My entrepreneurship story is when I met Daniel Cane, one of the founders of the program Blackboard which is used by many schools today as an e-learning type of program. As a student, he began thinking of ways that would make it easier for teachers to communicate with their students. He began brainstorming with a TA from one of his classes at Cornell. They went through many ideas such as posting notes on a bulletin board outside of the classroom but they felt that none of these ideas were efficient enough to communicate effectively with students. They finally stumbled upon the idea of forming a website where students can post questions about the lectures and assignments. This website was the beginnings of Blackboard LLC. Daniel and his TA then merged with two others and eventually sold the company for an outrageous amount of money. Since then, Daniel has been putting all of his time into inventing other useful products, some that have been successful and some that have not.
I enrolled in ENT 3003 because I wanted to get a basis of where my entrepreneurial adventure should begin. Nobody in my close family is an entrepreneur so I would enjoy getting some insight on how to start the process of starting a company from scratch. I hope to learn when to be patient and when to decide that a project is no longer worth working on.
Hi Jonathan, what a fascinating experience! We actually used the Blackboard system when I was at a previous school. Not everyone has to be a Steve Jobs type visionary. Sometimes it's simply identifying a problem and coming up with a solution that someone is willing to pay for. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteRobert Winter ENT3003
Forgot to add the link to my post...http://rustywinter.com/my-entrepreneurship-story-week-2/
DeleteHello Johnathan!
ReplyDeleteWow! That sounds like a great experience. I bet Daniel would be a great mentor for learning the process of a company starting from scratch. He was in Forbes Magazine at one point for modernizing medicine, which is pretty amazing. My story is similar in the fact that, communication is key. Communicating to any audience in order to get your message across is important. Check out my story at: http://entuf.blogspot.com/2016/01/my-entrepreneurship-story.html