According to social impact analytics firm Blendoor, 42% of tech company executives analyzed are women or people of color. And while Asian (South, East, and Southeast) men make up 12% of tech executives, Asian women hold less than 4% of those roles. So it goes without saying, Asian female tech entrepreneurs face barriers when it comes to starting and scaling a business. But there is a new generation of entrepreneurs that are tackling the challenges head on and finding success.
One such woman is Victoria Liu, an alum of the University of Florida (UF) who established and founded BYPPOTechnologies (“Byppo”) during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide an online ordering and delivery service that is both affordable and innovative for UF’s students and community members affected by the pandemic.
“The idea for Byppo was hatched during halftime at a University of Florida football game,” said Byppo founder and CEO Victoria Liu. “But it didn’t stop there, we worked extremely hard to turn that idea into a reality. Today, Byppo is a growing startup that is working to make a difference for local restaurants.”
Building Student and Community Connections
Byppo is a food delivery service based in Gainesville, Florida, that is centered around the diverse community and businesses of the local food scene. Byppo’s aim is to help small businesses, customers and staff (who are often college students themselves) get further ahead. Byppo aspires to be the all-inclusive platform of choice for discovering new local eats across the state of Florida and beyond.
“Byppo is in Gainesville Florida currently, but is expanding into other Florida cities,” added Liu. “We also have plans to go national this year, with a big focus on college campuses.”
As Byppo’s founder, Victoria and her team partner with the best local restaurants in town to provide the platform’s users with a seamless food ordering experience. Byppo team members are all food enthusiasts hoping to help small, qualified restaurants grow, and to help its hungry users be happier in both the variety of delivery options available and how those options can better impact their local community.
“Byppo makes it easy, and cost-effective, for local restaurants to manage the delivery of food to their customers,” added Liu. “By making the experience frictionless for both restaurants and customers, we are helping to grow a bigger community around local food.”
As is commonplace with any entrepreneur looking to grow their latest venture, Victoria was forced to be strategic in scaling and pivoting many aspects of her company in order to take it further and grow during the height of last year’s COVID-19 pandemic. According to Victoria, Byppo’s latest innovation manifests in the launch of its latest strategic pivot, BYPPOCampus: an extremely innovative evolution which focuses on the company’s main goal of connecting with the community of the Gainesville campus by delivering food from UF’s available dining services directly to students’ dormitory rooms.
Providing a More Meaningful Campus Experience
BYPPOCampus is just the latest innovation in a long line of food-delivery service platforms that saw a surge in usage during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that there appears to be a light at the end of the pandemic’s proverbial tunnel, Victoria aims to position BYPPOCampus as the go-to food delivery service platform for UF’s students, staff, and community by utilizing UF’s own students as its delivery people.
By utilizing UF’s own students as the platform’s source of deliverers, Byppo’s users can expect to receive faster food deliveries in a safer and more eco-friendly manner while simultaneously bolstering their network connections within the UF community. It will also provide a safer and more reliable source of extra income for UF students who sign up to become Byppo deliverers, who will not even have to leave the universitys’ campus to do so. In this way, Byppo can create more fun ways for UF’s students to connect, in turn providing a more meaningful campus and community-building experience.
According to Victoria, Byppo hopes to expand beyond Florida in the near future, with the goal to eventually become the platform of choice for colleges and universities across the U.S. By investing in innovative technologies such as Byppo, more college campuses and universities can generate ways that encourage students to build safer and more meaningful connections with their peers, colleagues, local businesses, and other members of their communities. BYPPOCampus will launch for UF students this upcoming fall semester.