By: Lydia Rogers
Xavier alumni Matthew Dooley (‘08) and Mike Sarow (‘06) held the event #KickstartKapture in which they presented their product, Kapture, and discussed the creative process of the project. Innovation Society, TEDxXavierUniversity, and Entrepreneurship Club sponsored the presentation.
Kapture is a wearable tech startup that is focused on the concept of saving and sharing spontaneous audio. It is a wristband design that has the ability to continuously capture audio by using a sixty second buffered loop that overwrites itself until the device is tapped to save the clip. The saved file can then be downloaded to smartphones where it can be edited and shared.
“The mission of Kapture is to combine fashion and function while changing the way that we are able to capture and share those everyday moments of greatness that are so often forgotten,” president of the Entrepreneurial Club and co-director of TEDxXavierUniversity Sam Seigle said. “The goal within the community is to support spontaneity and our random creative genius.”
Aside from the presentation of the product itself, the event also highlighted Dooley and Sarow’s entrepreneurial journey. They discussed their backgrounds and the paths that they took to get where they are today. They also discussed the role Kickstarter played in the success of their product.
Kickstarter is an increasingly popular crowd-funding site that allows anyone to support the development of a project. The project creators set a pledge goal, and they can reach that goal by getting donations that back the product. They only receive the money if the total amount has been raised. Dooley and Sarow set a goal of $150,000 for Kapture and they had 30 days to reach that goal.
Dooley and Sarow held the presentation on the last day of their campaign. They were $400 short of the goal and they reached it within an hour of presenting. “It was just really cool to have Cincinnati’s hottest startup in Kapture basically fund their Kickstarter campaign successfully while presenting to Xavier students; they could have been anywhere else waiting to for that final pledge, but they chose to share that moment at Xavier,” Seigle said.