Diane Hessan’s journey building Communispace, the first company to leverage online communities in order to generate market research, is a remarkable one, full of ups, downs, and plot twists. She took it from a startup all the way to the highly successful company she sold to Omnicom in 2011. Diane shared some of her stories…
Pitching and selling: what’s the difference? While they are both important in the life of a startup, they are actually very different and require distinct skill sets. On June 12 and 13, Kate Merritt, owner of KMP Consulting, took some of the Summer Venture Program teams through an intensive B2B Sales Training workshop to help…
A key component of the Summer Venture Program is its location in downtown Boston, giving the student entrepreneurs a chance to immerse themselves in the Boston startup ecosystem. To help orient us in our first week of SVP, Blank Center Executive Director Debi Kleiman gave us an introduction to the ecosystem. The Boston entrepreneur is…
As soon as the summer starts, so does our Summer Venture Program. For ten weeks, the undergraduate and graduate student teams work, learn, create, collaborate, connect, and accelerate their businesses. Here’s what happened in Week 1: Monday: 12:30pm: SVP Director Bob Stringer and Antonette Ho kicked off our orientation. The teams toured our new WeWork…
MassChallenge just announced the 100+ startups that will be a part of the 2019 Boston cohort, and we are thrilled to see five Babson businesses on the list. MassChallenge is a network of zero-equity startup accelerators, with locations in Boston, Israel, Mexico, Rhode Island, Switzerland, and Texas. Babson student and alumni businesses have a great…
Tech doesn’t need to be pretty. To scale, tech needs to solve a problem. When we talk about how tech can and should be in tune with customer needs, Clynton Caines, the newest advisor to join the Blank Center’s Summer Venture Program team, readily points out Craigslist as an example. Clynton explains that Craigslist’s MVP…
In the past few months, Babson student and alumni businesses have launched beta testing, landed funding, received accolades, won competitions, and explored new partnerships. Here are just a few of their updates: David Zamarin ’19 and his startup Detrapel, which uses nanotechology in its powerful, non-toxic sprays to protect your belongings, was awarded a bronze…
For entrepreneurs starting out in the e-commerce space, it can be hard to know what resources to integrate and leverage. In How 2 Sell via Ecommerce, Ross Beyeler ’09, Founder of Growth Spark and COO of Trellis, shared some incredibly valuable resources with us. As Ross explained, “I find early on as an entrepreneur, it’s…
Term sheets: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, definitely can’t make sense of them. Mike Conza, Partner at Morgan Lewis, walked us through some of the complexities in How 2 Come to Terms with Angel and Venture Term Sheets. He opened the session by explaining the difference between angel and venture capital. Angel…
When entrepreneurs are looking to fund their startup, generally they first think of raising money from investors. But, according to the Kauffman Foundation, “about 40% of initial startup capital in a newly founded business is debt that originates from banks.” Lindsay Blakey, Vice President, Business Development Sales Manager, and Michael DiCiaccio, Vice President, Business Banking…
