Meet Serial Entrepreneur My Anh Phan (BBA, ’28)—A Triple Threat

Zicklin undergraduate My Anh Phan (BBA, ’28) started out as an artist but caught the business bug early.

Zicklin undergraduate My Anh Phan (left) won two startup competitions in the same day.

At Francis Lewis High School in Queens, My Anh (pronounced “Mayan”) studied fine arts, exhibited her paintings in galleries, and interned at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also founded a club called Art For Awareness, which sold club members’ artwork on stickers, phone charms, keychains, bracelets, and the like, to raise money for charities.

After Art For Awareness made over $1,000 in a single day—“it was fun and I felt creative”—My Anh decided to study business in college, following in the footsteps of her sister Kieu Anh (Zoey) Phan to Baruch and the Zicklin School of Business. In her freshman year, she co-founded Bearcat Thrift, a student-run marketplace peddling new and vintage apparel alongside handcrafted items like soaps and candles supporting other student entrepreneurs on campus. She also planted the seeds for her current venture, Popped Up!, which recently won all three startup competitions across CUNY.

Popped Up! is an app that offers live, crowdsourced updates on pop-ups in New York City. What’s a pop-up? “It’s a temporary marketing event meant to create brand awareness and loyalty and showcase a new product,” replies My Anh (who’s clearly answered this question before). She got the idea after attending a pop-up for a new hot sauce: “It was really fun and we got free ramen, so I started following pop-up accounts on social media and became an avid pop-up goer. Then I was like, ‘Why is there no app?’”

My Anh wanted a centralized place with useful information on pop-ups across the city that would include real-time updates (How long is the line? Have they run out of free samples?). When she couldn’t find one, like founders everywhere, she created it herself, learning basic coding and finding a developer at another CUNY school.

This past May, Popped Up! won two startup competitions in a single day: the CUNY-wide Baruch CEO Pitch Competition, where My Anh and her team took home $5,000, and the CUNY Clash Ideas Competition, where they snagged $10,000. A few days later, they won $15,000 in the women and tech category at the Zahn Innovation Center Venture Incubator and Competition at City College.

Reflecting on her success, My Anh says, “I couldn’t have done it without the Field Center”—the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship—“and [Executive Director] Dr. Marlene Leekang. My first stop on campus is always the Field Center, literally. Bearcat Thrift was incubated there. Marlene has been a mentor and I’m very grateful there’s a space like this on campus.”

A finance major, My Anh adds that her favorite professor at the Zicklin School so far is Jonathan Gersch (Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics), who teaches introductory statistics (STA 2000).

“I always thought he was really cool,” she says. “He took the time to explain things and made every class interactive. I always sat in the front row. He was really supportive of my first startup, Bearcat Thrift. A very kind professor who was always interested in what I was doing.”

Categories: Alumni News, Current_Students, Faculty, News, Student News