By Elise Anderson
It was a far cry from what Arash Nasibi (’14) had envisioned as an MBA student. A former computer scientist with a focus on management consulting, Nasibi took a sharp left turn shortly after enrolling in a core strategy class with professor Phillip Leslie, and just kept driving.
Nasibi became interested in Leslie’s perspective on business strategy, which suggests that MBAs seek opportunities that exist in often overlooked “sleepy niche markets.” When he learned that Leslie was recruiting research assistants for work he was doing on restaurant inspection data, Nasibi was intrigued. “It struck me as one of those peculiar markets that he had discussed in class — enough to pique my curiosity and learn more,” Nasibi says.
Leslie’s interest in food safety was evident in the work he did with University of Maryland’s (UMD) Ginger Jin, showing that restaurant hygiene grade cards had an impact on reducing foodborne illnesses. With a grant from the Sloan Foundation, Leslie created a nationwide standardized database on food safety inspection, information that traditionally had been highly idiosyncratic and fragmented.
One of Nasibi’s first tasks as a research assistant was to assess the commercial viability of the academics’ research and design a plan for its commercial use. After confirming the market potential, Nasibi formed a student-faculty founding team, many of whose members played vital roles as subject matter experts, relationship builders, advisors and investors, with Nasibi serving as CEO.
The team entered into an agreement with UMD and UCLA to license aspects of the intellectual property. Next, bypassing a search for venture capital funding, the team sought non-traditional sources of capital, which included the Sloan grant and non-dilutive grants and loans offered through the Maryland Innovation Initiative, a program that invests in Maryland-based startups.
“Our focus from day one was verifying our product fit and business model by quickly gaining customers and generating sustainable revenue streams, which seems to be in contrast to what many entrepreneurs do today, which is to focus on raising large amounts of capital,” Nasibi notes.
“I found certain aspects of the entrepreneurial path to be more challenging than I had imagined at the outset,” he says. Outside of the “textbook” expectations of experiencing possible financial hardship and dealing with rejection or abject failure, Nasibi did not anticipate the “nuanced challenges that can arise in team management, including keeping up morale, maintaining co-founder dynamics, dealing with a range of employee issues and needs — all of which can lead to demise if not attended to proactively and appropriately.
“It’s difficult to define success,” Nasibi says. “I see ours as a series of incremental wins: building a strong team, getting early prospects to serve as beta partners, releasing a minimally viable product, signing up that first customer and a second customer, then renewing the first customer, and so on.”
Nasibi and the team’s hard work led to the development of Hazel Analytics, a data analytics and technology company that provides food retailers, especially large restaurant chains, with novel solutions that enable them to engage in data-driven approaches to food safety.
“It gives restaurants an opportunity to learn about various regulations [and] how to comply with them, and demonstrates how well they are performing on a comparative basis, year after year,” says Leslie (now vice president and chief digital economist at Amazon).
Ann Marie McNamara, one of the nation’s top food specialists at a large retail chain, was an original beta tester of Hazel Analytics’ flagship software. She says the tool creates a proactive system. “It shows greater visibility in the daily operations of stores or restaurants throughout the U.S. and allows food safety personnel to take corrective actions when something is identified as an issue or violation,” McNamara says. “It helps drive the safety behaviors of personnel in restaurants and retail, which protects guests, public health and brand reputation.”
Nasibi expects that perhaps 100 of the largest food retail brands will be using Hazel Analytics’ technology platform by the end of 2018. He also sees international opportunities, “as many large chains have global footprints, which makes visibility and insights across borders critical,” he says.
Nasibi also notes that a majority of public health departments are eager to make better use of their data, especially in the hundreds of jurisdictions that are still paper-based. To make this data accessible and actionable, “we plan to create new products that will enable health departments to digitize inspection records and get them posted online for public access in an affordable manner, which ultimately enables the departments to better utilize their own data and become more effective and efficient,” Nasibi says.
In today's changing world of public health, data is crucial in making key decisions which has the potential of improving healthcare delivery
Posted by: Essaycurve | 06/13/2018 at 12:22 AM