The 2014 RuleBreaker Awards celebrates entrepreneurs who defied convention. Simeon Schnapper made unconscious learning engaging. Christina Daves redesigned post-surgical recovery with fashion-forward care and won the grand prize.
I want to thank you all for coming, and we think that rule-breaking is so important because you know that in small business Nothing happens, really, until someone breaks the rules, right? So let's get started. Simeon Schnapper at Utopia broke the rules.
We're very proud of breaking the rule around how people learn. This is how you learn. You have to read the book. You have to do the test. So the rule we broke was people learn when they're engaged and they're not thinking about learning. Not a lot of people have broken that rule. Thank you guys. Thank you very much.
Rule breaker number 1. I function during the day as an educator, and we subscribe to following the rules. And I'm rule-breaking because I self-funded, and I found ways to just leap and figure it out. And I am kind of a one-stop shop. I started the company myself, I run it myself, and I use a lot of these various outlets—social media, Constant Contact—to run my business.
Before Constant Contact, the idea of email marketing to small businesses didn't exist. It was a million-dollar endeavor for large enterprise companies. So many people told us You can't do it. You're not going to be successful. We just kept hearing that, and we said, we're going to be successful. We're going to break the rules. So we brought email marketing down to the small businesses. You know, we have 600,000 customers now.
When I was just 16 years old, I started my very first business. People were very ignorant of me. It shaped really my DNA. At Nextiva, people gave us one month to live. Today, Nextiva is one of the largest business cloud communication providers nationwide.
Rule-breaking is deeply encoded in the Skype DNA. Skype started with a premise that you can talk to anyone in the world, wherever they are, for as long as you want. And with all of this, the rules will just never be the same. Because entrepreneurs dream, entrepreneurs take risks, but entrepreneurs who create lasting impact do break rules.
The 2014 grand prize winner, the biggest rule breaker of them all is Christina Daves with CasMedics. Woo!
Thank you guys so much. Like I said, I have this really big dream, and obviously other people are seeing that this is really possible. Oh my gosh, the emails that I get are unbelievable. People love it. Well, they just, they just love it. It just, I've just changed the whole healing process because I broke all the rules. You know, the doctors don't care what you look like, and I'm like, let's make you fashionable and fun and have a really positive recovery. And this just exemplifies everything I'm doing. You know, if you have a good idea and if you think it's good and other people think it's good, break the rules. Like, just go for it. You can just change everything. I think it's awesome.
This is a great crowd we're at tonight. A lot of energy, a lot of people, and the who's who of the New York small business rule breakers.
This is awesome. It's a great venue. It's a great crowd. Glad to be here. What a phenomenal event. I love it, and I love that it's the first Rule Breaker. It's the maiden voyage. How do you go about breaking rules? Anything I can. Like right now, I'm breaking rules. See, this is breaking rules. This is how you break the rules. Feeling a poor man's microphone, I tell you what.
