 Welcome to the fourth of our entrepreneurship panel sessions brought to you by the John Martenson Center for Engineering as well as the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. A special thanks to Professor Young Lu for organizing these panel sessions and for all the panelists for making time this afternoon. My name is Arnold Chen and I'm the managing director for the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship on campus. And for the current students who are listening, I'll be uploading into the chat a few documents. The first document just so you know is just a high level overview of all of the different resources that are available to students. And then the second would be a one pager that describes our particularly our Center for Entrepreneurship. And the last one will be a call out for our annual business model competition which crucial knows much about having been the winner as well as Katie back in 2017. So today you'll be hearing from four alumni entrepreneurs who just a few years ago were sitting where you were sitting today. And we're going to be hearing about their startups and their journey. So first I'd like to introduce our two moderators for the panel session today. The first is Isha as she mentioned earlier. She's a senior in computer engineering and psychology. She's participated in business competition and is interested in going to graduate school to create technology that can potentially be used to create new industries. And Fisher who also introduced himself earlier is also a senior in computer engineering. He's been part of Dr. Lou's research team for the past year and a half. Fisher is aiming to be an entrepreneur and is working on submitting an SBIR proposal to help fund his startup. Both Isha and Fisher are co-leaders of the COVID-19 team in Dr. Lou's lab and they'll be interviewing our panelists. Isha and Fisher. Thank you Dr. Chen. Thank you. Yeah so thankfully we have some great people attending the panel today. I'll go ahead and introduce our panelists. First of all we have Kushal. He is the co-founder and chief product officer of Glimpse. He's currently a senior studying computer engineering at Purdue set to graduate in three years. The company he co-founded Glimpse was the winner of the Burden D. Morgan Business Model Competition. Glimpse does product placements in Arabian bees and has received an investment from Y Combinator which is the world's top startup accelerator which has built companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart and Twitch and he is currently building his startup full-time. Catherine is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Omnivis. Catherine works at Omnivis where they produce devices to detect infectious diseases to prevent wide-scale outbreaks. She believes health care should be a right, not a privilege. She received her education at Purdue University and the California Polytechnic State University where she studied biomedical engineering. And finally we have Everett Berry who is the CEO of Perceive now known as Visitor X. He's a graduate of Purdue University. He used to be in the ChemSquared team as well with Dr. Liu. He studied computer engineering and he is the principal investigator for a National Science Foundation SBIR proposal where he received a federal grant. So those are our panelists today. Before we move on to any questions, Isha is going to go over a entrepreneurship course that Purdue is currently offering. Yeah so I'll quickly talk about Build My Startup. So Build My Startup is a course designed for companies in execution and expansion stages. The faculty advisors and the industrial mentors will help the students improve their value propositions, identify markets, assess business models, create product prototypes, and develop strategies for raising funds. The students must have already completed an initial assessment of the value proposition, target markets, and customers. And this team is designed for student entrepreneurs that are already building their startups and the student must have already registered their companies before joining this team. So this is a new VIP team at Purdue Vertically Integrated Projects. Isha. So before moving on, I'd like to ask the panelists to take a couple minutes to talk about their journey and what motivated you and inspired you to move into entrepreneurship. So Cuchon, could you go ahead and start us off? Yeah, thanks for having me guys. But I'd love to talk about how I started off with glimpse. So actually what motivated me to get involved in entrepreneurship was in high school, my senior year of high school, I started a tutoring business in my town. And that went really well. I had like three employees as tutoring at 30 students. And that's when I first got involved in entrepreneurship and I really fell in love with the entire process. So coming into college, I was looking for ways to get involved with entrepreneurship on campus. And that's when I joined an entrepreneurship professional fraternity called Delta Mukappa. And that's where I met Akash. He's one of my co-founders. He was my big DMK. And so we started working on side projects for a whole like a few months for entire semester, trying to get to know each other better and starting to build working on problems and trying to build something to get it off the ground. And I think that's what really sparked the glimpse. We started off doing like small college startups. So we would do like campus deliveries. We were doing like try before you buy service for clothing. So we created a business where people could basically rent clothing. We'd go and pick it up from the store. They could try it out in their dorm. And if they like it, they purchase it. If they don't return it, we tried a lot of different ideas. And then that's when my third co-founder, Anuj joined. And we started working on pop-up shops on campuses. And this is really where things started to take off. So we started doing pop-ups on campuses and we would basically cold-call brands tell them like, hey, do you want to get in front of tens of thousands of students? We can help you do that. And so we started getting in contact with different brands, bringing them onto campuses and tried to create like experiential retail marketing initiatives. And I think the entire process of just doing things that we wanted to and creating a