Sunstone community fund newsletter

Welcome to the new Sunstone Community Fund Newsletter.

We will be sending this communication out once every quarter to keep you and your fellow donors up to date on the Community Fund’s activities, new partners and other important information. Of course, you can always get more at the fund’s website, sunstonecommunity.org, or by getting in touch with Jayro Sandoval at Jayro.Sandoval@Sunstoneinvestment.com.

In This Issue

1. A good time to donate

2. A great way we help

3. Upcoming events

As we near the end of 2023, thoughts turn to taxes – and ways to make better use of your money. Donations to the Sunstone Community Fund – a donor-advised fund -- are completely tax-deductible, helping your bottom line while helping educate young entrepreneurs.

Tax Advantages

· When you contribute cash, securities, or other assets to a DAF, you can typically take an immediate tax deduction for the full fair market value of your donation in the year you make it, even if recommendations for the distributions to charities are made in future years.

· If you donate long-term appreciated securities like stocks or mutual funds you can usually avoid paying capital gains taxes on the appreciation.

· Assets donated to a DAF are removed from your estate, potentially reducing your estate tax liability.

· For cash donations you can usually deduct up to 60% of your adjusted gross income; donations of appreciated securities or other assets have a limit of 30% -- and contributions that exceed the limit can often be carried forward and deducted in up to five subsequent years.

An Educational Success Story

It is called the Sunstone Economic Development Challenge @ USC Price, and it is now in its second year. It is a true win-win effort, with graduate students from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy getting real world experience creating economic development plans, and partner cities getting a fresh look at ways to use the startup ecosystem as an economic development tool.

This year, the Sunstone Community Fund will donate $32,500 to the program, paying for everything from experts to host mentor forums to a prize next spring for the best plan and presentation. Student teams are currently forming proposal plans, and will work with municipal leaders from Culver City, Lomita, Pasadena, San Bernardino and Torrance.

Last year, new economic development proposals were provided to El Segundo, Garden Grove, Irvine and Long Beach. The team of students helping Garden Grove with a plan to rebuild the city’s hospitality industry post-pandemic took home the $5,000 prize.

What’s Coming Up

With your help, we plan to continue growing our impact nationwide. Here are a few upcoming activities.

Nov. 28 –

Giving Tuesday #GivingTuesday

- This national event is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and encourages people to give thanks for and donate to charitable causes helping others – including the Sunstone Community Fund. We urge you to consider supporting the Community Fund’s efforts to educate new entrepreneurs and promote economic development through job creation.

Dec. 1 --

TiEcon SoCal 2023 TiEconSoCal.com.

- This annual event brings together investors, founders and supporters for educational talks and pitches.

Your donation supports entrepreneurship and the future of the American Economy. 

Donate Now!

Be A Sunstone!

Tell your friends and colleagues about The Sunstone Community Fund Newsletter and the insights it provides. To receive a copy each week, sign up at the link.

About Sunstone Community Fund 

The Sunstone Community Fund is a key component of the Sunstone Management vision to advance public benefit programs with support of inclusive and vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems through grants, sponsorships and more. SCF is a Donor Advised Fund managed by the National Philanthropic Trust. A DAF allows donations to be tax-deductible, with distributions directed to meet the fund’s goals. 

Website | LinkedIn 

Note: Sunstone Community Fund is a donor advised charitable fund (“DAF”) sponsored by Sunstone Management, Inc. Neither Sunstone Management, nor any of its affiliates, manage the assets of the Fund or receive a fee for being a sponsor. National Philanthropic Trust serves as the manager of the DAF and charges a 3% processing fee for your donation and receives administrative fees for its services which are paid from Fund assets. Donors are advised to consult with their financial and tax advisors to understand how DAF contributions may impact their financial and tax circumstances. Sunstone and its employees are prohibited from making investment recommendations for your donations

Welcome to the new Sunstone Community Fund Newsletter.

We will be sending this communication out once every quarter to keep you and your fellow donors up to date on the Community Fund’s activities, new partners and other important information. Of course, you can always get more at the fund’s website, sunstonecommunity.org, or by getting in touch with Jayro Sandoval at Jayro.Sandoval@Sunstoneinvestment.com.

In This Issue

1. A vision for the future

2. Community Fund activities

3. Upcoming events

Since this is our first newsletter, we thought it might be helpful to explain a bit about the Community Fund. Let’s start with our vision – the vision you have joined.

What We Do

The Sunstone Community Fund is committed to catalyzing partnerships that create economic opportunities for startup founders and communities throughout the United States.

We support a network of universities, nonprofit organizations and public-private partnerships including accelerators to develop entrepreneurship programs, early-stage tech accelerators and advance local economic development.

Where Donations Go

The Sunstone Community Fund is young – it was started just last year. Yet we have already sponsored several university entrepreneurship contests with prize money and made several grants to grow and support incubators and early-stage tech accelerators. 

As the new school year begins, the California State University system is featuring the Sunstone CSU Startup Launch Competition, a contest for entrepreneurs from each of the 23 campuses. The event launched last spring, fueled by a $1 million, five-year commitment from the Community Fund. Teams already are forming for a year of work on their businesses, prepping for the Spring 2024 competition.

We work with more than the CSU. At the end of August, we sponsored the Pitch. Launch. Grow. Pitch competition put on by the University Lab Partners at University of California, Irvine. The top company in Life Science and Medical Technology each won a $10,000 check from SCF.

