Tracy Ingram found himself on the side of the Appalachian Mountain, next to an overheated bus with a dead hard drive in his computer, trying to create a business plan.
"You plan for everything and you can still can't plan for everything," Ingram said. "It's Navy SEAL training for entrepreneurs and this is the thing — you can't train someone."
Ingram and his five teammates were part of the eight bus loads of people who trekked across the country to compete in the "Navy SEAL for entrepreneurs," otherwise known as the Startup Bus tour. The Florida bus departed from Tampa, with participants spending 72 hours in a hackathon/bootcamp/roadtrip hybrid that led them to New Orleans. They competed again seven other buses representing New York, Washington D.C., California, northeast Ohio and an “advancing black entrepreneurs” bus departing from Harlem.
And the Florida teams came in strong: three of the top six had come from the bus, with Ingram's team placing an unofficial second in the competition.
"Florida is definitely overlooked in terms of tech and the startup community," Rina Bane, Ingram's teammate and software engineer at SourceToad, said. This was the third year Bane participated in the Startup Bus competition. "We have a rich community that's been growing for years and it puts us up as a decent competitor that shouldn't be overlooked."
The team — made up of Bane, Ingram, David Castaneda, Joey DeVilla and Justin Linn — had to go beyond creating a prototype and prove the idea's actual feasibility to judges. Enter Hyve. The idea stemmed from the realization that while there are password protection services, making a secure email address (that can still be fully functioning to the user) is more difficult.
"There are big players in that market like Apple, Google and other places that do this," Ingram said. "But a lot don't allow you to use the email address. You can get an email (to your secure email address), but if you want to reply and maintain privacy long term, they don't allow that."
Hyve, while just in the beginning stages — "there are bananas in your fridge older than this company," Ingram joked — has already had interest from the Department of Defense and others players in the privacy sector.
The team will be looking into securing its IP, evaluating the market and continuing to build the brand for both consumers and a business-to-business approach.
Despite the exhaustion that comes from working on a project at 2 a.m. on Bourbon Street, Ingram and Bane both agreed the experience was invaluable for not only them, but the Tampa Bay startup community at large.
"The network is the big thing and the second thing is the journey," Bane said. "When you're going on it, you're visiting places with a startup community and hubs. You're seeing what it's like compared to your current place and you also try really good food in all the places you go to."
