Shop Talk: Bradley Ericson and 3SecondReceipts
Bradley Ericson
Like a lot of Drexel undergrads, Bradley Ericson likes to take trips for the South Street Special.
“You wrap a piece of Lorenzo’s pizza around a Jim’s steak and see which one of your friends can finish first,” the Drexel sophomore says. “It’s the simple things that keep you young.”
Of course, what has made Ericson one of the better known teenagers in University City was his being named College Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur’s magazine. So, though Ericson “never in a million years” imagined himself attending Drexel, you’d be right to guess he now approves of the path he’s taken.
Ericson is the CEO and co-founder of 3SecondReceipts, a startup incubated at Drexel, a startup that is testing a point-of-sale system for digital receipts to save vendors on paper and ink.
The company’s beginnings started October 2008 back at Drexel and, like the South Street Special, involves pizza. As a freshman, Ericson and his college buddies would head out to a university dining hall for pizza, using their student ID cards in the closed system.
Everyone waited for a receipt, and then everyone immediately threw them out.
“I just wanted my pizza faster, but I also realized all this paper was being thrown out for these small transactions that are pretty immaterial to us,” Ericson says now. “There had to be a better way.”
