Her father is the billionaire co-founder of the world’s largest retailer and e-commerce company and the owner of multiple professional sports franchises. But the quality Alex Tsai admires most about Alibaba executive vice chairman and Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai has nothing to do with his wealth and everything to do with the intrinsic drive responsible for his riches.

“I’m definitely inspired by my dad’s scrappiness,” said Alex Tsai, a rising senior midfielder for the Stanford women’s lacrosse team. “I get a lot of my work ethic from him, absolutely.”

Scrappy. That word manifested in some form five different times during a 36-minute Zoom interview with Tsai and her colleague, Babson men’s lacrosse player Mason O’Hanlon. They’re both rising college seniors whose seasons came to a screeching halt in March and whose academic pursuits look vastly different today than they did four months ago.

Tsai and O’Hanlon also were among the first students to join founders James Kanoff and Aidan Reilly in establishing The FarmLink Project, a nonprofit grassroots organization that transports surplus produce from farms to food banks. Tsai and Kanoff knew each other from Stanford’s Mayfield Fellows Program, a nine-month work-study program in high-tech entrepreneurship. O’Hanlon and Reilly, who plays water polo at Brown, were high school classmates in Los Angeles.

FarmLink’s origin story — which has been covered in national media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News and ABC News — starts with childhood friends Kanoff and Reilly. They had a hard time reconciling what they read in a New York Times article about farmers being forced to destroy or dump millions of pounds of produce with the fact that the Westside Food Bank in Santa Monica, Calif., where they had volunteered as teenagers, was burning through months of food storage to try to keep up with the demand of families displaced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kanoff and Reilly paid an Idaho farmer to prevent 50,000 pounds of onions from going to the landfill, diverting the truck to a nearby pantry. They also bought 10,000 eggs from a California farm, rented a Penske truck and delivered them to Westside Food Bank. In the startup world, they call this proof of concept.

“Food insecurity isn’t a right-now problem. It’s a forever problem. In a typical fiscal year, one-third of the food produced on a farm never sees itself on the shelf at a grocery store or on a plate at a restaurant,” said O’Hanlon, FarmLink’s media strategist. “The problem has been evident for years. It’s been hidden and just brought to light due to COVID-19.”

Tsai and O’Hanlon were part of Kanoff and Reilly’s circle of Southern California and college friends that grew FarmLink from two volunteers to 20. Dozens more inquired about joining the movement when companies canceled their summer internship programs. Today, the FarmLink network includes 180 college students from Babson, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, Stanford and USC.

Since mid-April, FarmLink has raised $1.6 million and transported more than 7.8 million pounds of produce to food banks. The group has sourced food from 41 farms in 18 states and delivered it to 162 food banks in 36 states, leveraging partnerships with Borden Dairy, Food Finders and Uber Freight. FarmLink also has restored $490,000 in wages lost by independent farmers and truckers during the pandemic.

Again, these are college kids, many of them athletes. In addition to Tsai and O’Hanlon, there’s Brown men’s lacrosse player Luis Castro and Stanford women’s lacrosse player Hannah Dudley.

“Since NCAA competition was canceled and colleges were closed, I feel like college athletes, we really value any opportunities to work together as a team and work toward a shared mission,” said Tsai, who leads the fundraising team and has secured donations through corporate philanthropy and charitable foundations. “For me personally, FarmLink satisfied that desire to gain that camaraderie with a group of like-minded, driven and passionate individuals working toward a shared goal.”

They’re certainly more than just jocks. Tsai and O’Hanlon both have previous experience with startups.

Tsai, a computer science major at Stanford, is the product engineer behind Mem Labs and its Supernote application. “It’s basically like a magic notepad — the fastest way to capture, connect and share information,” she said. “If that sounds like a pitch, that’s what it is.”

O’Hanlon, who studies finance and sustainability at Babson, created the video dating application Skippit to help break down the barriers of text-based interactions between singles. “It gained a lot of traction with tens of thousands of users,” he said. “Now I’m working in venture capital, which is an industry I hope to continue with.”

In the dense matrix of hunger relief organizations in the U.S., FarmLink has a uniquely Generation Z vibe. From its sophisticated website with sleek graphics and trendy merchandise to its inspirational storytelling and social media presence, FarmLink looks and feels like something more than just a summer project.

O’Hanlon said some contributors are working as many as 80 hours per week, standard fare for a startup. “It’s our scrappy nature and willingness to work for free that’s been able to move us to where we are today,” he said.

There’s that word again.

“We’re young, we’re energetic, we’re scrappy and most importantly, we’re agile,” Tsai said. “We adapt to fit in where there are structural deficiencies. Unlike more established food insecurity organizations in this sphere, we aren’t tied down by existing partnerships or geographies. Because we are so new and adaptable, we’re able to fit in where we’re needed most.”

O’Hanlon and two other members of FarmLink’s media team recently drove a 28-foot truck to a farm in Topanga Hills, loaded more than 60,000 eggs and delivered them to the Watts Empowerment Center in Los Angeles where people lined up for groceries, clothing and housing necessities.

“You see these statistics, but they’re just on paper,” O’Hanlon said. “Fulfilling the actual service was really gratifying.”

Tsai directed a truckload of zucchinis to a food bank in San Diego, where she has lived since her family moved from Hong Kong when she was 13 — the same age her father was when he was sent to the U.S. from Taiwan to attend the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.

“Seeing that in my own city made me feel extremely passionate about FarmLink,” she said, “and instilled faith that starting from one family, one delivery at a time, we can really make a lasting impact during a time that has disproportionately impacted some of the most underserved people in the country.”

Tsai is her father’s daughter in more ways than one. Joe Tsai loves to tell Alex and her younger brothers Dash and Jacob about how he was a walk-on at Yale, where he played both lacrosse and football, after getting cut from the varsity team as a senior at Lawrenceville. It motivated Alex Tsai to walk on to the team at Stanford, a perennial Pac-12 favorite.

It also stoked Joe Tsai’s appreciation of a sport in which he remains intimately involved today as owner of the National Lacrosse League’s San Diego Seals and backer of several other organizations in the U.S. and internationally. All three of his children play lacrosse. Alex Tsai competed for Hong Kong in the 2017 women’s world championship.

But Alex Tsai also is quick to credit her mother’s influence on her. Clara Wu Tsai, a former executive at American Express and the Chinese online shopping website Taobao, manages the family’s philanthropic efforts through the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation. A Stanford graduate after whom the school’s neurosciences institute is named, she helped coordinate the donation of 2.6 million masks, 170,000 goggles and 2,000 ventilators to New York when it was the epicenter of the pandemic in April. Another 500,000 pieces of personal protective equipment were distributed to health care workers in San Diego.

“Both my parents have been pretty involved with philanthropy and have always instilled a culture of giving within our family,” said Alex Tsai, currently living at home in La Jolla, a hilly, seaside community in San Diego. “The entrepreneurship combined with the giving-back aspect has been a common thread. My family’s influence has definitely given me the drive to try to make the world a better place and try to innovate ways to give back to the community.”