Spunky. Curious. Open-minded.
Meet Mimi Tran Zambetti, a sophomore at the University of Southern California. Born in Vietnam, this spunky gal calls San Jose, California home. This semester, she’s continuing to grow Tommy Bot, a chatbot which facilitates access to USC campus information from dining hall menus to building locations. Mimi was inspired to build Tommy Bot as a way to help freshmen like her find their way around campus. In the future, she and her team hope to expand Tommy’s functionality to include more personalized information!
What is the purpose of your project?
To reduce friction in students’ lives by facilitating access to campus information. We’re a chatbot company that aggregates information about campus such as events, building locations and hours, dining hall menus, and sports schedules.
What inspired you to start your project?
The short version of this is — as freshmen, Justin and I were lost all the time, and we wanted to create something that helped us get around.
The long winded way of explaining this is to look at our team, and how our collective goals and strengths helped us scope our problem and decide on a product.
Our goal?
We wanted to have the experience of taking a project from start to finish, or in other words, from idea to end user. Whatever problem we chose to tackle, it had to be small enough in scope that we’d be able to execute a product and run several iterations of it over the course of just one semester.
The scope?
[At the time,] we were a team of sophomores and freshman. It made the most sense to tackle a problem that we felt as students, and to create a product whose user profile matched ours and a user base that we could directly access. Those two factors helped us decide on Tommy Bot.
How was the process of developing the bulk of your project in just one semester?
To be honest, we were pretty terrible at pacing ourselves. That first semester was a lot of talking and not a lot of doing, capped off in style with a couple of all nighters before demo night. I like to think we’ve gotten a bit better at structured sprints now.
What is your vision for the future of your company?
We’re looking to expand our campus chatbot model to different colleges across the US, and to turn Tommy Bot (or Bruin Bot, Tree Bot, etc.) into every student’s first and most reliable friend on campus. It’s so overwhelming to come to a new school and not know where anything is or what’s happening, and chatbots are a great way to access that information in a personal way.
Why do you think entrepreneurship is important?
Entrepreneurship, in our case, gave us agency to quickly solve problems [we saw], especially in slow moving, established spaces. Tommy Bot was such a quick fix to the friction we felt in our daily lives, and if we had waited for USC to roll out a comprehensive app or website that did the same, we would probably already be seniors (no shade to USC, it’s obviously much more difficult to create and approve products in such a large organization).
Entrepreneurship is a great way to make an impact, to take initiative within your community and tackle a problem you care about or to bring one of your cool new ideas to life — it’s about making things happen without having to play by the rules (at least at first).
Favorite food?
Dark chocolate
Favorite TV show?
Freaks and Geeks
Fun fact about you?
I collect socks. Well, I used to, until my friends got clued in and started to give me socks and then I had way too many so I had to stop my personal collecting.
This is my actual fun fact: I have a lot of fun socks, and when I’m feeling edgy I wear them mismatched.
Come out to Founders Roundtable to chat with Mimi about where Tommy Bot is now and where it’s headed (and maybe catch some edgy, mismatched socks)! You can also message Tommy Bot on Facebook!
Spark SC champions the entrepreneurial spirit at the University of Southern California. Through initiatives like 1000 Pitches, the Startup Career Fair, and Project Launch, we inspire students to participate in a culture of innovation at USC and beyond. Learn more about what we do and how to get involved at our website, sparksc.org.
