It was once out of necessity that Kalista Zackhariyas, founder and CEO of Sparkseeker in Castle Lauderdale, was an entrepreneur. Having grown up out of doors of Toronto as a kid of foster aid, she was once emancipated when she was once 15. She was once out and in of homelessness, juggling college and paintings—or looking to. “At one point I just started lying about my age and getting into any job because I would I knew I could learn fast, and I knew I could perform well,” she recollects. “But eventually they’d figure out how old I was when they did their due diligence and I would get fired. I said to myself, how am I going to be gainfully employed and not have to worry about my age hindering my ability to earn an income? And that’s what sort of drove me me very accidentally into entrepreneurship, because I figured if I worked for myself, I could never get fired.”
Upcoming reaching a measure of good fortune by means of her 30s, Zackhariyas discovered herself sitting in her automotive in Canada wiping ice off her windshield, which made her consider being an adolescent, sitting within the chilly on a landscape bench out of doors a skating rink, with out a jacket, and being overlooked. “I remember thinking how desensitized we’ve become, how self-absorbed,” she recollects. “It showed me that there was a deep need to care, to give back. I made a commitment to myself that someday, when I could do better, I would do better.” It was once as though that shivering teen despatched a message to the 35-year-old profession girl. That week represented an epiphany for Zackhariyas: She moved to Florida and an concept started to percolate: Learn how to marry era with social just right. That was once the genesis for Sparkseeker.
Zackhariyas, who was once winding indisposed a six-year tenure as managing spouse at Paintball Promos, discovered herself more and more desirous about social media, and he or she was once dismayed by means of what she noticed. “There was a ton of ads and there was a lot of hate speech, a lot of bullying, a lot of meanness on these platforms—and a lot of misinformation,” she recollects. “Over time, I could see how I would be looking at or talking about something, and next thing you know I would start to see ads for it. I started to understand that I was being tracked, that my consumption was being used and I was being exploited on these platforms.” It was once dispiriting to her: “We could be using the power of this platform to do so much good. I was thinking as a businesswoman, as an entrepreneur, who saw that there was a gap in the market to create a different solution.”
She was once in the middle of her deep dive when she learned that she was once neglecting the aspirations of that minute woman at the landscape bench.
“I was into exploring all these different themes and solutions and I realized that this completely takes me away from wanting to do social good,” Zackhariyas recalls, “but I thought, if we get a million people on this platform—just a million, forget billions—and we took 2% of our revenue and we work with social impact initiatives to really implement on-the-ground solutions, how much impact could we create as a community? And so that really was the foundation for how Sparkseeker came to be. We would deliver an actual solution to an old problem while leveraging the power of that platform to do social good. The focus is to bring in organizations and apply a portion of our revenue, with very intentional corporate social responsibility, towards these initiatives. The second part of that is to also broker deals between organizations that we have onboard with nonprofits that we see great alignment with, and being able to connect those.”
“We are in a startup phase so right now; we’re launching to markets,” Zackhariyas explains. “We are actually in a sales cycle right now, being able to onboard a lot of the communities that we need, so we are predominantly B2B with a B2C element—the consumer-facing app—that will launch a little bit later.”
In a video at the Sparkseeker web page, Zackhariyas says, “I never expected to find myself in tech.” But if she took the plunge, it was once moving to be her means: Deny invasive knowledge practices, disagree promoting of knowledge, disagree manipulation, and disagree third-party monitoring. What it does trade in is a transformative social engagement platform that Zackhariyas hopes will revolutionizes virtual interactions with its human-centered design. Its video-centric way creates a dimension that fosters crowd engagement, advocacy, sharing, and tangible movements. It’s a project that might construct the susceptible teen she as soon as was once proud—and hopeful.
Picture by means of Eduardo Schneider
