Vanderbilt Center for Entrepreneurship

Reminiscing on our Cocktails & Connections event✨

Congratulations to Ellie Zimmerman, founder of , on winning our January Firestarter Pitch Competition!

While backpacking in the Owyhee Mountains, Ellie and her friends contemplated the difficulty of finding meaningful internships in high school. Inspired by this discussion, Ellie went on to found Interns 4-Good, an online platform bridging the gap between nonprofits and volunteers. Since its inception, the organization has empowered countless motivated students and left a lasting mark on communities around the world.

Thank you to all of our incredible self-starter participants for sharing their ideas & to our accomplished judges for their helpful feedback and advice!

On 1/31 we are hosting our first Firestarter Pitch Competiton of 2023 from 5:30-7:00PM over Zoom🥳

Email your business name + concept to the Owen C4E Director, Stacie Pawlicki, ([email protected]) to participate!

Need some last minute gift ideas for the holidays? Give the gift of entrepreneurship🎁

Vanderbilt Entrepreneurs have you covered no matter who you are shopping for this holiday season. Find the perfect gift among some of our incredible alumni & student-founded businesses🌟

Congratulations to Vello, for winning the our December Firestarter Pitch Competition! Vello is a bike-sharing service for students that provides transportation at an 80% lower cost than other transportation-sharing services. The service allows bike owners to rent their bikes out for short-term rentals to students to get around campus or the local area. A special thank you to all of the self-starters that shared their ideas and the judges that offered helpful feedback! Check out our blog for the full recap🙌🏻

Don't let the year end without pitching your brilliant business idea! The last Firestarter Pitch Competition of 2022 will be on December 6. The Firestarter Pitch Competition provides a low-pressure environment where students can pitch their early-stage startup ideas. Students walk through their concept for 5 minutes, followed by another 5 minutes of Q&A. Judges from the entrepreneurial and investor community provide feedback.

Contact Stacie Pawlicki, [email protected], if you would like to pitch or judge in our December Firestarter🌟

We are excited to congratulate the winners of our November Firestarter competition, Marc Nabhan & Mark Hilton, co-founders of Optomar Technologies, a medical device company to transform the future of metabolic health!

Last week we hosted our first successful Firestarter Pitch Competition of the school year! We are so blown away by the talent of all of the businesses that participated.

We want to congratulate on winning the $500 prize! Brakefields is a clothing brand that provides customers with fashion and function, through colorful prints and styles for disability, motherhood, demanding jobs, on-the-go lifestyles and more! ✨

A special thank you to the incredible judges for providing helpful feedback to our student self-starters.

The Voices of Entrepreneurship speaker series returns on October 26 with featured guest Glenn Clayton. Glenn is a Managing Partner of Mark Two Ventures (MKII), a venture studio that helps found and fund new startups alongside talented entrepreneurs in the Southeast. Prior to founding MKII, Glenn successfully launched and scaled several startups. His companies have employed hundreds of people, and he personally built and managed one of the largest software development teams in the state of Alabama. He raised over $35M in early-stage capital for his own companies, including one of Alabama’s largest Series A rounds of venture capital. He has successfully exited a company and scaled up another to profitability with over $40M in ARR.

Pre-COVID, Glenn spent a couple of years as part of the NYC startup community, developing close relationships with other founders, technologists, and venture capitalists. Seeing how access to a strong network of capital and talent improves the odds of startup success, Glenn decided to launch MKII to provide hands-on support for entrepreneurs in the South.

Glenn will join the C4E in person for a fireside-chat-style conversation to discuss entrepreneurship from both a founder's and funder's perspective.

Students, alumni, staff, and community members are welcome to attend. We will have an in-person and Zoom option and will provide a free lunch for those attending in person. Zoom link details will be released late.

Register with the link in our bio! 💡

What a fun night we had at the OVEC Fall Social on the BentoLiving Rooftop this past weekend✨

S/O to for this awesome event!