product that we really enjoyed and passionate about was what started us getting involved in entrepreneurship. And this was when I was a freshman. So we really got our toes dipped in into the world of entrepreneurship. And then going into sophomore year of college is when we really got serious about it. And then we started looking for ways to scale the business. So we were doing things like one-off consultant type pop-ups for these businesses. But we were looking for ways to use software to scale it. And that's when we stumbled across the idea of Glimps using Airbnb and other short-term rentals. You get products from these brands placed as kind of like a marketing initiative. And I guess that's where the whole journey started for us. And then we got funded by Y Combinator and we're working on it full-time now. Awesome. Congratulations. Catherine, could you go ahead and tell us about your business? Yeah, sure. And how I got here. So I did biomedical engineering as an undergrad. And I really wanted to do that because when I was a little kid, somebody in my family had died from full-blown AIDS. And it was the first time I understood kind of what disease was. And so that stuck with me throughout the years. And I go to college and I'm a little bit bored. I liked my classes, but I didn't know where I wanted to go next. And I did a study abroad trip and was working in this rural area in Thailand with engineers without borders and began to learn about appropriate technology. How can you bring medical devices or other types of technology more out to the user, make healthcare more accessible? And so I was graduating from my degree and I'm sitting there going, I still don't feel ready yet. I want to do something with appropriate technology. I don't know what. And so I went to Purdue for my PhD and I see Steve Worley is on the Zoom call. He was my PhD advisor in the mechanical engineering department. And I wanted to build up my tool belt. And when I was there, there was a gal in one of the labs I was working in who was telling me about this disease cholera. And it was kind of like all these things came together that my love of appropriate technology, my love of making healthcare more accessible. And I have learned cholera was something that didn't exist in Haiti for 100 years until the earthquake. And it came to the country and it went across the country in a matter of weeks. And it created outbreaks and deaths until really recently. And it's not just Haiti, there's 41 countries around the world that have cholera. So I kind of said, this is the moment, this is the moment where things are coming together. What can I do? And I've been working on my PhD on a variety of different things and decided to apply some of the work I was doing to see if we could do some sort of detection platform. And particularly with cholera, this waterborne pathogen. And saw that it was successful. So how does this become a company? Well, I never thought that it would become a company, I'll be honest, but started to enter these pitch competitions around campus, like the Shurs Innovation competition and the Burton Morgan business plan competition. And kind of started to get that feedback. And that was really exciting. And then started to go out more into the community and talk to people and see if there is that interest and create that fire. And so we started the company officially in 2017. I was completing a postdoc after that at Purdue and then did a few accelerators after that to see how we could take off and finally moved to San Francisco and got funding for the company and have been going ever since. That's awesome. I'm glad you took advantage of a lot of things in college because I think a lot of people here will be interested in hearing your experiences with those programs. And finally, Everett, thank you for coming. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey and what motivated you to start? Yeah, for sure. Hello, everyone. I know it's it's really an honor to be with these other great panelists. In fact, Khrushcheva was just talking to Akash last hour on another Zoom call. So in Catherine, we haven't met yet, but I'm also in SF and so we're about to connect when we get the opportunity. But yeah, so Steve was a camera technology company. We started several years ago while still in college with Dr. Lou who's also on the call. And we were fortunate to write and receive at this point, nearly like 1.8 million and NSF grants, non-dilutive grants to kind of build out the research technology for the company, which involves behavior recognition. And today, as visitor X, we provide a UX research product for real products. So think faucets, furniture, mattresses, one of our customers, the largest faucet maker in the US. And we record video clips of customers interacting with these products and and help them kind of design them better and market them to the right set of users. So yeah, we are dealing with the physical world a lot and COVID has had a massive impact on our business positive and negative. So excited to be here and tell you all about it. Awesome. Thanks guys. Okay, so we'll get right into the questions. We got questions from a lot of people that registered for the panel. And one of the most popular questions was, how did you get your initial idea for your startup? So we've heard some talks about that so far. But I'll take it a step further and ask, how do you know when you have an idea and you're ready to transition it to a business? How do you know when you're ready to take something full time and really start developing that into a commercial opportunity? So anyone can just jump in and answer if they have anything to say on this matter. Yeah, I think I can go ahead. I think in terms of first coming up with an idea, I think that in terms of coming up with ideas for me personally, it was just looking at problems in our every day and just starting to work on it with people who are passionate about starting a business. So for me, I was just working with Akash and Anuj on the various different problems. And I think that just getting stuck on solving something, even if we didn't have an idea at first, but we had a problem to solve, it helped us get to that solution. So really what we realized, and I think the best way we've seen to start is just find a problem you're passionate about and start doing customer discovery. So