It's not everyday that you encounter a college student so completely focused and intent on seeing their product come to fruition, willing to demo at a minutes notice, but Scott Block, co-founder of VentureBoard, fit the bill.
I met Scott Block a few weeks back at a Foster.ly education-focused meetup and was immediately impressed by his fervor, passion, and well constructed business idea. His enthusiasm and ultimately his intellect are what sold me, I needed to get a little sneak peak of this talented student's brainchild. Needless to say, I was not disappointed.
VentureBoard was created by four University of Maryland students, Scott Block, Justin Searles, Avi Eisenberger, and Jordan Goldstein as a way to overcome challenges that they themselves have personally been confronted with while in college. Each founder had at some point during their university career wished to work with others as a way to foster the growth of their dreams into a reality. And, noticing a lack of a network for those with prolific startup ideas, they created VentureBoard, "a platform to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship and grow entrepreneurial culture in higher education."
With the use of VentureBoard, students have the ability to "create profiles, build teams, and collaborate on the beginnings of great companies embarking on the new venture creation process with specially designed tools and educational resources when they are needed the most." Universities also have a stake in the process, checking out the ventures as well as the teams on VentureBoard to provide targeted feedback to aid in the development of student's creative business proposals.
"We understand how it's difficult to connect with fellow entrepreneurs so we are using our own experiences to narrow down the design of VentureBoard as a way to make it as beneficial as possible for all who use it," explained Searles during our Google Hangout interview. (For those wondering, we may or may not have been playing around with mustaches and sombreros while chatting).
All four co-founders are still in the process of fine tuning VentureBoard, rolling out a new business model canvas sometime in the near future. The business model canvas will help to allow advisors to keep track of students teams (i.e. know where they are in their business model and what pivots they might be making). They will be using that semantic analysis to see what resources those students need to better help them develop their idea.
For Block, he sees college students nationwide using VentureBoard in the future as a way to progress their entrepreneurial interests, opening the doors for anyone attending a university. While currently only available to University of Maryland students, Block plans to expand by selling VentureBoard's feature set to other universities.
"It's a really nice tool to find other entrepreneurial minded students on campus," said Block while pointing to the easy to search through site that allows users to filter by different categories in a simple and efficient way. "It's also a great place to organize thoughts that your team might have in one central area."
Not only is VentureBoard a step in the right direction for universities to take across the country, but also an extremely useful tool for any up and coming student intrigued by the idea of beginning their own business. A way to connect, but also a way to grow, a solution to the ever growing problem of how to make your startup dreams become a reality.
Searles put it best: "We want to make running and building a company from the ground up as easy as possible."
