“I had to sit next to the teacher to use the calculator,’’ says Watase, the founder and CEO of Scholars App, an online service that matches students to vetted scholarships from donors that are part of the Scholars App platform. “And I thought, this really sucks. But it turned out that I was actually able to grasp the concepts really quickly.”
Watase’s high school grades dramatically improved but some colleges and scholarships looked over his application just because of his grades, without trying to understand more about his story. Ambitious and frustrated, he did something kind of crazy.
He ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, three meals a day, one week of every month to fund a $500 scholarship for someone else—someone just like him. And therein lay the seed of the Scholars App business.
It turns out to be really hard to grant someone a scholarship “unless you have $20,000 in charitable money to work through a community foundation or $500 for legal fees to open your own 5013c,’’ said Watase.
By then, he had a job at the local credit union and was enrolled in community college. His colleagues thought his PB&J diet was crazy, but he decided his future was to create a company that truly helped students, school counselors, and donors.
