Campbell Erickson isn’t a typical 17-year-old. Sure, he’s into photography and hanging out with friends, but he’s also a serial entrepreneur who knows a thing or two about launching social impact-driven startups.
Growing up in Austin, Erickson was surrounded by founders. (Even his dad was an entrepreneur.) Somewhere in between passion and gut, Erickson embraced what most people are afraid to accept: the challenge of daring to dream and following through.
“My passion and purpose in life is to do things differently, step into the real world as much as possible, and prove to others and the world that being in high school doesn’t mean you can’t try, and fail, and eventually start a movement,” says Erickson, a WeWork Congress member.
Ever since his sophomore year of high school, he’s started a great deal of movements, beginning with an app he launched while attending a four-week incubator program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
While attending Launch, he co-founded PurchaseMate, an iOS app that gives consumers information about the social, philosophical, financial, and political stances behind food and beverage companies. The idea is that consumers can scan products at the grocery store with the app and learn about these companies while making money. Corporations and grocers can then receive data regarding customers’ outlook on their business and shopping habits.
“Let’s say you buy a bottle of Coke, and want to know who Coca-Cola gives money to, and what its personal corporate expenditures are,” says Erickson. “The social side is that we connect the consumer to the corporation, so they can give them direct feedback on the information they learn about the company. And it provides customer feedback that companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to get direct access to cheaply and quickly.”
PurchaseMate will soon hit Apple’s app store. It will provide updates on information about each product, such as whether GMOs or child labor was involved, he says.
If that’s not social-impact-minded enough, when I spoke to Erickson, he said he needed to drop off a box of 20 disposable cameras at Whole Foods right after the call. He’s involved in a project called A Youth Mind, which empowers kids in third world countries to tell their stories through photography and storytelling. The idea is to equip children with the tools to record their personal lives and share them in their raw form.
Through a partnership between A Youth Mind and Whole Foods, this batch of cameras will be going to a school in Colombia. “Getting the shipment prepared isn’t easy,” says Erickson. “We pack each camera with everything the kids need, and we write introductory letters and a short curriculum.”
Though college isn’t in the cards until fall 2017 (Stanford and Harvard are his top picks), Erickson has exciting news for this fall too: launching a hackathon for Austin’s youth, the first of its kind, with the help of his mentors at Youth Austin Hack. The event will be catered to high school students interested in tech, social good, and social hacking. The difference in the types of ideas generated in a youth hackathon versus one for millennials and older is that entrepreneurs under 18 see the world very differently, says Erickson.
“I see two different types of entrepreneurship and the way they work in a big, clustered world of disrupters,” Erickson says. “There are tech entrepreneurs and social good entrepreneurs. Rarely are they both. But for us, the social and technology aren’t divided.”
Photo credit: Adam Saraceno