find people who have that problem of similar set of users who deal with that problem every day and run interviews with them, figure out like, what are their major issues? What are their major concerns? And I think one of the strongest points for us is we have the .edu email. So as college students, we can send emails like marketing heads at tons of different companies, which really worked for us and they would be able to get on the call with us for 30 minutes. And so that was really helpful for us to identify that a lot of these direct to consumer online companies want to get their products into the physical world. I think that's where we did a lot of the learnings from. So when you have a problem, in mind first identify the problem, find people who share that set of problems and then try to interview them, see if there is something that's similar across all of them. Once you identify that, you can definitely build a solution based off feedback you get from them. Cool. So you'd say it's about essentially validating that the problems you want to solve actually exist. And that's how you determine if your idea is marketable. Yeah. Yeah. I think if a common set of people share the same problem and the market size of large enough, then it's definitely a business that you want to attack. So a lot of you guys started working on your ideas when you're students. And a lot of the people that are interested in this panel are also students that want to develop their commercial ideas. So how do you balance that sort of work life between your academics and your efforts growing your company? I can go on this one. So one of the things is it's really helpful if you have awesome founders that can help balance some of that load, for sure. I think I got really lucky. My founders are professors at Purdue. So if you see them around, you should go say hi to them. But also balancing the workload, it's not easy. If you really want to be successful, it's not easy. Somebody on this panel said that they're working right now full-time and they're going to be graduating in a few years. For me, it was part of my thesis as well. So I like to say it was a two for one. I got to work on a thesis and do some of the underlying work. But I also got to do the pitch competitions, which I think helped me when I had to do my defense because I already knew how to talk about it to all kinds of people. So I think that was a huge way that helped me balance my workload, for sure. And just kind of seeing how many times I could get a two for one experience out of something. Yeah, I think Catherine's absolutely correct because I think for many including myself, there actually is no balance. If you want to pursue a company, many people end up dropping out or they let their grades completely go to the wayside, unless it's maybe a research opportunity, which is a slightly different case. But the great news is the college is a great time to explore ideas. And a lot of the very, very early stuff is exploration and talking to people. And so no one was more open to talking to me than they were when I was like, hey, I'm a student. I would love to ask you a few questions about your situation. We talked to the CMO of Adidas and CMO of Nike and a bunch of these extremely high level people that I emailed with my Purdue.edu address at Lawstone College. So there are pros and cons, but I think if you're trying to maintain your GPA while really doing it, it's probably losing proposition. They've said .edu address. I can attest when my .edu email went away. I was really sad because people are less likely to talk to me for that product market fit. So take advantage of it. That email is awesome. Awesome. So as executives in these startup companies, you obviously have to work a lot of time and initially maybe for not that much reward. The idea is that it works out in the long run. So to be such a hard worker, what kind of skills do you think you need to succeed as an entrepreneur, especially a young student entrepreneur? I think the biggest skill is just ability to learn and try new things. So when I started working on Glimpse, so just to preface a little bit, in high school and just background, I'm very engineering focused, very numbers and data driven. But now I'm working in a business that's very marketing oriented, more real world product oriented. So be able to shift that mindset going from just being pure, trying to build technology aspect to understanding the marketing aspect of a business is really important. And I think I had to pick up a lot of skills that I didn't have before, like being able to sell, being able to negotiate things like that, understanding the marketing landscape and how to build a product are just things that I had no experience with before. But I think just being open to learning and trying things out of your comfort zone is probably the most key and needed skill to start a company. Awesome. Okay, well, one of the biggest topics right now is obviously the coronavirus and the pandemic we're facing. And a pandemic is obviously going to affect how all companies do business and especially startup businesses. So Isha is going to ask a few questions about how the pandemic has affected your businesses and how you guys have adapted to it. Okay, yeah, thanks for sure. So we have a question for Catherine specifically. How do you think the world of research and development specifically for biotechnology will change post COVID? What can we continue to do post COVID that we've been doing during COVID? So the one thing I will say about biotechnology, so I'm in California, the second to that everything shut down, everybody said, Nope, you can keep coming in, you're doing biotechnology, even if you're not doing COVID some discovery you make could help us with COVID. Go, go, go. So I think that this is actually a very interesting time to be in biotechnology because suddenly everyone I know understands diagnostics, everyone's an expert in sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, limited detection. And I'm going, Dad, you know what that is now? Really? I never, I never thought that this would be the day. So I think that this holds a really interesting future for biotechnology because people are getting why diagnostics are important. I think people understood why vaccines are important, but now that nobody wants to get SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, everyone's like, Yes, I am on board. When is the vaccine coming out? I'm watching the news every day. Come on, let's go. In terms of also going into work versus not, I think it also showed a lot of the scientists and engineers they got to kind of go in. They got to do the testing, but it really helped show too how, while you can do some of the remote work, if you're not that scientist or that engineer, or maybe you're just writing a grant, so you don't really need to go in. But I think it really showed how to create that communication, how to get that work done. And yeah, the appreciation behind biotechnology has really, really taken off nowadays. And I hated that it came to be a pandemic to have to be at that point of understanding. But it is very interesting from being a founder and seeing this huge shift in the community and understanding. Yes, congratulations actually. I don't know if you're announcing it or not, so on the grant front, I think it has been a good time for you guys, right? It's been all right. Yeah, it's been all right. Cool. We've been following along too. We have been following along too. So yeah. I have another pandemic related question for Kushal this time. So for Kushal, how has your company used the COVID crisis to foster innovation in whether technical in your programming or how your team works? Because I think you guys are a team, a group of three founders, is that correct? Yeah, it's three of us. And yeah, COVID definitely hit our business a little bit hard when it first came because we are doing product placements in Airbnb's. And as you know, when COVID hit, definitely short-term rentals, hospitality market took a really big hit. I think what really got tested was our perseverance and continuing to push through the business. So in March, when bookings in these Airbnb's went very, very low, a lot of the work we'd done, we'd seen basically kind of diminished for the entire month. And what we kept pushing, and what the good thing is, is that luckily bookings came back, state restrictions have been lifted and Airbnb's at the same point it is now that it was in January. So bookings have come back. The thing that's changed is how travel looks like in the US. So I guess August, about one year ago, there would have been a lot of international travel. Instead, a lot of travel is now happening to getaway stays about 100 to 300 miles away from big urban centers. So like right out of New York or right out of LA, there's a lot of travel. So we really got tested in our perseverance as well as ability to adapt. So we had a lot of properties in our platform that were in these major cities, but we quickly adapted and onboarded a lot more properties that were in some of these getaway stays, whether it's like upstate New York or like Big Bear Lake out of LA. I think that's really where we had to make a quick business change, but it did pay off and Airbnb bookings are coming back. Good to hear. And then, Everett, you mentioned in the beginning that the pandemic has affected your business both positively and negatively. Would you like to speak on that? Certainly. So we deal with a lot of retail and places with high-foot traffic, and I think we are seeing a complete transformation and acceleration of things that were already happening before, but they're happening in a drastically accelerated timeframe. So we have completely re-imagined our product to be less about foot traffic and converting people in the moment to more about sort of brand engagement and experience and converting people when they buy online potentially later. So yeah, we have actually leaned into our largest customers, and to be quite frank, some of our smallest customers either cancel contracts or have shut down or it was a really crazy time. I had one contract canceled because of force majeure, which means act of God. So in California, when they forced everyone to shut down, that was the impetus for one of our customers to cancel our contract. So yeah, it was a massive impact, but I'm actually heartened by it a little bit because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or once-in-a-decade opportunity, shall we say, for the way we do business in the US to completely change and several elements of our product fit into that narrative. So yeah, I would echo what the other panelists have said, and that I think anytime you have massive structural change under foot, it's a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. Thank you guys for your insight. I think for sure we'll have some questions regarding business life. Thanks Sichuan. Okay, so maybe Everett and Catherine can answer this. For day-to-day life, what does day-to-day life look like for an executive from a startup fresh out of university, just in a general sense? Well, it's highly different. Most every day is different. I typically do it in weeks, so I have kind of things I do on Monday and things I do on Wednesday, and then also between months it varies. So for me, we are in about a six-month fundraising cycle. So six months ago I was raising around, which means I was doing entirely VC means and kind of content around that, and that's happening again now. And then between those times, typically there's been something that's like falling apart in business that requires some focus. So over the summer, I was actually back in Indiana at our Indianapolis office working with our engineering team on reliability and kind of when you shift from smaller customers to larger customers, there's an expanded set of requirements to deal with. So yeah, it's quite varied. And the only thing I try to do or I'm working on doing is just trying to be more consistent, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time to deal with the variability. So yeah, not a very specific answer, but it varies widely. I can second that so much when you're saying, you know, it changes day-to-day week-to-week month-to-month. I'm going, yep, changes hour-to-hour sometimes. When I first left and started kind of doing this full-time, I eventually just had to sit down and say, okay, Monday's is to focus on product, Tuesday's is to focus on marketing, Wednesday's is to focus on finance, Thursday's operations, Friday, because things do change so much. And sometimes, yeah, you'll get out of, you know, a couple hour-long meetings back-to-back and suddenly