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![“When I came into high school, I was ready to be a follower. But DECA was a game changer for me. It helped me overcome my fear of public speaking, and it's played such a major role in who I've become today. To be able to successfully lead a chapter of 150 students, an officer team and be one of the upperclassmen I once really admired is something I'm [really] proud of,” Anvitha Tummala ('21) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-25-at-9.50.05-AM-900x594.png)
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![“[Volleyball has] taught me how to fall correctly, and another thing it taught is that you don’t have to be the best at something to be good at it. If you just hit the ball in a smart way, then it still scores points and you’re good at it. You could be a background player and still make a much bigger impact on the team than you would think,” Anya Gert (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AnnaGert_JinTuan_HoHPhotoEdited-600x900.jpeg)
![“I'm not nearly there yet, but [my confidence has] definitely been getting better since I was pretty shy and timid coming into Harker my freshman year. I know that there's a lot of people that are really confident in what they do, and I really admire them. Everyone's so driven and that has really pushed me to kind of try to find my own place in high school and be more confident,” Alyssa Huang (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AlyssaHuang_EmilyChen_HoHPhoto-900x749.jpeg)
Liftee partners with Night on the Town Gala to provide safe rides for the event
Courtesy of Liftee
Liftee hopes to revolutionize kids transportation by providing personalized services for each customer. The company will sponsor rides for attendees of the annual Harker Gala.
Ritu Narayan, Harker parent and co-founder of the company Liftee, has partnered with this year’s annual Night on the Town Harker Gala event to help provide safe rides to the event for both kids and adults since guests are not allowed to drive themselves to the event.
After working in the technology industry for more than a decade and facing the daily struggles of a working parent trying to balance work with pick-ups and drop-offs, Narayan decided to bring together her passion and her problem to create Liftee. Liftee is a company focused on providing highly-trusted rides for kids and giving needed services for busy parents.
“It was always a challenge for me to find very high trustworthy resources when I needed them and how I needed them,” Narayan said. “I wanted to create a marketplace with very high trustworthy services for busy parents, especially working women who end up dropping out of their career or scaling back because they don’t have these kind of resources.”
Narayan went back to Stanford Business School in 2013 and immediately started talking to a lot of parents, interviewing them, formulating the idea and testing out real rides.
Liftee only launched into the public domain early this year and is already doing over 100 rides per week and is rapidly growing into a well-known company.
One of the main things that differentiates Liftee from its other competitors is their mission of “community helping community.”
“Our Lifteers are not just the drivers on the road; they are people in the community who believe in a mission and come together to actually solve this problem with us,” Narayan said.
Liftee not only takes pride in its unique mission but also in the motivations of each of its staff members and strong backgrounds of each employee.
“Most of them have amazing backgrounds like doctor or police officer,” she said.
Liftee will be partnering with the Harker Night on the Town Gala because of their similar missions; both focus on a child’s development and future.
“This was such a perfect opportunity because anyway the parking was a big issue at the event and organizers were wondering how they could just drop of their kids,” she said. “So we just came forward and said we would like to partner and provide rides for the parents so they can have that experience with us.”
According to Narayan, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Almost half of the attendees of the event have chosen to ride with Liftee. People have even called after Liftee closed booking for the event, asking for a ride.
The company has also offered special packages in light of this event and will be giving 20 percent of their profits back to Harker.
Narayan mainly advises aspiring young entrepreneurs to stay passionate about the problem they hope to solve and experience it themselves.
Sharanya Balaji (12) is the Editor-In-Chief for Harker Aquila and has been on staff for the past three years. Additionally, during her freshman year she...