Nationality American Ethnicity Chinese American | Name Steve Sue | |
Citizenship United States of America Education BA Design UCLA, JD UC Berkeley School of Law Occupation Home builder
Designer
Entrepreneur Organization Bedrock Development, Inc.
StoryManager, Inc.
Lemonade Alley
BizGym Foundation
SaaS Ventures | ||
Steve Sue is a business owner and app developer most well known for his work on organizations such as Lemonade Alley and BizGym.com. He got his start in business as a home builder and designer for his company Bedrock Development, Inc. in Hawaii, and moved on to do development and design work for mega-resorts in the Las Vegas area. He created an application called BizGym.com which he used to host a charity called Lemonade Alley. Steve and his organizations have received multiple awards and recognitions. Bedrock Development, Inc. was named the sixth fastest-growing company in the San Francisco Bay Area by the SF Business Times, and BizGym Foundations and Lemonade Alley won Steve an award for Hawaii-based charities from BBB Hawaii.
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Career
Steve's career began as a home builder and then later he interviewed potential home builders for his business. He worked with casino developer Bill Bardsley, who helped Steve improve. He was also working on building theme parks and other structures in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. He was hired by Autodesk to create a software program called Impressions which converts AutoCAD drawings to his drawing style. Steve went on to make a website called BizGym.com. In 2012, Steve created a partnership between BizGyms and the Hong Kong-based business CyberPort to create a Chinese language online entrepreneur toolset. Steve is currently a mentor for the Hawaii accelerator Blue Startups.
In 2011, Steve launched a kid-oriented challenge called Lemonade Alley. According to Steve, the challenge was created in order to improve children's life skills. Lemonade Alley got its start due to the BizGym website being used in schools such as ʻIolani School. This drew the interest of Capitol One Bank, which gave a $60,000 grant to Steve in order for him to manage Lemonade Alley. He then created BizGym Foundation as a nonprofit foundation in order for them to be able to take the money. The event was hosted for a group of 25 groups of kids from grades K-12 to create lemonade stands for the day and learn how to make recipes from chefs. The charities were each selected by a team that participated in the event and included the Ronald McDonald House of Hawaii, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Make a Wish Hawaii and more. In 2014, the organization raised more than $15,000 for local Hawaiian charities.
Recognition and success
In its sixth year of operation, Steve's home building business Bedrock Development, Inc. was named the sixth fastest-growing company in the San Francisco Bay Area by the SF Business Times. At the 2014 BBB Hawaii Torch awards show in Honolulu, Steve Sue was awarded the BBB Hawaii's Public Charity award for his work on the Lemonade Alley event as well as his work on BizGymsFoundation. The Lemonade Alley event was praised by blogger Chelsea Seki, who found both the event and its cause to be admirable. A. Kam Napier (an editor for Pacific Business News) compared Lemonade Alley to the television shows "Shark Tank" and "The Apprentice" (both TV shows about people being judged for their business acumen by celebrities and business people), except with kids being the participants. Two brothers who participated in a Lemonade Alley event won an award for the lemonade that they made from the Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa. Their lemonade was then later sold at the resort, with a portion of the sales going to the Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children. Lemonade Alley was featured on the cover of the magazine "Midweek Oahu", which covered Steve Sue, BizGym Foundation, and Lemonade Alley. Parents and children who attended the event felt that it was a worthwhile event, and that the skills that the children learned from it were valuable. In an article detailing the highlights of West Oahu, Midweek staff listed Lemonade Alley and its lemonade. BizGym Foundation was one of three finalists (alongside Business Law Corps and the United Cerebral Palsy Association) at a Nonprofit Business Plan Competition held by the Hogan Entrepreneurs program and the American Savings Bank. BizGym Foundation and the other two finalists were awarded a total of $1,000 each.