Fall 2026 Winner Of The Emerging Entrepreneurs Scholarship

Aidan Christopher Joneleit

Aidan, a college sophomore at Berkeley, is the Fall 2026 recipient of the $1,000 Emerging Entrepreneurs Scholarship. Reading Aidan’s essay, you learn that he has already founded his own e-commerce business, built a pricing and inventory system, and aspires to bring the lessons he has learned to the forefront of his academic career at Berkeley.

Read Their Essay Here:

The first time I noticed, I was looking at a listing that should have been mine. A Charizard VMAX I had sold for $43 a week earlier was now moving on eBay for $91, and I had nothing to show for the difference except a spreadsheet I had updated by hand. I had let the market move without me.

That was the moment PokePulse stopped being a hobby and became an engineering problem.

I founded PokePulse in 2018 as a Pokémon card e-commerce business, initially managing sales through manual tracking and instinct-based pricing. I was young enough that most people saw Pokémon cards as a hobby, but the business quickly forced me to learn pricing, inventory, fulfillment, customer expectations, and risk in real time. The trading card market is unusually volatile. Prices can shift quickly in response to tournament results, new set releases, and influencer activity, which makes static pricing a disadvantage. What I had built was a business that worked when I was watching it and stopped working the moment I looked away. The gap had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with system design.

To fix it, I wrote a Python web-scraping platform that pulled competitor pricing data from multiple marketplaces and adjusted my listings three to five times a day. I built inventory dashboards that tracked sell-through rates, flagged stale SKUs before they became sunk costs, and issued timed markdowns on slow-moving inventory. The results were measurable: across roughly 500 active SKUs, my sell-through rate stabilized at ten to twelve percent, stale inventory dropped by twenty percent, and fulfillment errors fell by about a quarter. What had once taken fifteen to eighteen hours of weekly manual work became a more scalable operating system.

The deeper lesson was not about automation alone. I used to believe the advantage in a competitive market went to whoever knew the product best, whoever could identify a hidden gem before anyone else noticed. That still matters, but in a liquid, fast-moving market, knowledge decays the moment conditions change. What compounds is infrastructure: systems that update faster than you can, watch more listings than you can, and make decisions while you are asleep. The Charizard I missed taught me that being right about a card's value means little if my pricing cannot act on that information in time. In a competitive market, the winner is not always the person with the best instinct. It is often the person whose system responds fastest when the market changes.

PokePulse has also taught me what it feels like to bear the full weight of a decision. When a markdown does not move inventory or a bulk purchase sits longer than projected, there is no instructor's rubric and no partial credit. The feedback is the outcome, and the cost is real. That accountability has shaped how I approach every tradeoff, pushing me to define what I am optimizing for before committing rather than reacting afterward. Entering Berkeley's MET program, where my engineering and business degrees are built on each other, the instincts I developed running PokePulse are the ones I trust most: build carefully, measure honestly, adapt quickly, and never let the market move without me again.