From Campus to Company

Entrepreneurship is thriving within students at Piedmont, from cooking meals for classmates to building e-commerce empires from the ground up. Students are learning business techniques to earn profits, gain real world experience, and pursue passions.
Sophomores Leo Sachs and Maximo Miller run a culinary business.
“We run a business where we sell meals off of school grounds to our classmates for ten dollars,” Sachs said. “It’ll be a new meal every week, and we’ll send a poll in our group chat, and they can decide what they like for that week.”
Sachs and Miller’s business has a diverse menu featuring foods from multiple cultures.
“We’ve done [foods like] birria tacos, butter chicken, fried chicken sandwiches,” Sachs said.
However, Sachs and Miller don’t use the profits they make for themselves— they put it towards more charitable purposes.
“With our profits, we make extra meals and give it out to the homeless. We just drive around Oakland [to hand out meals to the homeless]. We’re left with like five bucks between us,” Sachs said.
Sachs and Miller’s customer range is not large, and consists of primarily sophomores.
“We’re handing out 14 [meals] this week. It’s around that number each week,” Sachs said. “Around 30 [meals] combined, but 14 prepared for classmates and 14 for the homeless.”
Sachs said that their passions are the main reason for running their business, alongside helping the community and doing it for college applications.
Similarly, junior Quentin Shafroth said he and his brother, 2024 PHS graduate Oliver Shafroth, previously attempted to start their own business as well as a way to bond together while selling clothing.
“We had a website built on Shopify, and we contacted a few different manufacturers in Taiwan. We had a name picked out with designs and stuff, but we just didn’t have enough time to get it going,” Shafroth said.
Shafroth and his brother also began their business for more than financial gains.
“We really just wanted to have the experience of building a company together,” Shafroth said.
Shafroth said that starting a business took more commitment then he could handle at the time.
“It really is a commitment thing. You have to sit down and say you’re gonna do it and then really work to get it done,” Shafroth said. “You can’t make it a priority that’s low on your list. It has to be the number one thing you’re focused on if you really want to succeed.”
Shafroth believes that with some time, he and his brother’s business could potentially have made lots of profits.
“You need to focus on yourself and focus on improving your mindset so you can work really hard. If we worked for a couple more weeks, I think we definitely would have seen some profit,” Shafroth said.
In comparison, 2024 PHS graduate Alan Szymanski said he has had lots of success doing business through dropshipping, where an online store ships products without storing any inventory.
“It’s basically just fulfillment from China,” Szymanski said. “Someone else makes the products and ships them. It’s basically just an e-commerce business, except I don’t have to hold inventory.”
Szymanski said his role is attracting customers through ads, and then the manufacturers do the rest of the work.
“[I post ads on] Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, Google, the main stuff,” Szymanski said.
Szymanski said he initially faced difficulty with his drop shopping career and profits, but eventually hit success.
“Failing for months [was really hard]. For some people, it takes years,” Szymanski said. “You have to be able to hit the wall and keep going. I’ve made over six figures.”