When Rosie Fellig, 21, stepped up to pitch her business idea to Ronnen Harary, the Canadian billionaire entrepreneur who co-created the children’s television show “Paw Patrol,” she expected to walk away with, at the very least, some practice presenting to a successful businessman.
Instead, minutes later, the University of Pennsylvania junior secured what she called her “first-ever business investment,” $500 from Harary himself.
“I’m always gonna remember his first investment in me, because it helped with my momentum and helped propel me forward,” Fellig, who runs an online sketch-comedy account that she hopes to turn into a production company, told JNS.
“He gave me a lot of confidence,” she said.
Fellig, who is Modern Orthodox, is among dozens of students to receive startup funding from Harary, who is Jewish, as part of his “No Experience Necessary” tour of North American universities.
The tour, which gets its name from Harary’s book published in July, began on Oct. 8 at the University of Pennsylvania and is scheduled to visit 22 campuses across the United States and Canada through Nov. 18.
It was created to inspire young people “to start their own businesses and to bet on themselves,” Harary told JNS.
At each campus, students have 60 seconds to pitch their ideas, followed by another minute of questions. Those selected receive $500 and seven days to use the money to develop their proposals.
Students get to pitch their ideas in a “very quick, rapid-fire format,” Harary said.
JNS spoke to him about two weeks into the tour, at which point he had heard about 400 pitches. Those ranged from a woman with a doughnut business to a young man developing a camera system that uses artificial intelligence to analyze physical movements.
A lot of proposals focused on food and beverage, he said.
“It’s all turned into a bit of a blur,” he told JNS. He remembers the faces of all the students who pitched him, he said.
Roughly 40 to 50 students have already received funding.
Those selected must then submit receipts documenting how they spent the money, along with a more detailed pitch. Thirty finalists will compete for 10 grants of $25,000 each.
Harary, who is funding the competition personally, told JNS that the grants come with “no strings attached” and that he will not take equity in businesses.
“I think the thing that dawned on me is, it’s less about the specific idea, and it’s more about someone believing in them,” he said.
For some of the students, “this is the first money they’ve ever received in their life for an idea that they want to bring into the world,” he told JNS. “But I think it’s more about that. It’s about someone believing in them, someone they don’t even know.”
Harary has spent more than three decades in the toy and entertainment industries. He is co-founder and chairman of Spin Master, which, according to his LinkedIn profile, has had a portfolio of “world-changing toys and shows since 1994 including Paw Patrol, Bakugan, Air Hogs, Hatchimals, Etch A Sketch, Swimways, GUND and more.”
He told JNS that he knew he wanted to go into business for himself at age 10 despite struggling in school with dysgraphia, a learning disability that affects writing.
At 20, he started a business with his partner, Anton Rabie, selling Earth Buddies, small novelty products that, when watered, grew grass resembling hair. The pair eventually expanded into the toy industry and, years later, began producing children’s television shows.
“If you would have asked me in university, when I was younger, like these people, these students, I would have never dreamed about going into the toy industry,” he told JNS. “But for some reason it found us.”
The road to “Paw Patrol” was not without setbacks. The company’s first television series was successful, but the next three failed. “Paw Patrol,” its fifth series, was produced in the company’s 19th year of business.
“It wasn’t something that we just did,” Harary told JNS. “It was a result of really learning the toy industry and understanding the entertainment animation industry.”
Those experiences helped shape his book, which encourages young people to take risks and pursue their ambitions before they feel fully prepared.
“A lot of times it’s not risk,” he said. “It’s just resistance that holds people back.”
Harary told JNS that he views the tour as an expression of his Jewish values.
“It’s really expensive to put on,” he told JNS, of the costs of traveling between cities with a silver Airstream trailer, from which he hears students’ pitches and awards prize money.
“I look at it as a form of tzedakah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for charity. “It’s not just giving back from writing a check. It’s giving back my time and my energy and my thoughts to the kids.”
Harary visited Yeshiva University on Oct. 12. Seeing the flagship Modern Orthodox university in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights and meeting its students was a highlight, he said.
“I went to the beit midrash,” he told JNS, of one of the university’s religious study halls. “That was really cool to see.”
The YU students were “super switched on,” he said.
Among them was Jacob Hoschander, a senior studying economics, who nearly missed his opportunity to pitch Harary.
Hoschander and his business partner, Oriel Atias, were scheduled to present their idea during the final slot of the day, but time ran out before their turn. Rather than give up, the pair ran outside and caught Harary as he was leaving the building.
“We asked his media team to mic us up, and instead of 60 seconds, we had about 15, walking from the door to his car,” Hoschander told JNS.
“It was nerve-wracking, but he gave us his full attention, and those 15 seconds got us into the next round,” he said. “He’s a rigorous audience, which made the whole experience feel real and exciting.”
Their proposal, “Project Joshua,” is a platform designed to connect different therapists working with the same child with special needs, allowing them to collaborate on the child’s care.
“The current system is fragmented, and it makes coordination across a child’s care team incredibly difficult,” Hoschander told JNS. “The tools to support that collaboration simply haven’t existed.”
If they win the $25,000 grand prize, the pair, which Hoschander told JNS has worked with children with special needs for more than eight years, plan to finish developing the platform, incorporate privacy protections that comply with federal health-information standards and launch a pilot program with a care provider.
The experience “was meaningful,” Hoschander said.
“Ronnen has built a lot, and it says something that he came to YU and invested his time in student founders,” he told JNS. “For us, it was a chance to show that young people in the Jewish community are building real solutions to real problems, including ones in our own community.”
For Fellig, who spent the $500 on a director of photography and microphones to shoot higher quality short films, the experience was less nerve-wracking than she thought it would be.
Harary “was really, really nice,” she told JNS. “I was super nervous, but I gave him my pitch, and he asked a bunch of follow-up questions. Interestingly, his follow-up questions were mostly about my passion and zeal for the whole project.”
“He was asking me why I wanted to do this, what my ultimate goal was and what attracted me to it, which I wasn’t expecting,” she said.
Having the support of someone like Harary means a lot to Fellig, who told JNS that there isn’t much support for Orthodox women who want to do comedy.
“I’ve definitely faced pushback in my own community pursuing performance arts and comedy and, you know, unladylike things,” she said. “I actually brought that up, and it was nice knowing even somewhat that he could understand a little about Jewish culture and what that looks like.”
If she wins the grand prize, Fellig plans to produce more comedy sketches and eventually “create longer narrative short films, put them in the festival circuit, get buzz” and build her company’s reputation.
Her ultimate goal is developing and selling original projects.
“I think more people should take chances on kids,” Fellig told JNS. “They have really good ideas.”