This week’s 1 Million Cups at the Kauffman Foundation featured pitches from Acre Designs, a “smart home” builder, and LiveOn, a platform to share digital memories in the future.
This week’s panel of guest inquisitors consisted of Kansas City Startup Village co-founder Matthew Marcus, Clayton Reeves of Kansas City Power & Light and Bob Stewart of Now Casting.
Acre Designs founder Andrew Dickson, an interior architect and industrial designer by trade, began his pitch by stating that “the American Dream is over,” because so many people find it too expensive to purchase their own home.
“We are reinventing the home and reigniting the dream,” Dickson said.
Acre Designs’ solution is to drastically reduce the cost of building and maintaining a modern home by making it smaller and outstandingly energy efficient. Although it would plug into the existing power grid, Dickson said, a $200,000, 1,600-square-foot Acre Designs home built with solar panels and other energy-saving features would effectively have no utility bills. He called the result a “net zero home.”
Dickson’s vision of homebuilding and homeownership is more holistic and accessible to the masses, he said, with an Acre Designs home using a “panelized system” of construction rather than a traditional pre-fabricated system. “It makes more sense to use a commodity (panels) than to use a custom process,” he said.
Acre Designs is initially aiming its business at “empty nesters,” Dickson said, who are “looking to downsize and do a little something different.” He plans to build four or five homes in the next year, including one in Startup Village.
LiveOn at 1 Million Cups
Next up was LiveOn CEO Laura Steward, whose pitch centered on offering online consumers the ability to record, store and curate video time capsules for future generations. The service also allows current “digital assets” to be shared in the moment, including via Facebook and other social media outlets.
Steward said that she purchased the enabling technology for LiveOn after it was successfully introduced at the 2012 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, where it received a “top-five designation.”
LiveOn’s core demographic is women 25 and older, including the 30 million women who have children and are on Facebook, Steward said, although there are many other potential users.
“There are people who are faced with their own mortality,” she said, “and they find this very comforting.”