What’s Coming Up

With your help, we plan to continue growing our impact nationwide. Here are a few upcoming activities.

Sept. 6 -- 

Master Minds Startup Workshop #65 www.ocstartupcouncil.org/masterminds- at the Sunstone Stage.

- This workshop is a technology startup accelerator coaching community service aimed at helping entrepreneurs and investors get together, share expertise, and make connections to make the startup ecosystem stronger.

Sept. 28 -- 

Accelerate Long Beach - Economic Forum lbep.org/accelerate/

- The event will include an economic update, forecast, and report on trends in consumer spending, housing, international trade, employment and other economic factors. 

Oct. 5 -- 

Unexpected Connections unexpectedconnectionsevent.com/ 

- brings together the highest-level creative minds across diverse fields including art, design, technology, business, and food. Intimate conversations will drive new perspectives over a series of one-on-one conversations. These connections will serve as the catalyst for ideas that will propel creative culture to new heights.

Nov. 3 -- 

CSU Demo Day www.csulb.edu/institute-for-innovation-entrepreneurship/csu- demo-day

- This event allows the CSU community to connect with venture capitalists and angel investors all in one place. 

Your donation supports entrepreneurship and the future of the American Economy. Donate Now!

Be A Sunstone!

Tell your friends and colleagues about The Sunstone Community Fund Newsletter and the insights it provides. To receive a copy each week, sign up at the link.

About Sunstone Community Fund 

The Sunstone Community Fund is a key component of the Sunstone Management vision to advance public benefit programs with support of inclusive and vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems through grants, sponsorships and more. [GU1] SCF is a Donor Advised Fund managed by the National Philanthropic Trust. A DAF allows donations to be tax-deductible, with distributions directed to meet the fund’s goals. 

Website | LinkedIn 

Note: Sunstone Community Fund is a charitable organization sponsored by Sunstone Management, Inc. Neither Sunstone Management, nor any of its affiliates, manage the assets of the Fund or receive a fee for being a sponsor. National Philanthropic Trust serves as the manager of the DAF and receives compensation for its services which may effectively reduce the amount of your donated funds. Donors are advised to consult with their financial and tax advisors to understand how DAF contributions may impact their financial and tax circumstances.      

I think what you need here is more information about what the fund is. You already state the vision in the text, but you haven't made it clear that SCF is not an investment vehicle, but rather a DAF and then a sentence about what a DAF is

For many, a love of books – reading them and talking about them – seems incompatible with the digital world we live in today. 

But that just sounded like a problem looking for a solution to three MBA students at Cal State Long Beach. Elias Babaalian-Morales, Jaelyn Gutierrez and Nathen Deo became friends talking about how they might be able to take book clubs online with an app of their own. 

That was in 2021. The founders announced BookBase was available on Sept. 18, 2024, and the app is now on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

“We met at the MBA program at CSULB and started talking about creating content,” Elias said. “Reading books was a common denominator, but so much is digital these days.” 

The discussion turned into a proposal to develop a smartphone application to promote reading and book discussions. The trio were aware of the Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, a university-wide program designed to promote and assist entrepreneurial endeavors. 

“We were asked to participate in the Apostle Incubator and the Apostle (Business Ideation) Challenge (in 2022),” Elias, now the CEO of BookBase, said. “We ended up getting first place. We won $2,500.” 

Nathen, the COO and content curator, said the BookBase app is designed to connect people interested in talking about books, guide those looking for book recommendations and help moderate specific book clubs. 

“I came to reading pretty late,” Nathen said. “That might be why I’m passionate about it. I’m sort of looking for a job in the book industry, but I’m spending a lot of time on BookBase. I’m focusing on my passion; I’m kind of betting on it.” 

All three co-founders say most of their time is dedicated to their company. Most of their resources are too – they do not have any outside investors. 

“So far we are bootstrapping it,” Elias said. “The pitch competition winnings were a start.” 

BookBase came in first in 2023 at the Sunstone Innovation Challenge at CSULB, winning $15,000 and a suite of in-kind services, including legal advice. Sunstone sponsors the challenge through its Sunstone Community Fund, a donor-advised fund. 

This spring, BookBase competed in the Sunstone CSU Startup Launch Competition, which includes startup teams from all the campuses in the California State University system. BookBase was a finalist there, earning another $5,000. 

“We spent a chunk of that money on the name registration,” Jaelyn said. “We originally were BookBound and, using the in-kind legal help (part of the prize for winning the pitch contest), thought we were close to registering (the name). Then we found out another BookBound had already registered. So we had to change the name. The in-kind helped a lot, but there were still a lot of fees and other expenses, just on the name.” 

To reinforce the fact that starting a new business is anything but smooth, Elias said the first app developer they hired, a company working out of India, procrastinated, then came up with an underperforming product. The $6,000 paid to them was written off, and a single engineer working in Virginia has built the BookBase app. 

“I don’t think we could have done this without winning the pitch contests and the prize money,” Elias said. “That gave us confidence in our idea as well as the money to get started.” 

With the app only 45 days old, there is precious little revenue from subscriptions. But more than 100 users are already on the free version of the app. Jaelyn said that fleshing out the website and app with more offerings will help drive traffic, subscriptions and revenue. 

“In the future we’d like to work more with influencers,” she said. “We’d really like to collaborate with authors. Wouldn’t it be great if we could host author-reader chats?” 

“We want to promote reading in general,” Nathen added. 

BookBase is online at bookbaseapp.com.