1. How is funding received from grants different from funding received through equity placements? 2. Why do you suppose that Ben and Harrison decided not to attempt to borrow the capital they needed for start-up? 3. What is your opinion of Ben and Harrison's using the list of donors engraved on the wall of the College of Business to find investors? 4. Why did Ben and Harrison choose to follow a different route to funding than the common reliance on friends, family and fools? Focus on Small Business: Bungiia Pickup Truck on Demand Quick-where will the next "big thing" tech business be started? What if we had asked you that in 2014? What would your answer have been? Most likely, you would have answered Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas, or maybe even Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Shanghai, China. You certainly would not have picked a small town in the 35th most populous state in the nation. Well, you would have been wrong. Did you even consider that the next-big-thing business got its start in Kansas? It did; and not in Wichita, home of Learjet; Olathe, home of Garmin GPS systems; or Lawrence, home of Kansas University. Nope, the next big thing got its start in Manhattan, Kansas, at Kansas State University (K-State), home of the Kansas Wildcats Big 12 Conference basketball team. Still not sold on Manhattan, Kansas, the "Little Apple"? I'll give you a quick rundown. Manhattan, Kansas, is a city of about 55,000 people (a fifth of which are students at K-State) located in the northeastern corner of the state. The city was founded in 1855 by settlers sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Because of its relatively remote location from Missouri (120 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri, and 90 miles south of the Nebraska state line) and its proximity to Fort Riley (only 8 miles away) the town was spared the violence of the Civil War. Kansas State University was founded there in 1863 as a land-grant college and was the first institution of higher learning in the state. Today K-State is one of the top research universities in the nation.1 So maybe it should be no surprise that in 2014, a K-State marketing student had a flash of inspiration that has led to one of the recent entrepreneurial successes. As Ben Jackson told Matt DeCoursey and Matt Watson on their podcast in 2017, the idea came from Ben's experience of being leaned on by friends to help them with moving some bulky furniture. After spending a full day helping four college friends by donating his black 1999 Ford Ranger pickup truck and his time, Ben found himself lying awake that evening feeling somewhat put upon. "I'd like to consider myself a nice guy," he said, but went on to say that doing these tasks for free left him tired, sore, and feeling put-upon. The next day as class began he told his story to a casual friend, Harrison Proffitt (his real name; we couldn't make this up). Harrison considered what Ben had told him, and then leaned across the aisle and said, "Let's start a business." When Ben and Harrison walked out of class that day, the idea that would become Bungii.com had been conceived. The idea? As Ben said in the podcast, 4 "We've been compared to popular ride-sharing apps.... But instead of Page 506 moving people, we move stuff." Now, the main problem was that neither of them had the money nor the technical skills necessary to turn this idea into a real business. So they began to develop a business plan with the idea of raising capital. They entered their business plan in the K-State Launch Competition, where they took first place with an award of $5,000 in the fall of 2015. With this infusion of capital, the partners began trying to develop an app on which the business would run. Their first effort was to try to write an app themselves. Once they realized the scope of knowledge and skills needed for this task, they decided to turn to acquaintances who already had the necessary skills. This, however, also proved to be unworkable, so next they turned to a programming company located in India. After about six months of dealing with the Indian shop, they realized that the business could not be bootstrapped, given their own resources. They would simply have to raise enough capital to pay for the development. Again, Ben had a serendipitous moment. As he walked from class during his final semester at K-State, he noticed that the entryway of the College of Business building had engraved marble plaques. On these plaques were the names of folks who had donated $250,000 or more to the college. He quickly photographed the names with his smartphone. For the next several days, Ben and Harrison found contact information on the Internet and then asked the donors for appointments, stressing the K-State connection. They succeeded in raising about $500,000, and Bungii was finally on its way. In the fall of 2016 the business relocated to Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, and the app was made live. Success was not instantaneous, but succeed they did through a feet-on-the-ground marketing effort made mostly to furniture companies that did not have their own delivery trucks. Of course, financing for Bungii.com does not end here. With success and the desire for growth comes ever more demand for capital. Ben and Harrison received another grant, this time in the amount of $50,000 from the LaunchKC competition of the Economic Development Corp. of Kansas City.5 But even this was not enough. So in the winter of 2017 they decided on a Series A round of funding to qualified investors. In January 2018 the partners announced that they had not only met their goal of $2 million in equity funding, but that they had surpassed it by more than 50 percent, having closed the funding with more than $3 million.6