something's on fire and you've got to go fix it. And you're going, okay, well, there went my marketing day. And that's okay. I think flexibility is incredibly important to have and a lot of hustle at the same time. And that's kind of what helps with that variability. I think a lot of entrepreneurs like to wear many hats, so it's a little bit easier to navigate around that. So yes, you're going to be wearing all the hats when you first finish your, there's not going to, you can't say I don't like finance, so I'm not going to handle it. Finance is kind of the core of what you're doing. You better be able to handle that. Or marketing. You can ask me any day, marketing is not my specialty at all, but I had to do it. I had to work on it. So then you look to hire people and raise that money and grow so that there are people that can help wear some of those hats over time. But right away out of school when you're kind of doing this, yeah, you're bouncing around doing everything day to day. And I can't say that one day was ever like the previous day. So what do you think has been the hardest part of business life so far? I'll let Catherine ask. Yeah, I was going to say the hardest part. I think, I don't know if it's the hardest, but it is the one that you're always putting a lot of energy into is one, team dynamics and team culture, because you want to cultivate something that is incredibly positive and that you work as a united front to get something out there. I would say that that's one. The second that I've heard from a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of programs that I've been in is that sometimes entrepreneurship or being a founder can be a little bit isolating because you are kind of at the forefront. You are trying to figure things out and you're trying to be that steady ship to navigate around. And so that can be a little bit nuts sometimes. Yeah, I'd agree. I think I like to kind of push individual projects forward, but it's a come around to the view that a whole day spent meeting with people and listening to them is actually worked on as well. It doesn't have to just be pitch decks or spreadsheets or reading codes. So yeah, the communication aspect and if you can really be the multiplier for your team, if you can offload things that you do, you know, that's I think difficult, especially if at first those things might be done in a different way or, you know, in brutal honesty, a less effective way. But in the long run, the training and focusing on the collaboration of the whole team is kind of your job versus just doing things and then like passing down, passing down orders. So that was a big shift for me, still ongoing, but I definitely agree with Catherine that just the raw emotional communication of a startup is probably one of the most important, important and difficult things. Would you say your experiences are similar? Yeah, yeah, I definitely think so. Right now, we're going through Y Combinator and so we're at the stage where we go through this three month accelerator program to try to build the business, get it off the ground, and then we go and raise a seed round of financing, which our demo day is actually next week on Monday and that's when we present to like a thousand investors try to raise new round of financing. So like the last few months has just been straight, like working nonstop, trying to get everything off the ground. I think some of the hardest things for us in the early days is operations, operationalizing everything, figuring out who's going to handle what and staying in order, especially when we're trying to move as fast as possible. I know Catherine talked about things breaking, you're trying to get something done one day and then something breaks and you're like, oh, I got to put my goal for today on the whole and fix this issue is having another client. I think these are problems we all face and it's definitely been really pleasant. So one thing you guys brought up was the team atmosphere of your employees. So as fresh graduates especially, a lot of students might not have a ton of leadership experience. So what do you think the best way is to encourage and be able to lead your employees? And how do you think you can most effectively foster a positive atmosphere? Well lately, I've been working on being more straightforward with expectations. So coming out of school I've been found it was difficult to kind of say what I was really feeling or say in a way that was productive for the people. But this often causes more problems later than the initial maybe difficult reaction that someone might have. So for example, we had someone who was working on our hardware and one of the things we did during COVID was we were transitioning to more of a software company. So our computer vision software can now run on many more types of cameras besides our very specific cameras that we built. And you know, so I had to say to our hardware person, look, you have three months to learn these kind of the set of software skills or else like there's really no place for you on the team anymore. And you know, this is not something I would have communicated before. I think but experiences taught me that not saying the like severity of the situation, the need of the team, and then like being frustrated later and everyone's freaking out would be worse. So I think that's one thing I find many people I talk to straight up college are they actually feel very strongly, very passionate about certain things, but they don't really want to surface it because you know, someone might get a little bit offended or a little bit scared or panic. And actually you want to know about if they're feeling that way about what you're feeling like right away. So that's just personally I don't know that I'm working on at the moment that I think has been broadly very helpful for me. Would you agree, Catherine? Do you have similar experiences? I mean, absolutely. But also to add to it is when I was having some troubles in my own company with particularly like culture and things like that as I sat down and I had studied how all these companies had cultural values. And at first, you know, I have this engineering background, I was like, cultural values, it doesn't feel like it means that much. It's just like five words, somebody chose like happiness, humility, and I was like, what does that mean? But then