“Building the Future”

For Tina Anne Sebastian, Co-Founder of Quacoon, anticipating unexpected hurdles and handling these in a calm but responsive manner without giving up is key to launching and building a startup, for her resilience and determination are two of the defining characteristics that have helped her not only on the entrepreneurial journey but in life in general.

“I believe that the work I do is on behalf of all women who are expected to play traditional roles and denied an opportunity to define their life path or follow their dream career, whether it be in the form of an entrepreneur or as a job they like,” she explains. “There is a lot of talent being wasted due to these conventional gender norms that often restrict women from the workforce.” This is especially relevant considering that most people who left employment during the pandemic to care for their children at home were women. Taking on the role of a woman founder under these circumstances alone, especially without a safety net or a support system, should inspire other women to follow suit.

Tina is also the founder of Card-Boss, which uses AI to grade sports cards online, currently a patent-pending invention. She is the editor at The Melting Potter a global media site focused on sustainable, inclusive, and ethical business, technology, investing, lifestyle, environmental issues, and entrepreneurship. She is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and holds certifications in quantum computing and cybersecurity from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “In the past year, I co-authored a paper "Implementing evidence-based instruments to improve the measurement of frailty levels among home-delivered meal clients" along with Dr.Lisa Juckett, Professor at OSU and the Meal-On-Wheels non-profit based on an analytics project completed for them,” she adds.

At Quacoon, Tina, along with co-founder Barbara Dunn—who brings significant experience in supply chain management—have ensured that they have an equal number of women team members, thus ensuring equal opportunities. Quacoon was born out of the disruption in essential item supply chains, such as food and toilet paper, witnessed and experienced during the pandemic. This was not just a minor inconvenience but a major event that led to increased hunger and poverty worldwide, while excess food was rotting and being discarded in other parts of the world.

In light of these shocks, companies need to maximize their operational resilience for future unexpected disruptions. The only viable solution is to break down existing silos, enable cross-company collaboration, increase end-to-end visibility, and ensure ready access to alternate options. To be truly effective, this collaboration needs to happen in a voluntary, self-organizing manner, which Quacoon hopes to achieve with its social platform. Some of the features of this proposed solution include crowdsourced product shortage information, real-time demand and supply planning ecosystem, end-to-end traceability and analytics, alerts, and news from the ecosystem for timely decisions and sharing of trucks, warehouses, and other resources. A significant feature is the ability to integrate with existing systems.

The company’s pilot client, a grocery chain located in Columbus, Ohio, has assisted Quacoon to realize its full potential. “While we are still working on the project with them, our initial phases of implementation have shown promising responses from the consumers,” she says. “We are working on building a resilient supply chain that will enable them to serve their customers better and expand their business.”

For the days to come, Quacoon aims at becoming a household name, being used by every single company and individual involving supply chains. It will be the global de-facto platform for building and maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable supply chains in an easy, affordable manner in ten years. “We plan to expand to be a full-fledged platform that anyone can sign up and intuitively use to achieve the best possible results without complicated jargon or training or manuals. We are just getting started and the future is certainly bright and fun,” says Tina. IE