UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Since graduating from Penn State World Campus in 2013, Evon Onusic has worked in product development for a startup in Silicon Valley, created an entrepreneurial-minded home for students and young professionals, and co-founded a successful data-driven marketing company.
Onusic’s startup career path seems logical, in retrospect, but when he was a junior at Penn State majoring in economics, he was just focused on getting good grades in order to graduate and then secure a good job. Passing his Chinese language class was his most immediate challenge, and his immersive approach to solving that problem provides a glimpse into what fueled his success as an entrepreneur.
To best learn Mandarin, Onusic decided he should live in China. Fully committed to learning the language and intrigued by China’s emergence as a world economic power, he thought, “What better way to learn than to fully immerse yourself?” That decision led Onusic through a series of experiences that ended with his accepting a job in Silicon Valley as a product development manager for Zulu Inc., a startup working to use inaudible sound frequencies to populate data on mobile phones.
Onusic’s knowledge of Mandarin and Chinese culture prepared him to travel to Beijing on behalf of Zulu to coordinate with the technology development team behind the startup. Zulu didn’t last as a company, but Onusic made a lot of great connections in Silicon Valley and came away from the experience wanting to enter the vast entrepreneurial ecosystem.
While working in Silicon Valley, Onusic and his friend Eric Simons saw how difficult it was for young entrepreneurs to get their start there and decided to open the Webster House, a home where young entrepreneurs could hang out, rent a bed, and work on their innovations alongside like-minded peers.
“We started teaching basic programming and business development skills to high school grads, college dropouts, and others to help them incubate and grow their ideas,” said Onusic.
At Webster House, Onusic helped create a company called SongHop, which he described as “Tinder, but for music,” matching users with song samples. Onusic didn’t think the idea was very promising on its own, but at a minimum it was an opportunity to further expand his entrepreneurial network. He met Matt Michelsen, an investor who, after six months of courting back and forth, was ready to invest in SongHop — until Onusic stopped him.
The company had flatlined and Onusic didn’t feel comfortable taking Michelsen’s investment. This kind of honesty struck a chord with Michelsen, and so he invited Onusic to join him on an eight-month quest to build out new ideas.