Approximately 90 DePauw students registered to hear successful entrepreneurs speak, present business pitches to professionals and learn how to start a successful business at DePauw's first UPushStart program on Friday and Saturday.
Student Government president Walker Chance and senior Frank Hu came up with the idea for UPushStart in September. They contacted DePauw alumni, business professionals and lawyers to come to campus and work with students on how to be successful entrepreneurs.
"You kind of have three solid actual [student] startups on campus," Chance said, citing Pizza Dude, DePauw Cookies and Simplicity Products. "And there's a lot more than that too, which says something about the energy that these students at DePauw have and the ideas that they have."
Throughout the weekend, registrants had the opportunity to work with DePauw alumni who had started their own businesses and present business pitches to experienced professionals. The winner of this pitch competition, which drew 28 participants, was a team of four. It included seniors Stephanie Sharlow, Caitlyn Hammack and Madeline LeClair, and Indiana University senior Matt Hunt.
Sharlow and Hammack initially came up with the idea of Simplicity, an organic cosmetics line, at the beginning of this semester. Sharlow is in charge of marketing and advertising the product and Hammack makes the lotions. Before UPushStart, the two lacked a partner who had knowledge of how to run a business and business financing. They asked Hunt, Hammack's boyfriend, to aid them in the business aspect, but it was not until Friday night, when they met LeClair at UPushStart, that they had the fourth member of their team.
"It's good that none of our skill sets overlap, because that's where problems arise," Sharlow said. "The four of us are going to keep going as a team in the real world."
Runner-up senior Isiah Miles, who lived on a Native American reservation for most of his childhood, had no idea that he was even going to be involved in the pitch session prior to Friday. After he met with DePauw entrepreneurial graduates, however, he began to generate an idea for creating a fellowship for educated Native Americans, which would allow them to return to the reservations and have a guaranteed job. This fellowship, Miles hopes, would lift many reservations out of poverty.
"It was something that was really personal," Miles said. "The applicants would be targeting talented or educated Native Americans and accepting them into a program or fellowship that would help them become leaders."
As a political science major, Miles did not think that entrepreneurship was something that he could consider as a career until UPushStart. He has since become excited to begin creating this fellowship.
"I didn't know if it was actually going to be significant or a good pitch, so I didn't actually decide to do a pitch until the day of when I actually had to present it, so it was a whirlwind of craziness," Miles said. "It was great to see all those ideas and see how students were really thinking about this in terms of reality and trying to do something big."
In third place was first-year Justine Clarke. Her entrepreneurial pitch was a smartphone app that would notify the user of events taking place around them. She said that this was an issue that she has had to deal with, because so much happens on DePauw's campus that it is hard to know when there is something that one could be missing.
"It was just an issue that I found myself constantly having," Clarke said. "I was thinking that 'what if there were other students who didn't get the chance to experience this [UPushStart] simply because they didn't know?"
She, like Miles, did not anticipate participating in UPushStart prior to the beginning of the event.
"I was returning from dance practice basically dressed in dance clothes and I was encouraged to go upstairs," she said. "I didn't know I could work and deliver that kind of work."
While this is the first year for UPushStart, many hope it will continue.
"I just hope that it really continues to grow because it offers a lot of opportunities for anything you want to go into," Sharlow said. "I think it was one of the best events I've ever gone to at DePauw."
"We all die," Miles said. "The goal is not to live forever, but to create something that will."