Over one hundred Rady School MBA and UCSD undergraduate students came together to celebrate UCSD’s second annual FOUNDER.org kick-off event this week in the Fung Auditorium. FOUNDER.org is an accelerator program that invests in fifty student entrepreneur teams from all over the world, who they meet with virtually throughout the year. Chief Revenue Officer of FOUNDER.org Tony Ayez, took the stage to walk through implementing the eight keys to successfully founding a billion dollar company (idea, team, product, business planning, market development, customer development, operations, and fundraising) as well as how to apply to FOUNDER.org’s class of 2016. Tony, himself, has an impressive background in high performance sales and business development for Splunk, Azul Systems, and Oracle to name a few.
StartR’s partnership with FOUNDER.org is what brought the kickoff to campus and both current and past StartR teams participated throughout the event. Rady School student and StartR alum Martyn Gross presented on his experience developing a concept for Skylit medical through StartR at Rady and then executing his concept while participating in FOUNDER.org’s accelerator. The agenda also featured 60-second pitches from thirty student teams. Of those students, three current StartR teams pitched their companies:
Insilico Scientific – Providing novel cancer biomarkers to pharmaceutical clinical trials
CB Therapeutics – Developing processes for the production of rare cannabinoids
Sher Butt’s concept – Creating supplement drinks for health conditions, diabetics and pregnancy
StartR co-leader Kimberly Davis King singled out Martyn’s presentation and the 60-second pitches as the night’s highlights noting, “I like to see that FOUNDER.org is interested in our students and in funding them. We had a great turnout this year.”
Founded in 2013, StartR is a nonprofit, six month-long acceleration program for Rady School of Management students and alumni. Its mission is to provide early stage companies and student teams mentoring, advice and access to other resources and six teams are selected per each program.
Past and Current StartR Groups Shine at 2nd Annual FOUNDER.org Kickoff was last modified: August 30th, 2017 by Lauren Herr