Lily Stambouli, a junior at Harvard Westlake School in Los Angeles, California, has a big goal for the future: to become Wharton Global Youth: How does your family actually enrich your entrepreneurial thinking around this? Lily: Yeah, so my dad has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He started his own company, Immigrating from the Middle East. And also, my mom has always made sure to inspire me and push me to the best that I could possibly be. And so, I think their support and the environment I grew up in gave me the opportunity to have the mindset of wanting to start something and wanting to create something that could help people. And then that little extra push of being surrounded in an environment of people with learning disabilities gave me that exposure very early on. Wharton Global Youth: Your father and your brother are neurodiverse, correct? Have they helped you with your prototype and helped you to develop Audistory? Lily: Yeah, definitely. Throughout the whole process I would ask them: is this something that you could see yourself using? And throughout the process, they would tell me a ton of kinks that they saw and [say], I don’t know if this part would be really helpful to me, and then here’s something that would help. And so, I would take their advice in and be able to apply that to whatever I was doing. Wharton Global Youth: It’s interesting because not all that long ago, autism was a condition that few people had heard about, unless maybe they watched the movie Rain Man. But diagnostic criteria have changed and now more people are under that umbrella of autism. It’s a great time to build awareness about neurodiversity, and that leads me to another project that I heard you talk about, which is Learn D. This is something that you did at Babson College last summer. Can you talk about that experience and what your key takeaways were? Lily: Absolutely. So, I was in a group with five people, and starting off, we had the task of creating something that would help solve one of the UN (Essentials of Entrepreneurship. How, if at all, did that fuel your critical thinking and innovation around neurodiversity? Were you able to find a community and like-minded people to discuss some of these topics with? Lily: What’s so great about going to one of these [summer] programs, which is personally, my favorite part, is that every single person there is interested in entrepreneurship and is trying to fuel their own passions. Even though I didn’t find somebody who was super keen on helping solve issues that people with learning disabilities have, their help and their advice given towards me was able to build me up and help me fuel this passion that I had. And I realized that I could use entrepreneurship to help people, which was such a huge realization for me. Wharton Global Youth: You’re involved in all sorts of activities and projects. Lily, we’re living in such an accomplishment-focused world, starting as young students. When is it too much? Lily: I think that definitely when you lose the sight and ability to stop and take a second and think to yourself, is what I’m doing really making me happy? Or perhaps, am I just doing it for my parents or for college? I think why I’m so passionate about what I do is because I’m having fun doing it and I’m feeling enriched while doing it. And I think what happens with a lot of people nowadays is we get so lost in trying to have that perfect GPA and trying to do everything, that you lose sight of what’s really making you happy and where your passions lie. Wharton Global Youth: So the purpose of an incubator — which you mentioned that your venture program is an incubator at your high school — is to incubate, right? You grow to a certain point and then you can go out on your own. Just like a little chick in an incubator. And I’m wondering where you stand with Audistory in the process of incubation. Are you going to pursue it further? Lily: Yes. After the incubator ended at the end of last year, we were able to pitch our idea to a ton of alumni and they gave their advice and gave us resources that we could go through. I really took that to heart and I decided I wanted to continue Audistory. As of right now, I personally can’t code. So, I’m looking for someone who can code the idea because it’s been prototype mapped out. I have a User Interface (UI), a design and everything. So I’m searching for that right now, like a coder who I can trust with building the Source link