I said, I'm going to try this. And I came up with five cultural values that we had on transparency, communication, you know, showing gratitude to work together as a team. You know, when you show up really show up things like that. And then what I noticed is that when I started sticking to my cultural values and sharing this directly with my team, they also started to reflect these cultural values. And when we weren't, I don't know how this has happened, we keep very open communication because that is a cultural value, we check each other on it. Sometimes it's hard to be transparent, I will be honest. Sometimes it is so hard to be transparent, but that is one of our core values is transparency. And so that's, that's really helped me. So I think that's one way that it's really helps working as a team and helping my leadership skills is to create this idea of, what do I really want my company to look like? How do I want people to truly behave as a team? And so that was one really big thing that I would say helped quite a bit. And then the second one is I am willing to be with my team to take out the garbage at night. I'm willing to be with my team to, you know, run the air into FedEx. And I think that that's incredibly important because when you're there to build a shelf together, or a chair, or put together lab equipment, or figure out some software that makes you want to like drop, kick, kick your computer across the room. These are huge team building experiences because you're doing it together. You're not acting like there's some strange hierarchy. People respect you a lot more because you're willing to sit down and build that shelf or to get angry at a piece of software and start yelling at it or something, but it helps create that team dynamic and that leadership. And then the final one that I would say is that when your employees shine, you shine. So I think people are really ready to take a lot of credit for things. But when other people on your team shine, you also shine. So like, let people go do what they need to do, get out of their way, let them do their job and let them shine. That is a huge part of being a leader. Thanks. For future entrepreneurs, if there's software that's making Catherine pull her hair out, you know, maybe you should ask her about it, you know, it could be an opportunity. Yeah, so on the topic of team atmosphere, one of the most prevalent sources of feedback I got when starting to write my NSF SBIR proposal was that I need to have a co-founder I can trust for my company. And that founding company is many, many times easier if you have someone that you trust or someone you're friends with to found it with you. So a lot of students might not have someone that's exactly like that, not immediately. So what do you think you should look for when determining is this person just a friend or can I found a company with this person? What kind of skills do you think that person needs to bring to your company? And if you don't have this kind of person, how do you think you can find one especially now in this virtual kind of world we live in? Yeah, I think the most important thing is I think shared values. So if you can find people you share the same values with or the same goals, I think getting started with them is probably the best way. So Akash, Anuj, and I, the three of us, we were all in Delta Bukapa. So we were already in this community as very entrepreneurially focused. And the way we started working was starting to work on side projects together. So it wasn't a commitment, we weren't starting a company off day one, it was more to get to know each other. I think that worked really well. We became really close, like we're basically all three opposite brothers now. We live together, we're very close, but it started because we're looking to do a side project together. And I think even if you don't have a co-founder in mind, if you have someone who you know or someone in the community that you're a part of, you probably share some set of values, and you could get along and starting to work together with them on side projects, seeing where something goes for 30 days, seeing if you work well together, it's probably the way I found to get started the best. I see. Cool. One question that we got, and I just wanted to hear your guys' opinions on it because I thought it was an interesting question. Someone asked, as a student without entrepreneurial experience, do you think it's better to build experience at a company beforehand, or should you just work on studying entrepreneurship and starting a business on your own as soon as possible, if you have an idea already? So for me personally, I think getting started, you can start anytime, and some of the best experience comes from trying something and learning. I think no experience is the best experience, to be honest. But experience doesn't matter. So my freshman year, I did a internship at the startup in California. They're called iFi, and they build these AI-based nano-stores. And for them, I learned a lot. So I was doing a lot of different things for them there, and one of the things was selling, and that's where I really got into the side of business development. And combining that with a tech background, I think that's what really helped me start this business. And I think that you don't need to have a lot of experience to start. You just need to have, I think, something you're passionate about, and the rest of the pieces will fall online. I remember when Anuj, Akash, and I started, there were so many things we didn't know. We didn't know how to onboard a customer, how do you invoice a customer, how to price. Like these are things that if you try to focus on from day one, you won't make any progress because you're too focused on the small details. I think if you just look at the big picture, if you find a problem you're passionate about, you can get started any day. And I think that really no experience or experience, you can still get to the same place at the end of the day. Yeah, I would say if you don't want to work on your startup right away, don't join a big company because you'll stay there forever. Mine is much better. That makes sense. Yeah, I don't know if there's a perfect experience that you need. I can definitely say I had zero business experience, but by remaining coachable and just trying to do everything, like