Iranian Studies Minor Co-Founds Youth Polling Startup
Matin Mirramezani and Cyrus Beschloss
Business Insider: "Young people are notoriously hard to poll. Generation Lab hopes their 'ergonomically fitted' polling can fix that."
Cyrus Beschloss, 25, is the founder and CEO of Generation Lab. Matin Mirramezani, 22, studying economics and Iranian studies at Stanford, is the chief financial officer. Introduced by a mutual acquaintance, they first founded "College Reaction" in 2018, a non-partisan polling shop focused exclusively on understanding the views and attitudes of college students. They later expanded their polling to younger people more broadly, rebranded to "Generation Lab" in 2020, and now work with leaders in academia, media, brands, and government.
"As young people across America first became eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine last spring, vaccine hesitancy was widespread among those under 30. In response, New America's Health Innovations Lab launched a "resource hub" called BeatTheVirus.org to encourage young people to get their shots and help achieve herd immunity.
"Young people sort of held the key," Dr. Susan Blumenthal, the director of the program and a former US Assistant Surgeon General, told Insider in a recent phone interview. But if bringing up vaccination rates among younger Americans was a straightforward goal, figuring out how to reach and persuade them was not. "We were on a grant and didn't have, you know, enormous funds to pay a big pollster," she added.
The think tank's health initiative, focused on advancing public health through technological innovation, had been devoting much of its energy towards addressing the pandemic, including through social media campaigns aimed at young people that featured celebrities like Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber. But the group wanted to better understand college students' attitudes as vaccines became more widely available.
To answer that question, Blumenthal turned to Generation Lab, a small polling startup that studies the attitudes and behaviors of young people, with a particular focus on college students."