Startup companies, investors, business leaders and academics came together at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) to share their experiences, advice and much more for the inaugural Orange County Celebrates Entrepreneurs event.
In collaboration with UCI Beall Applied Innovation, Concordia University’s School of Businbcess and Economics, and CSUF’s Center for Entrepreneurship through Mihaylo College of Business and Economics, presentations, panel discussions and story sharing was spread all throughout the college’s Atrium and the Titan Theater. The event kicked off with keynote speaker Paul Wasserman, co-founder of Ebates, now known as Rakuten Rewards, a cashback and shopping rewards company based in San Mateo.
Wasserman talked about his journey from working in law firms to starting his company, Ebates, and his most impactful experiences with investment funding, pitching and building his company.
“Passion is one of the key ingredients that would help me in my time to come,” said Wasserman. “Passion is the thing that carries you through the dark times as an entrepreneur.”
During the first panel discussion, Andrew Ninh, CEO of UCI startup Docbot, which uses artificial intelligence to detect colon polyps, shared his experience about building Docbot, working in different incubators – including Applied Innovation’s Wayfinder program and Y Combinator – his tenacious pitching to investors, and how those experiences helped grow his company.
“We tried really hard and we had some good investors who saw the vision early before we got into Y Combinator,” said Ninh. “You got to have a solid plan and when you start, you can’t stop. Every pitch has to be the first pitch, which means you can’t change what is written. You have to come in and be very excited, even if it’s the one-hundredth pitch that day.”
During another panel discussing, Josh Mundell, founder and CEO of Wayfinder startup NeighborING, and Leila Safavi, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of UCI startup Purist – also part of the Wayfinder program – shared their experiences of turning their ideas and research from the classroom into a startup company.
“Going into this, I had no idea what commercializing a technology out of the lab really meant, but being a part of UCI [Beall] Applied Innovation, with all its resources, really got me onto this route,” said Safavi. “And with the help of these resources and mentorship, I was able to get a quarter of a million dollars in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. I don’t think I would be here if it wasn’t for all the help I got along the way.”
The event concluded with the closing keynote speaker Gillian Hayes, UCI vice provost for Graduate Education and former CEO of AVIAA, who shared her experience in both the academic and entrepreneurial worlds. She highlighted the need to create affordable housing in Orange County to keep talent in the area.
“If we want to keep our brilliant young minds here, we first need to do something about housing,” said Hayes. “We want all of our alumni to come back from all of the schools in this area and start creating and investing in businesses here and hiring our students and keeping these brilliant young minds here.”
Find out the different programs available at Applied Innovation to kick off a startup journey.
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