Nearly 10 years after Tyler Confrey-Maloney cofounded Undercover Colors while attending North Carolina State University, he’s still at it – with new startups, a new mission and a new home in the San Francisco area.
He’s also attracting attention from entrepreneurial celebrities such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
In an interview, Maloney talks about his journey from the nail polish startup that went viral to Silicon Valley and the lessons he’s learned along the way.
Maloney first ventured to the West Coast for Stanford’s MBA program five years ago "and then met a girl and built a network and decided to stay out in the California sun." But Maloney is still tied to Raleigh, where he attended Broughton High School before N.C. State.
Maloney’s entrepreneurship story starts with Undercover Colors, initially envisioned as a firm developing a nail polish that when dipped into a drink, could change color, alerting its wearer to the presence of a date rape drug.
“I founded Undercover Colors because someone really close to me in college was drugged and assaulted, and as a kid, I wanted to do something about it,” he said. “It was the first time for me to really connect my education to the real world … apply it to solve problems.”
The story of that mission went viral, appearing in news outlets and publications across the country. The firm attracted nearly $9 million in investments – including dollars from “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban.
“I think we thought that we could will a technology into existence by sheer effort,” Maloney said. “It turns out you can’t just will science.”
His team spent years on the idea, securing patents. Eventually, they developed a technology – “but ultimately couldn’t get that technology to work in the form factor of a nail polish.”
Maloney, now 32, remembers being 22 years old and sleeping in the lab, trying to will the product to happen – what he describes now as a real lesson in "humility."
Maloney left Undercover Colors in 2017. Soon after his departure, the company released what it called a “SipChip," a device on a keychain that could detect drugs in drinks. But the idea didn’t take off the way the nail polish concept had. Today, the product is no longer for sale on Amazon.
Maloney took the lessons he learned while at Undercover Colors with him to California.
“I learned that I was in love with that process, taking an idea out of your head, trying to create something that doesn’t exist,” he said. “I found out I loved entrepreneurship. I didn’t even know what entrepreneurship was when I founded Undercover Colors.”
Maloney knew he wanted to be around technology and innovation. He launched more companies, such as Faves in 2020, described as Pinterest for Gen Z. “We allow you to permanently save & organize all your favorite videos from across the internet,” Maloney wrote on his LinkedIn page.
In 2021, he founded TeachMe.To, which Maloney credits to watching people kiteboarding while on walks by the water with his golden retriever
“Every time I would go down there I would say to myself, this is something I want to learn,” he said. But when he’d Google kiteboarding lessons, he’d get five or six “crappy websites” where you call to book lessons – but no pricing or reviews were available. He eventually realized he “would have bought a thousand dollars of lessons months ago if there really was a modern e-commerce experience here.”
So having figured out a possible opportunity, he decided to dabble, putting in an investment to hire a marketer and an engineer to see if the idea had steam. They built a website – and it started to take off.
Unlike Undercover Colors, which started with an idea, TeachMe.To started with a product – one step at a time. Maloney promoted his marketer into a CEO and the firm started to find traction – and dollars.
Through his Stanford network, he met Altman, who wound up investing.
“He’s just an amazing entrepreneur,” Maloney said. “What I like about Sam is he’s a very down-to-earth guy.”
Maloney says he’s lucky to have had mentors like Altman, who leads the company behind ChatGPT. And he’s starting to pay it back, advising a handful of entrepreneurs and hosting a monthly phone call with some people at N.C. State.
“I had to learn a lot of things the hard way, by trial and error,” he said.
Now it’s time to pay it forward.