we use our software to empower career service alumni relations professionals to run their mentorship programs. In essence, we're a software provider.
How did you initially find NYU’s entrepreneurial community?
There was an open house event and I went to the Leslie eLab to say hi. Two years later, we're here. It spawned from that jumping-off point. Someone who was very important in that journey was Darren [Yee]. We were not building directly within the Leslie eLab ecosystem at the time, but he was still super supportive of what we were doing with Latte. When we did our launch party, he came out to support us, and that was really cool.
What’s the biggest business challenge your startup has overcome so far?
Our transition to B2B from B2C. That's a big one. Our transition to B2B sales was a lot of hard work. There were a lot of adjustments, both in terms of the way we were spending our time and the way that we approached the software. We had to make sure that the software itself was configurable to each of our clients' individualized needs as opposed to having one generalized piece of software. It's a lot of adjustment and flexibility that's needed on our part, but we're so happy that we made that transition.
What has been the most rewarding moment of your founder journey so far?
Getting our first customers. It's such a long, arduous process to get a single contract signed, but that also means that the first contract is so, so, so exciting and rewarding. When we got the contract back Getting our first customers. It's such a long, arduous process to get a single contract signed, but that also means that the first contract is so, so, so exciting and rewarding. When we got the contract back –this is more hyperbolic than anything – maybe we'll get that thing printed and put it up on our wall. That's the kind of feeling that you get. At this point, we have six different pilots going for the fall. We're so excited.
What 3 words would you use to describe your founder journey?
Mentorship for All
What’s the biggest piece of advice that you’d give to aspiring student founders?
Discovery. Discovery. Discovery. Seriously, start with your customer. If you're really good at building, you can start by building a little bit but don't invest too much of your time and money into building for something that exists purely in a hypothetical space. Understand the problem that you're solving. You never want to be a solution looking for a problem. Don't look for fundraising too early. Your fundraising is completely independent of the quality of your startup. Fundraising is to scale. Don't look for funding unless you have a good reason to scale. Have an idea, validate your idea, and then build something for your idea. That's the general procedure instead of building without validation. Build as late as possible. Validate as early as possible.
What is your best college experience (either academic or social) at NYU?
I was taking commerce and culture courses at Stern and during our fall pilot for Latte, I pushed around this donor cart to each and every one of those classes to get students to sign up. That was so fun and seeing the look on people's faces when they realized their TA is also an entrepreneur was so cool.
Favorite NYU/NYC spot to spend time?
Lucky Rabbit Noodles in Brooklyn
