Chris Lee, a Wharton master’s of business administration candidate has always had an itch for entrepreneurship. The founder of the networking website Meeteor.com, Lee said, “I always wanted to start something.”
The Weiss Tech House hosted Students2Startups, a program featuring three entrepreneurs currently enrolled at the Wharton School, on Wednesday evening. The Weiss Tech House is a student-run initiative that encourages technological innovation, and this event was part of its mentoring series.
The first speaker, Adam Kapelner, founded the website dictionarysquared.com. This vocabulary-building program is targeted at high school students, particularly those preparing for the SAT. Since its launch in 2008, over 500 high school students have used this program in their English classes. Kapelner explained the importance of putting an idea into practice, even before there is monetary gain.
“Once you get something right on the web … it’s like a rubber band, you can just stretch [it],” he said.
Chris Lee spoke next about Meeteor.com, a program designed to expand business networks. Meeteor.com functions much like a dating website, matching up prospective entrepreneurs, engineers and other business partners based on their interests and backgrounds. Lee also stressed starting a project and gaining feedback as early as possible.
“Get it out there. Get real people working on it,” he said.
The last speaker was Kunal Gupta. As an undergraduate student at Penn, he founded the company Fone2Fone. He later became the vice president of Nutra-Med Packaging, a company owned by his family. Gupta encouraged students to find the “right team” of business partners, to make sure they are passionate about their ideas and to share their ideas.
A question-and-answer panel followed the presentation. Students, who largely represented Wharton and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, asked questions about how to begin their own entrepreneurial ventures.
“It really gave me the confidence to start spreading my ideas and to actually get something tangible done,” College freshman Thoba Grenville-Grey said.
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