biomedship at Purdue, trying bitch competitions that I could find, doing accelerators, whoever would accept me and talk to me, that was the part of the way that worked for me. But I think everyone's going to be so different. And it's hard to fit into a box, which I know is a really frustrating answer because you're just like, no, tell me tell me the exact answer to my path to this question. It really does depend, but you can find ways to be coachable. Yeah, I agree. I definitely don't think that a lack of work experience is a giant barrier to entry, especially because of how many entrepreneurship programs places like Purdue offer. And we have about 15 minutes left. So I'll go ahead and pass it back to Isha and she will ask about opportunities to help students build their entrepreneurship skills. Yeah, thanks Isher. So I have some questions here about opportunities to help students, but before that I have a question specifically for Everett. So Everett, can you talk about how you acquired your largest customer? Yes, our second largest customer showed them our product. So that's what you want. When that starts happening, that's a great time. But to get our second largest customer, I connected with, I was actually a home builder in Indianapolis who I knew was connected to the guy I wanted to speak to at this company. So it was actually, it was research working backwards on LinkedIn in general, and then kind of purposeful introductions and relationship building. So very different, but in the enterprise space, this is often I think how it's done. I know of one company where their investors just called their first 10 customers and was like, why don't we sign you up? And they basically said yes. So it's very different in different sectors, but in enterprises generally some sort of relationship thing. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, cool. So I'll move on to the opportunities to help students. So for any of you, what kind of support was available for you in school related to entrepreneurship or was there none? Can you guys also talk a little bit about that? Yeah, okay. I think I can start. There was a lot of support for us in particular from Purdue and from some of the communities on campus. So coming to Purdue as I mentioned, I joined Delta Moog Kappa. I think that fraternity was really helpful in building the entrepreneur community on campus. So there used to be this building called Angle. It's still a club organization on campus and Akasha Nuj and I would literally spend like hours there every day, like from 8pm to like 1am, just working every single day. And I think that that was really helpful having a shared space to work. On top of that entrepreneurship 200, that certificate program class, I took it as a freshman and I was in the learning community. I think that was really instrumental. My professor was Mike Pasady and he did such a good job at sharing his experience, his personal experience of starting a company that I think it really motivated me and I know a lot of other students in the class to work on something. And I think that he was instrumental in opening my ideas, my eyes, the idea of starting a company and how accessible it is for students to do so. And then also alongside that, I know Purdue has a lot of resources. So Firestarter is a program for boundary runs and they help you get your company off the ground. They have like weekly meetings where they give you advice and tips. And I think that that's really useful for someone who has an idea and kind of wants to go through kind of like a class environment to get the company off the ground. And then on top of that alumni have been really helpful. Especially right now, we're raising another round of financing and alumni connections in Silicon Valley have been really helpful for us to get some money and like start investor conversations and pitch people. So I think if you can reach out to Purdue alumni or start building those connections, that's really, really valuable. Yeah, totally. So I think three Purdue alumni are angel investors in our company. Not to brag, but I introduced the glimpse guys to one of their angel investors. So I do think that's, that's a big part of it. Being on this call is a great start. You can, I think, email any of us and we'll always talk to you. And then I think our research too, I love research, still a big technology person, you know, and almost too much in the eyes of some VCs, but that's okay. And so I was involved with a lot of student research at Purdue. And honestly, that's where that's where the passion came from. That's where the opportunities came from. And Dr. Liu, who is on this call was, was one of the great, great influences in my life. So yeah, for me, it was a lot of research opportunities at Purdue. For me, it was my co-founders or professors had had experience already at Purdue. So they were able to kind of guide me and say, Hey, some of these resources exist. Go take a look. I think that was one. The second is some of the competitions that they have around campus that I mentioned earlier in the call. I don't know if they do Shers or not anymore. The Shers Innovation Competition. That was the very first one I ever did before I knew what the heck a pitch was. And then the Burton Morgan as well. And then also just going to the Foundry and people are very receptive to talk to you there. People want to talk to you. And I got an entrepreneur in residence at the time for a year or two who was excellent. Loved working with her was just a huge saving grace for me. And then finally, I know, like somebody mentioned entrepreneurship 200, or I forget what the class was called, but also in the grad school, they have bio medship for biomedical engineers at the business college that comes together and merges teams that are business students and engineering, which is fantastic to find that product market fit or any like nodal I core kind of programs is really good to find that product market fit. Yeah, we encourage everybody to take advantage of all the opportunities that Purdue provides. Have any of you studied abroad? And if so, how vital do you think a study abroad experience is in relation to starting your own business? Well, I went into within a field of some classes because I was working on this company. So I had to take more credits. So I guess it's not that I studied abroad, but I want