LJV Fellows tour SpaceX, Arc Boats, and more during trip to Los Angeles

From touring SpaceX to climbing aboard an electric boat and meeting Internet personality What’s Gaby Cooking, seven Little Joe Ventures (LJV) Fellows from Cohort #6 and #7 got a front-row seat to innovation during a recent trip to Los Angeles. 

Over the weekend of May 1-4, the Fellows visited a range of startups and companies, including SpaceX, Arc Boats, Wolf & Shepherd, Neros, Salient Motion, Cloud Kitchen and Mendocino Farms. 

“It’s probably one of the best things I’ve been part of at Northwestern,” said Noah Edelman, a Northwestern senior, of the LJV Fellowship program.

The LJV Fellowship provides selected Northwestern undergraduates with a multi-year experience to accelerate their entrepreneurial growth, including one-on-one leadership coaching and multiple trips taken as a cohort. 

“I really appreciated how much diversity of ideas and diversity of industries that we got to see. The fact that we got to see chefs, shoes, electric boats, drones, and so on, was really, really incredible,” Northwestern senior Ian Lei said. 

The seven Fellows in attendance were Edelman, Lei, Ali Lee, Victoria Israel, Colleen Charchut, Terry Chen, and Trevor Abbott. 

The itinerary included a range of startups across industries. The first site visit, at a luxury shoe brand Wolf & Shepherd, was Northwestern junior Terry Chen’s favorite. 

“Just listening to [the founder] tell a story of how it all got started, from his trips with National Geographic selling artwork to raise money so that he can work on his own venture, and then eventually working on it and seeing how it evolved over the years – that has been really, really interesting,” Chen said. 

At their next visit to SpaceX, Fellows explored the factory floor and gained insight into the company’s manufacturing process for their Dragon spacecrafts, capable of carrying up to seven passengers to and from Earth’s orbit and beyond.

Junior Colleen Charchut recalled being “in awe the entire time.” 

“I was not expecting to walk in and on the right, see the control room, and in front of us see all of the Dragon capsules and the other rockets being built right in front of our eyes. I just have never seen anything like it,” Charchut said. “It was really incredible.”

The trip shifted from space to sea as the LJV Fellows hopped aboard an electric boat created by Arc Boats, a company founded by Northwestern alums Ryan Cook and Mitch Lee. They even observed employees navigating the warehouse on scooters for maximum efficiency (and fun). 

LJV Fellows also had the opportunity to meet a founder from the first cohort of Fellows, Vishaal Mali, the Co-Founder and CEO at Salient Motion. His startup designs parts for aerospace and defense industries. 

“It was a really special moment because it was the feedback loop I was looking for,” said Northwestern alum Tony Owen, who created the Little Joe Ventures Fellowship in 2018 alongside his wife Monique.

“We have Fellows out in the universe, and Vishaal is one of them, who have used some of the skills and confidence they built coming through The Garage and the Fellowship to go off and actually start their own business. Now they're teaching the next generation.”

Other highlights of the trip included a hands-on drone demo at Neros, a business-building conversation over lunch with Cloud Kitchen and Mendocino Farms, and a meal and Q&A with food personality Gaby Dalkin, who has amassed over 1 million followers on various social platforms. 

But beyond the logos and product demos, what made the trip special was the connection between the Fellows themselves, according to one Fellow. 

“Being open and vulnerable on the trips is really important, because I think the really cool stuff happens when other people get to know you well and when you bond and connect with people,” Edelman said. “That can’t happen if you’re not willing to talk about yourself, what you’re working on and what you’re struggling with.”

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Thank you to all our hosts, it was a fantastic trip!

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