MUSTANG DAILY | Thursday, May 9, 2013
BY DAVID LIEBIG
arts@mustangdaily.net
RORY ARONSON does a little bit of everything: He bikes, travels and builds. But now he’s branching into something new: a startup aimed at helping people do.
I
t’s a warm spring night in the heart of San Luis Obispo, and cyclists have gathered in ranks to swarm the downtown scene with a carnivalesque circuit of Marsh and Higuera streets. Rory Aronson joins the herd to cheers of his name: “Rory’s here!” As the mob rolls on, flagrantly dressed riders maneuver in to briefly clutch him — as if to ensure the man, clad in a tight-fitting, pink flamingo costume, is no mirage. Like the 5-foot-tall, green freak bike that hoists him high above the crowd, his reputation among these Bike Night revelers is the product of his own hands. Rory is a builder. He always has been — since he was a curious teen enrolled in ceramics, woodshop, metalshop and photography at Encinitas’ “arts-oriented” high school — until now, in the last quarter of an undergraduate career that has produced more art, more machines and more friendships than most do in a lifetime.
THE STUDENT WHO’S
PROPEL THEM
BUILT TO
Three worn-in sofas crowd the open-air porch. Rory reclines in one of them. A woodsy, almost-black glaze of beard frames his face. Each piece of clothing on his body seems plucked from a different decade: black-andwhite striped swoop neck, fluorescent purple hoodie, maroon jeans. “Whenever you do anything, you’re just caught up in your own mind, your own thought processes, especially if you work alone or with one group,” Rory says. “Until you actually start telling people about it, until you start trying to describe something concisely, you really don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’re going with the flow.” The previous night, Rory started telling people about his latest project when he applied for the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s San Luis Obispo HotHouse Summer Accelerator Program. If chosen, Rory and his startup teammates would receive professional counseling, funding and office space to get their concept off the ground. Their concept: a digital platform to make people do. “That is something that I see a big problem with,” Rory says. “People are not engaged. People are not active. People are all talk, no show, no action.” So the mechanical engineering senior and three recent Cal Poly graduates posed a question: How do you get people engaged? Their answer was simple: positive reinforcement. “Perhaps giving them a little bit of a push, with a little bit of incentive, will get people to take action and do cool things,” Rory says. Rory and friends drew blueprints for a digital platform dubbed “Propelem.” Propelem has two main components: a digital marketplace on the web to purchase goods for other people and a mobile app on which they can redeem said purchases after completing certain actions. For example, a corporate manager could incentivise healthy living for employees by pre-purchasing Jamba Juice smoothies that only become available after checking in at the gym. After satisfying the activity requirement, the giftee can present his or her smartphone to the retailer, and
BUILD
see BUILD, pg. 4
BICYCLE BUILDING
One of Aronson’s many passions is immediately evident upon entering his house (top): Aronson is a mastermind when it comes to bike building. His numerous creations dot the property. — Photos By David Jang
CHECK OUT
SPORTS, pg. 10
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