After spinal injury, alumnus continues startup business

Three years ago, the future could not have looked brighter for alumnus Anthony Zhang.

The 22-year-old entrepreneur’s startup EnvoyNow, a peer-to-peer delivery service app established at USC in 2014, had been growing ever since the ABC series Shark Tank’s executive producer Mark Burnett made a deal with Zhang — $100,000 for 10 percent of his company — valuing EnvoyNow at $1 million.

EnvoyNow then expanded to other college campuses across the nation such as the University of Michigan, and his team was flooded with weekly emails from students at other campuses who expressed interest in joining the company.

But all of that changed when Zhang and his girlfriend, McKenna Weinstein, a senior majoring in business administration, attended a Las Vegas pool party in April 2016. When Zhang dove into the pool, he overestimated its depth and banged his head on the bottom, leaving his body in shock.

“Honestly, it was just an accident,” Zhang said. “I’ve been a swimmer my whole life, and it was so much shock at the moment that I don’t even have the next three or four days down.”

Zhang was rushed to the ICU, and after several surgeries, he found that the accident shattered his neck and spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed in all four limbs.

After six weeks in the ICU, Zhang was transferred to Craig Hospital in Denver, which specializes in spinal cord injuries. According to Zhang, Weinstein also took a year off at USC to stay by Zhang’s side as he spent the next months in rehabilitation, intensive physical therapy and “basically learning to get back from [the incident].”

“It was nine hours of therapy a day — the full nine hours,” Zhang said. “I was exhausted every single day, I was trying to get better, so I wasn’t thinking about EnvoyNow and just trusted that the rest of my team would run it.”

Through rehab, Zhang’s body slowly recovered; he can use his arms now and is still working to regain more mobility in his limbs from physical therapy.

Months after the accident, Zhang received notice from his colleagues that they wanted to leave EnvoyNow. He learned that during his time in rehab, the company was not doing as well as he had hoped.

“It was definitely a pretty bad point in my life,” Zhang said. “I had my physical therapy going, and people I trusted were pretty much giving up on our dream. All I wanted to do was to be back at the office, helping them out, doing it together, but I couldn’t.”

With the help of Chief Operating Officer Grant Shuler, a senior at the University of South Carolina, and his remaining team members, Zhang pulled the company together into a “core team” to ensure each aspect of the business was still running throughout last fall, all while undergoing hours of therapy daily.

Zhang later began to work with several investment groups that were interested in acquiring EnvoyNow, and this January, EnvoyNow was officially acquired by JoyRun, another delivery platform.

“JoyRun’s purely college-focused, so it was an easy transition,” Shuler said. “In the first month or so, [we were] transitioning [our] team and then combining them together so that we could do a combined force across college campuses.”

Months later, Zhang already began building his next startup, Know Your VC. Compared to EnvoyNow, Know Your VC is more wide-reaching, Zhang said, applying to anyone who wants to research investors for their business.

As a response to the sexual harassment allegations that circulated among Silicon Valley’s biggest investors over the summer, Zhang wanted to create an outlet in which people can anonymously exchange information about certain investors.

“Having a platform where people can share these experiences and be safe without them completely blowing up in the news or without bottling them up … I feel like that is something worthy of building,” Zhang said.

In the future, Zhang plans on growing Know Your VC and continuing to pursue his goals as an entrepreneur.

“People have great ideas [for a company], but they are too afraid to do it, [and] it’s easy to get caught up in excuses,” Zhang said. “But that indecision, that hesitation … You don’t know when something might just completely change your life, so I would just take it and do it.”