Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

The End of Semester event- Butler Venture Accelerator Program

Last week the Babson Entrepreneurship Club and the Butler Venture Accelerator Program hosted the end of semester dinner for Accelerator members. Three businesses were recognized for recent accomplishments: Game Day, Thirty-One Gifts and Zingfin Technologies. The founders of each of the businesses talked about their business and their entrepreneurial experience.

  • Game Day is run by a senior at Babson Demetri Demascus. Game Day offers a variety of high-end shaving and skin products for men. The products are made from the best ingredients for the strongest, healthiest skin.
  • Freshman Hunter Jones displays how there are many types of entrepreneurship. Jones runs a franchisee of Thirty-One Gifts. She sells totes, purses, bags and related products. The products are designed for women who are “on-the-go”. There are products available for traveling women, stay-at-home moms, organized moms, and moms who want to be organized.
  • Zingfin Technologies is led by Balaji Viswanathan, who is in his first year of the two year MBA program. It is a tech startup and focuses on building quantitative algorithms and visualizations to analyze Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Hearing from these entrepreneurs was inspiring for many: they are peers amongst us that, even with classwork and personal lives, are still able to make time for their ventures. There were a lot of commonalities between these entrepreneurs. All of them had the business idea when they experienced the problem themselves and then set out to solve it.  For example, Demetri Demascus, the founder of Game Day, faced a problem when he wanted to look his best but he didn’t find quality men care products. This is when he decided to launch his business, Game’s Day. Although launched, each of the ventures is still working on building their management team. Viswanathan is working with seven friends who share the same passion as him for entrepreneurship and investing.

The one underlying theme amongst these entrepreneurs was their passion for their ventures. Through talking to them, you could sense the amount of time and resources invested and how much they believed in their entrepreneurial ventures. Entrepreneurship is all about innovation and making the world better, even in the smallest way possible. It goes hand-in-hand with passion: without it, nothing would be possible.