An Unlikely Investment from Sir Richard Branson

Don’t leave a stone unturned. That might be the lesson to learn from the story of Scott and Stacey Ferreira, brother and sister entrepreneurs who answered a tweet from Billionaire Sir Richard Branson.

While Scott was attending the University of Southern California his computer crashed and with it went a spreadsheet that held all of his usernames and passwords. Anybody who uses the Internet for banking, purchasing, social media or most other personalized services knows that it doesn’t take long to amass a lot of usernames and passwords and losing that information results in a lot of time invested in recovering the information.

Scott and Stacey knew that and that launched the idea of mysocialcloud.com, a secure website that allows the person to store this information in the cloud allowing easy and secure access from anywhere.

Stacey, a recent freshman at New York University, took a leave of absence to concentrate her efforts on their business. While taking a break, she did something she rarely has time to do anymore: she checked her twitter feed.

She found a tweet from Sir Richard Branson who was raising money for a charity. For a donation of $2,000, donors could come to Miami for a meeting with him. Scott and Stacey got a $4,000 loan from their parents and flew to Miami and met with him. They met Branson at a cocktail party (although they were too young to drink) and told him about their idea. Branson was interested in their idea and gave the two his contact information and kept in touch with him after returning home.

A short time later, they got a call from a Venture Capitalist who wanted to meet with them and learn more about their business and how far along in the creation process they were. They flew out to Scott and Stacey’s company headquarters and looked at the beta version of mysocialcloud.com and a soon after the visit, they received a joint investment from the venture capital firm in partnership with Branson.

That led to more venture investments and now the company is well on their way to launching their new company.

These young entrepreneurs are proof that opportunities can come from surprising places but those who don’t look in the more unlikely places and take the chance will miss these opportunities. As your business is forming and problems arise, don’t just look where everybody else is looking. It worked for Scott and Stacey and those same types of opportunities are available anybody who looks in the right place.