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| Profile Views: | 99 views |
| Friends: | 166 friends | | Last Update: | 5 months ago | | Signup Date: | May. 1, 2008 |
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First Name:
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Ryan
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Last Name:
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Gessel
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Story:
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I was born and raised in the small town of St. Louis Missouri. As a kid I did all kinds of jobs from selling Kool-Aid to shoveling snow from our neighbors driveways in the winter, eventually moving up to taking care of landscaping for our subdivision. Once I moved off to college, every summer instead of working a full-time hourly wage job I used my audio/video skills to design and install custom home theater systems for people remodeling their basements. At the same time during college, I made my first endeavor into real estate where I owned 2 properties with a few partners, and boy was that a learning experience. Talk about the school of hard knocks.
Fast forwards a few years and I am graduated from college, working at Dow Jones VentureOne in SF's Financial District. I get a call from my roommates that our apartment is on fire. Rushing home in a cab, I am choking on the smoke-filled air as far as 5 blocks from our apartment, and arrive to flames shooting out of our roof.
This is where the story of MyVault begins.
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Company:
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MyVault is an online home inventory management system that allows users to keep secure digital copies of important documents such as wills, trusts, birth certificates, etc. MyVault's easy to use interface yet robust feature set helps home owners and small business owners to simplify the claims process and recover financially in times of disaster. This is done by allowing for the creation of custom reports as well as individually granted authentication for people such as insurance agents, estate planners, and family members to access specific parts of your account when necessary. The system is also fully customizable for each user so that they can create and name any category they want in both their inventory and their document storage section.
Just as a business should have a disaster recovery plan, every person and family should have their own disaster recovery system. With MyVault this is possible.
MyVault is your Digital Safe Deposit Box.
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Company Name:
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MyVault
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Product Description:
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In designing MyVault, every one of these issues is being taken into major consideration and done so with the input of insurance agents, real estate agents, graphic designers, and most important, potential users. I am not building a system I think looks good, I think has the features people want, but it will have what users say they need.
MyVault will truly be a system for the people and have features they need. The MyVault platform will be very easy to use, pleasing to the eye, and boast more features yet less set-up time that competing systems.
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Difference:
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With MyVault, I will be able to help countless people recover in times of disaster. Being the victim of a fire myself, I know the pains firsthand of a situation like this. It was truly the most stressful and emotionally hard time of my life. I know many people will not have all of their information or home inventory safely stored in case of a disaster as I did not, but my hope is to get to as many of these people as possible before anything happens to them. At the same time, insurance companies will be able to benefit by helping to reduce insurance fraud and streamline the claims settlement process.
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Passion:
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I am passionate about being active & having fun. Be it snow skiing in Tahoe with my friends or visiting Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri with my family, I just love being active and keeping my mind stimulated. My 2 biggest releases from the stresses of everyday life are being on the water and cooking.
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Inspiration:
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Creating something from nothing.
And the place I enjoy applying it the most is the kitchen. I absolutely love to cook and enjoy creating different dishes from whatever ingredients we have and cooking for people. It's extremely gratifying when I make a dinner for a group of friends and everyone is like "Wow Ryan, this is amazing," then they ask how to make it.
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Motivation:
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Every night when I go to bed I try to have at least 1 particular thing I am looking forward too the next day. At the same time, if I am having an absolutely, downright horrible day, I know that every day is a new one and when I wake up in the morning it will be a new beginning. My mood will be changed and I'll be ready to go!
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Success:
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I'd say one of my biggest successes has been becoming an Eagle Scout which only 5% of scouts ever achieve. In getting to that rank, it took a great deal of determination, organization, planning, and dedication. All of these traits helped me in leading a team of scouts and adults to rehab and clean up a 200 acre park. Having that experience at a younger age has instilled a mindset of hard work and success that I have carried forward through all of my endeavors since.
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Challenge:
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The most difficult AND expensive lesson I have learned is the real estate transactions I got into while in college. Looking back on it I saw the prospect of making a lot of money pretty easily. I didn't do enough due diligence and I was blinded by the prospect of success too much to see all the potential failure signs.
Although a lot was lost monetarily, a lot was gained in experience and knowledge that will transcend the RE field. It was a HUGE learning opportunity and was definitely taught in the school of hard knocks.
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Advice:
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Nike had it right when they said "Just Do It."
Without getting into the RE deals, I would never have learned how to deal with a city in getting permits, planning issues, creating a business proposal, or approach a bank for a loan, at age 19 nevertheless. There are a lot of things that you can't find out by Googling, those are the things you learn by just doing it.
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Website:
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www.myvaulthome.com
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Calling:
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Going all the way back to being a 4 year old until now, I have always been inspired by working for and creating value for myself and others. Being able to use my creativity to take an idea and turn it into a business in order to shape my destiny really gives me the drive to succeed.
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Keywords:
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home inventory, disaster planning, document storage, online document storage, online home inventory
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Business Model:
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The business model is subscription based with Basic & Premium versions as well as a limited functionality free version. Add on features will be available such as additional GB of storage space.
Once a significant user base is built up, the next phase of the business model is approaching insurance companies to license the MyVault platform to them. Along with this, each insurance company can have the MyVault platform skinned with their graphics so that their policy holders appear to be on their website.
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Pain:
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Currently the majority of home inventory system offerings available are software based. In the case your computer is stolen or destroyed, so is your home inventory. With an online system, the issue of data loss is eliminated and the value of data portability is introduced.
There are some online systems out there, all of which I have signed up for, and if you talk to anyone in the industry the common theme arises...all of the online systems are either:
a) Have a confusing user interface.
b) Hard to use
c) Have lack of features
d) Don't help streamline the claims process sufficiently
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