Click here for Part I & Part II

Making the world a safer place through personal technology and community involvement

Anthony Gold is the co-founder and COO of ROAR for Good. ROAR for Good started after Yasmine Mustafa, the company’s co-founder and CEO, heard numerous stories of violence against women and resolved to make the world a safer place. Driven by this mission, ROAR for Good developed Athena, a wearable safety product that users can pair with their phones to share their locations with trusted contacts, and which sounds an alarm in the event of an emergency. For every Athena sold, the company donates a portion of the sale to educational programs aimed at reducing violence and building empathy.

EDWIN WARFIELD: What kind of fundraising did you do after the crowdfunding campaign that introduced your product to the world? Can you take us through some of the milestones?

ANTHONY GOLD: When we first started ROAR, the first thing we did was a small friends and family raise of people who were around Philadelphia, who wanted to be a part of our mission of what we wanted to do. We had some local people in Philadelphia who were part of that, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners was also part of that small initial raise. And then we were invited into the Dreamit Accelerator program and Karen Griffith Gryga, who’s a dear friend of mine for many years, convinced us to go into Dreamit. It was a great experience. I met so many great people and great connections and it really helped us quickly grow our company, and it culminated in us launching our crowdfunding campaign after we got out of Dreamit and then moved into our own space following that. And then, once we had the success that we had with the crowdfunding campaign, we knew that, okay, we need to build this product and we can’t just build it with any manufacturer because the original manufacturer that we thought we could use was never going to work to meet the volume that came through the crowdfunding campaign.

We were very fortunate that we met a company called Flextronics; they’re now Flex. Flex is the world's largest wearable tech manufacturer. We met them at CES a couple of years ago and they fell in love with what we were doing. Flex doesn’t work with too many startups, and they agreed to take us on. We started a partnership with Flex which is great—as I said, they’re the best; they make a lot of Apple products, they make a ton of products—but they’re not cheap. They are the highest quality—the gold standard of manufacturing—but we knew we needed to go with Flex because the product we’re making is too important and we can’t sacrifice quality at all. And so, we did a fund raise to enable us to be able to get through manufacturing to build the products and do that, and in that round, which we called a seed round, Ben Franklin was one of the lead investors, and that Ben Franklin put $250,000 into that seed round. They’ve just been a great partner of ours working with Omar and the rest of the team at Ben Franklin, and RoseAnn and her team, and everything they do is just superb, and we’re very fortunate to be partners with them and couldn’t be happier with everything that Ben Franklin has done.

Q. Your website mentions that ROAR is a certified B Corporation. What does that mean?

A. When we built ROAR, we intentionally chose to become a B Corporation. A B Corporation is a regular company that decides that it wants to follow very rigorous standards of adhering to the way we treat employees, the way we treat the environment, the way we treat our customers and our focus on society. Other B Corporations we’ve heard of are Ben & Jerry's ice cream, TOMS Shoes—these are companies that have great products but really want to make a difference in society, and we’re the same way at ROAR. We want to be B Corporation because we truly want to make a difference, and we are: we’re now a certified B Corporation.

Q. What are your plans for the near future? Will you be bringing Athena to retail stores?

A. One of the questions that we get asked a lot at ROAR is: “When you guys are going be in retail? When are you going to be in Target, or Best Buy, or the Apple Store?” And these are great questions, and Yasmine and I have been very selective about when is the right time to get into retail, because the challenge with retail is, yeah, retail is a great way when you can sell lots and lots of devices, but you take a big hit on margin when you go in to retail, and you don't get paid for several months after a product is shipped, so you’re floating a lot of inventory—it takes a while to get paid back—and what we’ve seen a lot of companies do and they make this mistake: they go to retail too quickly, because you’re blinded by that “ooh, if I could get into such-and-such a store, then we’re going to sell millions of units.” Maybe. Or you might sell your way into bankruptcy is what often happens because it’s expensive: you have to float a lot of cash, and you get killed on margin. But retail is a great way to sell lots of units when the time is right. So for us, we’re very selective about when we’re going to get into retail, and it’s probably going to be some time toward the middle to the end of next year.

Until then, we’ve been very successful with our online channels. We sell on our website, we’re going to be selling on Amazon very soon, and we’re on a few other online retailers like The Grommet and others where you can find our products. As I said, we’re very selective because we want to be intentional about a couple of things: we want to be intentional about where we’re selling, but we also want to be very intentional about the messages behind ROAR. You will never see us go through white label distributors in countries that we’ve never heard of shipping this, because for us, as I mentioned before, we do not measure success by the number of Athena units that we sell; we measure success by this one metric only: the number of lives that we touch. And so for us, the mission is so important. We need to be sure that where we’re selling and why we’re selling and the impact that it’s having is there. Our community is the most important thing. Our goal is not: “Where can we go to sell the most number of devices?” Our goal is: “What can we do to have the greatest level of impact?” That’s what drives all of our sales channels and our decisions around those sales channels.

Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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