Silicon Valley’s most exclusive accelerator backs a Concordian-powered online gift service
Spoil’s co-founders: James Traf, with Concordia graduates Cristian Asenjo, Charles-Eric Gascon and Mikhail Levkovsky. Spoil is an online gift concierge that aims to take the hunt out of gift giving.
In terms of prestige, it’s equivalent to getting the call-up from the NHL. A team of Concordia alumni, coached by experts in the District 3 Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, has received backing from Y Combinator, the world's biggest business accelerator.
Charles-Éric Gascon, Mikhail Levkovsky and Cristian Asenjo, graduates from Concordia’s engineering and business programs, started work on Spoil, an online gift concierge, in September 2014. They’d already developed quite a different application called Airborne, but were not satisfied with its pace of growth.
Spoil seemed to be headed for greater things when, after they developed the initial coding during a weekend “hackathon,” 50 subscribers signed up immediately.
In November, the founders applied to Y Combinator. The idea behind the accelerator is to vastly speed up the process of taking business ideas to the market. Y Combinator invests $120,000 in startups in exchange for a 7 per cent share in equity. More than 500 companies have received close to $60 billion in investment so far.
Spoil’s founders had only 10 minutes to make a good impression with Y Combinator. But District 3 coaching and the founders’ innate talents clinched the deal, and within weeks, the team had relocated to Mountain View, California, a requirement of the accelerator’s program. They are now working around the clock to build a company that can deliver results.
“We live next to the office, and we work seven days a week,” Gascon says. “We’ve been given three months to show investors something wicked.”
So what exactly is Spoil? In short, it takes the “hunt” out of gift giving. You visit the site, describe the person you’re buying for and where he or she lives, pick a price point, and Spoil does the rest. The eventual gift will be a surprise to both parties — the “spoiler” and the “spoilee.” The company filled a large number of orders in the lead-up to Christmas, selling out of inventory by December 19.
The next big test for Spoil will be Valentine’s Day, when it hopes to fill a record number of orders.
“It’s nice to have stories like ours,” Gascon says. “We’re definitely on the right road, and Concordia helped us every step of the way.”
Gascon is grateful not only to District 3 and its co-founder, Xavier-Henri Hervé, and community manager, Noor Elbawab, but also to Peter Grogono, former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, who first introduced Gascon to his teammates back when he was initially looking for collaborators.
Spoil curates gifts in two ways. First comes the number-crunching phase, during which marketing information provided by Spoil’s suppliers gets processed. The second filter is the human touch: Spoil has identified expert bloggers in several gift categories who make the final picks on what gifts are available.
The process clearly works, since Spoil has seen very few gifts returned.
“I’m really impressed with what Spoil has accomplished in such a short period of time,” District 3’s Hervé says. “It’s yet another example of the great things that happen when universities help kick-start innovation and entrepreneurship.”