Current Role: Founder, Soar
Hometown: North Carolina
Major: Interactive Media Arts
As a travel-loving teenager, Stanley Virgint '23 found himself flying off to Shenzhen—despite knowing no Chinese—after landing a summer internship at DJI, the world’s largest drone company. Now as the founder of Soar, a smart travel app startup, he finds himself flying off on adventures all around the world—he’s up to 75 countries so far！
You landed at NYU Shanghai almost without knowing what to expect. What was that like?
The first semester was really tough. I was like, “This language is incredibly hard to learn, I don't really know any people, this is such a crazy decision I made.” I think [it] was a very character-building moment, and then fast-forward to the end of it, and it was very hard to leave. It completely reverse uno-ed where I made such good friends, and loved the city, and loved seeing myself progress speaking Chinese. It completely changed me.
Chinese was probably the hardest part of NYU Shanghai [because] I'm mostly dyslexic. That was really empowering to feel like I did do it, and I still understand [it]. The NYU Moses Center for Accessibility and Inclusive Culture was super. They were very accommodating when it came to letting me type versus handwrite. That was a huge unlock. Typing definitely made me much more passionate because I could see progress happen quicker. When I moved off campus, I noticed a huge improvement in my Chinese as well.
What are some of your memories from attending NYU Shanghai?
The Interactive Media Arts program was my happy place, for sure. I really love the hackerspace/makerspace vibe of IMA—that space, the professors, the creative freedom to just work on what you wanted to work on, the benefit for my portfolio, too—the undergrad IMA [program] was unmatched to anything undergrad you could get in New York in that regard. One professor in particular I still feel is such a good friend, Rudi Cossovich. We worked on several projects [together].
The IMA show was always [a] really special time. In the startup world you have a lot of accelerators that have this demo day at the end of it. In IMA, you have a semester to really build something and then comes this moment where people interact with it and experience it. That was always really cool, especially just getting feedback from everyone on campus.
The pandemic really upended your college experience. You were in Shanghai, then New York, then back in Shanghai, and then you graduated from New York, right?
Me and the other people that are also kind of shipped to New York from Shanghai— that's still like my core friend group in New York City. I feel like I'm still very close with all those people.
In New York, I became president of the Startup Committee at Tech@NYU (I’m still an advisor for students). That's when the wheels started to turn. Being in the heat of the startup ecosystem in New York was really good for me.
I went from NYU straight into a master’s degree at Cornell Tech, and within my first semester I was poached to start working on an AI Literacy app, and there I got all the confidence I needed to to do what I'm doing now. I think working with them made me realize that I had everything I needed to to get started.
Your startup has attracted some pretty high-profile investors, including the former CEO of Expedia. Tell us about Soar.
When I was younger, I would spend a lot of time traveling with my family, but not in the typical vacation sense. Travel for us was always pretty purpose-driven. Volunteering in Mozambique, working at turtle sanctuaries in Costa Rica, studying Spanish in Cartagena, and so on.
It’s something [traveling] I’ve come to know really well as a consumer, and a space I see myself building in for a very long time. I think the most meaningful products get built when you’re solving a problem you’ve lived through firsthand and travel has no shortage of those.
We’re building an AI companion for frequent travelers that learns from your travel emails to understand your trips and preferences. It helps keep everything organized, handles changes as they come up, and takes a lot of the friction out of travel. Longer term, the goal is to bring the kind of support you’d expect from a great travel advisor to everyday people. Our first product is an iOS app that handles the messy and annoying parts of travel for you.
I’ve been really fortunate to have an awesome group of investors and advisors who’ve built great travel and consumer apps. One of them is the former CEO of AllTrails, who scaled the company from a five-person team to over 200. He is someone I learn a lot from.
How has the process of building a startup been?
I think you really do learn by doing and so certainly there are a lot of failures, time wasted, but I think that's kind of part of the process. Right now, we’re very small actually, three people with a few contractors and people on retainer as needed. I'm constantly looking for bright technical and marketing talent as we build our founding team. I raised our first round of capital as a solo founder from the best people I could ask for. I had never fundraised before so I had no idea when I first got started. It was a combination of reaching out to other founders for advice, many of which ended up investing themselves, leaning on mentors, and yeah, the rest is just self taught and conviction that this will be something huge some day.
What’s your advice for current students?
Coming back to NYU Shanghai, relationships I made are the thing that feels really valuable in what I'm doing now. If you know you want to build a company, or if you're interested in accelerators or building a startup, think about who you work really well with in class and who could be a good co-founder or business partner. This is something I regret not thinking about more.
Take advantage of being a student and email executives or professors or researchers, I think that response rate is higher than you'd expect. People do really love to help students. One thing that has gotten me pretty far is [the belief that] who you can reach is just purely based on being eager and hungry and being outspoken. I have some of the best investors and advisors in the world now. This is just all purely because I've reached out and I think you can do a lot by having that mindset.