Three Brown Alums awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 spot

Three recent Brown alums were included in the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Hip-hop educational platform creator and CEO Austin Martin ’17, health-conscious hard seltzer company co-founder and CEO Nico Enriquez ’16 and multimedia journalist Emily Kassie ’14  were all honored for their entrepreneurial work in their respective fields.

Martin, Enriquez and Kassie all said that Brown influenced their careers in various ways, from the mentorship of University faculty to the help and inspiration of their peers. “We were encouraged to create our own path and I think that was essential in my development,” Kassie said. All three alumni expressed gratitude for being honored by Forbes, while maintaining a focus on not remaining satisfied and continuing their work.

Learning reading through rap

Martin, founder of the online educational platform Rhymes with Reason, seeks to help underrepresented and underperforming students learn reading through his service, which pairs the lyrics of popular rap songs with reading comprehension questions. The 24-year-old got the idea for the platform when he found that 67 of the top 100 SAT words appear in well-known hip-hop songs. Rhymes with Reason is currently used by about 100 schools so far. Martin’s company also partnered with Chance the Rapper’s charity SocialWorks to give out 1,000 tickets to local Chicago students so that they could attend one of the rapper’s concerts.

Martin started creating his company during his first year at Brown as part of the Swearer Center’s Social Innovation Fellowship. After becoming interested in social entrepreneurship during his first year, he built Rhyme with Reason’s digital platform from the ground up with little development expertise. He often solicited the help of other Brown students who were more adept at coding than he was. Martin also sought feedback and advice from schoolteachers in the field in Providence and other areas.

“Being within proximity to other people with skill sets I didn’t have at Brown was a huge part of how I was able to make this happen,” Martin reflected.

Growing up, Martin said he was not a very serious academic student. Until high school, he had confidence issues which held him back academically. But, Martin had a passion for hip-hop. “I studied hip-hop music how I probably should have been studying school,” he said. Martin’s interest in the genre was partially motivated by how “people who looked like me ... could use language in such a genius capacity,” Martin said. Now, one of Rhymes with Reason’s central goals is addressing low confidence as a fundamental issue holding many kids back in academics. The company looks “to build confidence within students by highlighting the brilliance in what they already know,” according to Rhyme with Reason’s mission statement. “Confidence-building is really the engine behind everything ... Students can transform their lives,” Martin said.

From beach to brewery

Enriquez, the 26-year-old CEO of the hard seltzer company Willie’s Superbrew, prioritizes brewing drinks with natural ingredients and responsibly labeling nutrition facts. After beginning in summer 2015, Willie’s Superbrew is now sold in hundreds of stores across the Northeast.

“We want to be the largest craft beer seller in the Northeast in the next three years, while maintaining a good culture, ” Enriquez said.

Enriquez was 12 years old when he first met the eponymous Willie playing beach volleyball in Cape Cod. Willie was brewing ginger-lemon kombucha in his kitchen, and “for years I was like, ‘this is insane, we should sell this!’” Enriquez said. But time passed, and Enriquez spent his teenage years cultivating a new interest in synthetic biology.

After becoming a cognitive neuroscience concentrator at Brown, Enriquez was set to begin his junior year in a research position at the University, but had a “crisis,” he said. “I loved neuroscience … (but) I still realized the lab life wasn’t for me.” Enriquez eventually reconnected with Willie about the potential of producing ginger beer for sale, then spent summer 2015 selling the drink at local farmers’ markets and a few stores in Cape Cod.

Enriquez then partnered with Max Easton ’16, one of his best friends at Brown, to form a company, and spent his senior year taking most of his classes S/NC to focus on growing Willie’s Superbrew. A subsequent spell at the highly selective Chobani Incubator connected Willie’s with resources that allowed Enriquez and Easton to refine their product and pivot from brewing ginger beer to brewing hard seltzer.

Documenting injustice

At 27, Kassie is director of visual media at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice issues in the United States. Her work mainly focuses on documenting corruption and human rights struggles across the world. Her projects include the 2015 Student Academy Award-winning documentary “I Married My Family’s Killer,” which details the stories of Hutu and Tutsi couples who intermarried after the Rwandan genocide; the Highline investigative series “The 21st Century Gold Rush,” which covers how companies have profited from international refugee crises and a New York Times documentary on sexual abuse in U.S. immigration detention.

Kassie began making documentaries when she was only 13, after viewing a documentary about the Rwandan genocide in her middle school social issues class. “I was so moved by the power of that storytelling, and it pushed me to want to understand more about what was going on in the world and this search for justice,” Kassie said. “I felt that film has this power to move people and spur action,” she added.

But Kassie didn’t always know she would become a documentary filmmaker. At Brown she initially focused on international relations and political science. But during her first year, Kassie convinced a playwriting professor who was organizing a student trip to Rwanda to let her come along, before eventually creating her own concentration in “politics, film and journalism.”

After graduating from Brown, Kassie got a job at the Huffington Post. “I was really lucky in that it was a time of creation,” Kassie said. She got to explore and experiment with multimedia journalism, eventually being promoted to become the founding creative director of Highline, the Post’s investigative magazine. Since then, Kassie has also crafted multimedia stories for news organizations like the New York Times, NBC and the Washington Post.

Kassie was “truly honored” to be included in Forbes’ 30 Under 30. “But at the end of the day … I’m a behind-the-camera person,” Kassie said.  “I’m more interested in lifting the voices of others (over lifting) my own … (so) back to the grind.”