Fast Growth for Healthy Snacks

**Great article we found on Inc.com.**

Inc. 5000 applicant Snikiddy, founded by Mary Schulman and her mother, is finding success in the health food market with its snacks.

After nearly 10 years working in financial institutional sales, Mary Schulman decided she wanted to give back. She also wanted her family to have healthy snacks but didn’t see many options that met her healthy and tasty criteria. So in late 2006, Schulman and her mother founded Snikiddy.

Schulman grew up in a healthy household, courtesy of her mother’s particular shopping style. “We had this crazy circle bread in our lunch that was made with only sprouted grains and things of that nature,” Schulman says. Her mother’s healthy eating habits were passed down to her by her own mother, Schulman’s grandma, one notorious for packing lunch boxes filled with local produce and simple foods.

So notorious, in fact, that her children became known as “the snikiddy kids.” In actuality they were “persnickety eaters,” according to a teacher. But the kids used their own version of the word, snikiddy, and it stuck. They donned the nickname with pride.

The health-conscious snack food company started off with cheese puffs and cookies. But despite the deliciousness of their sweet treats, the cookie market wasn’t showing the growth Schulman wanted, so the product was cut. “It was a decent business under probably a lot of standards,” Schulman says, “but we weren’t seeing the tremendous growth we were seeing from the salty snack arena, and we really wanted to be a growth company.” From that point on Snikiddy honed in on the salty snack category.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Startup has Sky-High Aspirations for Roadable Aircraft

**Great article from the January 2012 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine.**

An aviation enthusiast’s invention leaps from the road to the wild blue yonder.

Entrepreneur: Carl Dietrich, co-founder of Terrafugia, a Woburn, Mass.-based company that’s developing The Transition “roadable aircraft.” (It’s a flying car!)

“Aha” moment: In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration eased regulations related to developing light sport aircraft and acquiring licenses for operating them. “That’s what got me thinking about doing something entrepreneurial in aviation,” says Dietrich, Terrafugia’s CEO and CTO, who got his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. In 2006, he and his co-founders (three of the original five remain with the company) launched Terrafugia–the name is Latin for “escape the earth.”

Taking off: Terrafugia was initially funded with $40,000 after Dietrich won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Inventiveness and the company’s business plan was a runner-up in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The team brought a model of the concept to Wisconsin’s EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, the largest annual U.S. gathering of aviation enthusiasts, and convinced seven people to put down deposits on vehicles. In December 2006, Terrafugia closed on a $250,000 first round of investment. In 2009, The Transition completed flight tests in Plattsburgh, N.Y. To date, Terrafugia has brought in more than $7 million from angel investors and others.