Pioneering a New Path

Rachel Ford has had a busy year. In addition to being a full-time student—which is no small feat at Georgia Tech—the fifth-year biomedical engineering major has also started two businesses, won several awards, established new programs and completed a CEO development program.

“This has all been within the last year,” Ford says. “It’s mind-blowing. If you’d asked me freshman year, I’d never have said I wanted to be an entrepreneur.”

Ford is behind two startup companies that are among the first to emerge from new entrepreneurship classes offered at Georgia Tech, leading her and her teammates to become a showcase for the Institute. She’s even helping teach the second iteration of Startup Lab, which has grown from 30 students in the inaugural class to 120 this year.

“Georgia Tech really promotes what we’re doing,” Ford says. “I can’t even imagine what it’s going to look like in the next five to 10 years. It’s going to be awesome.”

Ford excelled in chemistry in high school, and came to Georgia Tech with plans to study chemical engineering and go on to medical school to become a doctor.

But during her co-op at DuPont, Ford was exposed to product design and science-based research and development—an experience that made her change course.

“I realized my skillset was building things to enable doctors to help people, rather than being the hands-on doctor or surgeon,” Ford says.

So Ford switched to biomedical engineering, and in one of her new classes—BME 2300—she worked with a team to design her first medical device.

“That’s when all this startup stuff came about,” Ford says.

Ford and her team redesigned a pacifier to reduce the dental, skeletal and speech deformations that can be caused by extended pacifier use. Later, the team updated their creation, dubbed Sucette, so that it would change color to diagnose a fever.

They entered Sucette in Georgia Tech’s 2014 InVenture Prize competition and won second place. Their prize included $10,000 and a free U.S. patent filing.

After that first taste of entrepreneurship, Ford was hooked.

She enrolled in Tech’s first-ever Startup Lab class, where she learned what it takes to create a business—not just how to design a product.

“A lot of times at Georgia Tech we design things because we’re really good at that, but never think of who would buy it,” Ford says.

The class taught her to do market research and find out what kind of products people want before the design process begins.

Ford and her Startup Lab teammates began with the idea of creating a product for breast cancer detection. But after conducting market research, they found that women wanted more education about breast cancer exams, not a product they would need to buy.

The idea for their eventual Startup Lab business came when Ford’s car broke down on the way to her hometown of Powder Springs, Ga. She called classmate John Gattuso, an auto enthusiast, to ask for advice.

It was then that it clicked: Ford certainly wasn’t the only one out there who needed help diagnosing a car problem. And there were likely plenty of people without someone as knowledgeable as Gattuso in their Rolodex.

And so FIXD was born: a diagnostic device that plugs into your car to estimate what’s wrong and how much it will cost to fix.

Following the Startup Lab class, Ford was also one of the first students to participate in Tech’s Startup Summer, a 12-week program for student teams to launch startups based on their inventions.

“We were essentially the guinea pigs for all these things,” Ford says.

In a short amount of time, Ford and her teammates have made great strides with both startups. They’ve submitted the formal patent application for Sucette, and FIXD founders Ford, Gattuso and Kevin Miron, ME 14, successfully raised $40,000 from a campaign on the crowd funding website Kickstarter.

“If Tech didn’t decide to do Startup Lab or Startup Summer, I never would have had the opportunity to do this,” Ford says.

Ford knows that her experience at Tech has been unique. But it hasn’t been easy. Ford says she works around 15 hours a day and often sleeps for only four hours at a time.

“Startup life is hard,” Ford says. “But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

Ford says she’s also motivated by the recognition she’s receiving for her work. Among a slew of awards, she was named to the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s list of “30 Under 30” prominent young leaders and received Georgia Tech’s Alvin M. Ferst Leadership and Entrepreneur Award.

Ford says students are hungry for this kind of learning, and Georgia Tech is listening.

“There’s a grassroots movement of students pushing for design and entrepreneurial-based classes,” Ford says. “Not only professors and faculty, but alumni come out of the woodwork when we are passionate about something.”

Traditionally, Tech students go one of three main directions: Get a job with a corporation, get a job doing research or go to graduate school.

With Tech’s new focus on entrepreneurship, Ford says there is now a fourth option to make not only your own job, but other jobs too.

“Door No. 4 has been opened,” Ford says. She pauses and thinks about this for a second and then says, “Door No. 4 has been pushed wide open.”

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