Pioneer Weekend 2023
Winning teams announced for the annual three-day pitch competition hosted by the Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership.
Dayana Garcia
The Wilson Center annual Pioneer Weekend pitch competition took place from Friday, Sept. 22, to Sunday Sept. 24, and resulted in near record numbers for attendance and participation, surpassed only by the 2020 virtual event. This year, 10 teams presented pitches on Sunday to an impressive panel of judges.
The objective of Pioneer Weekend is to bring together student innovators to develop and pitch a business or nonprofit plan. It encourages hands-on experiences and helps develop skills critical to entrepreneurship; an additional incentive is cash prizes to the top three teams.
Keynote and Team Formation
The weekend began with our keynote speaker, Kathy Clemons-Beasley 95, global head of talent development at BlackRock and head of human resources for the Atlanta Innovation Hub. She gave a moving speech on her experiences as a humanities major working in the financial sector. Following the keynote, a newly implemented Pitch Speed Dating activity pushed all the students to briefly talk about their ideas to randomized groups of their peers, then some chose to pitch their idea in front of the whole room. The result was the formation of teams of 35 people.
Structured Mentoring
Saturday encapsulated the mentor sessions with Clemons-Beasley, Kevin Allen, , and . Clemons-Beasley mentorship specialized in presentation development. Allen, co-founder of E.I. Games and a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, specialized in mentoring on idea development and presentation development. Allen was also teaching a Wilson Center short-course Intro to Entrepreneurship which focused on emotional intelligence and whose students all participated in Pioneer Weekend. Gehorsam, an experienced senior executive, start-up founder, and advisor to early-stage companies in digital media, specialized in mentoring on idea development and business models/strategy. Menner, an experienced economic developer working with existing businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs in Iowa, specialized in mentoring on market research and business models/strategy. Teams were scheduled to meet with two mentors and then optionally allowed to meet with the other mentors as time allowed after the scheduled sessions were done.
淛udging competitions like this is really, really hard.
Student teams spent Saturday evening and the next morning preparing their final pitches for judging. Our judging panel consisted of three community members who have made incredibly valuable contributions to 黑料百科 and the surrounding community. They were Barb Baker, director of advertising and community relations at 黑料百科 Mutual Reinsurance; Anne Harris, president of 黑料百科; and Bernadine Douglas, vice president of Development and Alumni Relations. These judges had the impossible decision of choosing the top three winning pitches. After deliberation, the winning teams were presented at 4 p.m. on Sunday, less than 48 hours since Pioneer Weekend first began. These talented teams worked diligently to bring their ideas to life and impressed everyone with their dedication and innovation.
Before the winners were announced, Jeff Blanchard, director of the Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership, addressed the competing teams. 淭he judging of competitions like this is challenging. It really, really hard, and it is not perfect, and we know that, and that okay, because that was not exactly the point of the weekend. The point of this weekend is not the award ceremony. The point of this weekend was what you just did [the pitch] and the entire process to get there, and it was absolutely amazing. I檝e been blown away by every pitch today. I檓 super energized by this weekend by all of you. Thank you for all of the work and the engagement you had with Pioneer Weekend.
I檝e been blown away by every pitch today. I檓 super energized by this weekend by all of you. Thank you for all of the work and the engagement you had with Pioneer Weekend.
President Harris added that she was deeply engaged by the pitches and inspired to think about new possible partnerships.
Blanchard followed up by inviting the Pioneer Weekend participants to seek out additional resources at the Wilson Center Catalyst, an idea incubator and fund, whose student co-coordinators were on hand for Q&A.
Meet The Teams
Winning Team Pitches
First place: iMEDiate, an accessible healthcare solution featuring all-hours vending box for over-the-counter medical supplies. Team Grinnovators: Quynh Dao 25, Khanh Do 27, Trung Le 25, Huy Nguyen 25, and Phuong Tran 26.
Second place: Dorm Deals, an online, reliable marketplace for students to sell and buy second-hand items. Team Thrifters: Muhammad Khalid 26, Sauryanshu Khanal 25, and Devanshu Pandey 26.
Third place: RecapEd, a software solution that turns class recordings into bite-sized highlights. Team RecapEd: Meghna Adhikari 24, Shrey Agrawal 24, Avaash Bhattarai 26, and Vinicius Ono 24.
All Other Team Pitches (in alphabetical order)
- Carbon Cache, software linking consumers to companies, institutions, and governments that are impacting global carbon footprint, gamified with CarbonCash. Team Carbon Cache: Haden Horstman 26, Alexander Lembke 26, Cubin Molzen 26, and Tan Mukherjee 26.
- ConnectuAll, a campus event calendar app for community engagement. Team Fun and Creative: Luis Domingues 26, Patrick Sales Garcia 25, Beatriz Polo Diz 27, Gabriela Ro偶nawka 26, and Thain谩 Theordoro 27.
- Graduation Fairies, curating community resources for visiting families at graduation time. Team Graduation Fairies: Betel Aga 27, Ananya Manchanda 26, and Linda Pham 24.
- 黑料百科 Student Academic Forum, publishing student scholarly work in a journal format while upholding 黑料百科 standard for excellence. Team Academic Alliance: Chris Cecchi 26, John Miller 26, Bryant Nguyen 25, Alexander Nistor 26, and Sophia Ramalli 27.
- InterGen, an initiative to facilitate intergenerational community activities. Team InterGen: Greyson Blanchard 26, Alex Carlon 25, Paata Kaloiani 25, and Dennis Mboya 27.
- SilverFork, offering chef-led cooking classes that double to combat hunger in the community with good quality meals. Team SilverFork: Katie Babb 26, Elijah Gallagher 26, and Candice Lu 26.
- VRZheimer, a virtual-reality, memory-skills game for dementia patients who have little access to more expensive treatments and therapy. Team VRZheimer: Mohammad Chowdhury 27, Gun Woo Kim 27, Slok Rajbhandari 27, and Adarsh Sharma 27.
Sponsorship
This year Pioneer Weekend is made possible by a generous gift from Maijid Moujaled 14 and Ham Serunjogi 16, with additional funding from the Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership, and a lot of work from the Wilson Center student employees.