somewhere else for my undergrad. And I think it was huge for me because it changed my entire path of wanting to do appropriate technology rather than work on pacemakers and stance. So for me, it was a huge opportunity and it completely changed what I wanted to do. I think I can ask one more question about opportunities to help students and we'll have a final wrap up question. So what do you think universities can improve on to support student entrepreneurship or what do you wish that was there to help support you as you took on this journey? So I've been agitating for Purdue to set up their own venture fund. IU has a venture fund. So I really think Purdue should have one. But in all seriousness, I think it's just the facilitating connections. I'm not sure what the current status of the anvil is. I have heard that it's slightly changing or something, but that was a big, big part of it for me could go ahead and out with all other students that were interested in startups in a bit of an informal way. So more of those spaces is definitely helpful for students. There are actually really good questions in the audience chat box. Sorry, Kushal, were you going to speak on this topic before I move on to the next question? Yeah, I was just going to add, I think one thing that could be really helpful is even in the very engineering focus classes, tying in entrepreneurship. So like EC368 data structures algorithms, or maybe EC20875 Python for data science, I can see a lot of applications of how you could tie in industry type of projects where you have to actually create something that can potentially provide business value. And so you have that engineering side of that component, but then also you have the opposite side where you see how can I turn something I have built for a classroom project into seeing does it have market viability, how can that work? I think that can foster like a community or get into the mindset of students to look at like everything from a business perspective. I think that that could be something that can be interesting. We have one good question from the chat. What advice would you give to students who want to pursue a business idea but might have student debt that might dissuade them? I think you should pay off the debt first. So I've actually gone into debt and of course this company in some cases. So I think you should actually have some reserves before you do it. Yeah, our work part time while you have a job that really is helping with that debt and getting those bills paid off for sure. It's tough as an entrepreneur and there is a likelihood that you can go into debt. We have another question about Purdue education. So one person would like to ask about how a Purdue education reflects on the startups of entrepreneurs and what they have learned in class that helps them the most in running their businesses. You know, I think one of the biggest things that I learned from Purdue and class in general is a solid work ethic. I think that a lot of the things that we do in class may not directly translate into everyday to day work and operations. But the basic foundation of working hard is what has been built through our classes. And then a lot of the classes that have been really instrumental I think came a lot from working hard as well as an entrepreneurship side that's a certificate program learning from past experience hearing other entrepreneurs do something like this before and what their thought process is like that's been really helpful in getting off the ground. Yeah, if I could interject for a moment speaking about university opportunities at the beginning of the lecture or sorry the panel it's not a lecture. We talked about the build my startup VIP team and that's for teams and students that already have their business idea but Kushal also mentioned entrepreneurship 200. So I would that is for students who don't have this idea yet and aren't ready to take this idea to business. So if you're interested in entrepreneurship I think those are the two top things to look for. I also did fire starter myself and can recommend it. It's modeled after the National Science Foundation's iCorps program. So those are three great opportunities for all students to look into. Fisher if I can interject also our business model competition all you need to have is a rough idea and it's a great opportunity to flush it out and as well as two of the panelists win some money to get your your startup going. There's actually a question about business competitions as well. If you've been through a business competition which I think all of you have how did the experience help you or how did it not help you? One thing that helped is it made me get my butt in gear to have a really good pitch and to have a good plan if it was like an actual business plan type of competition and also the questions from the judges that is amazing practice because sometimes I mean especially when you're starting somebody's going to come out of left field and you're going to go I did not think about that so I think that those are some really great ways that helped. It also helped me get a thicker skin for some of the types of judges that was asked certain questions because people are going to question you no matter what you just have to have the conviction to know why it can be done and so I think that that's also incredibly helpful. Yeah I definitely agree with what Catherine said and I think one of the really valuable things especially for the Byrne de Morgan competition is that it provides a lot of structure for your company so the way that one works in particular is they it's a you have to basically build a business canvas and you're basically pitching your business model so a lot of the a lot of the conversation questions you get from judges is around the viability of your model and you proving it so it provides a lot of structure for like entrepreneurs especially because one of the biggest challenges in building a startup is making decisions with very little data a lot of the decisions you make it's like how to make iterations on your product it's from anecdotal data you might hear from customers and not really anything that you can do like statistical analysis on so I think the business model canvas is really really helpful in that it's very formulaic and structured in building a company and they test you to see how you've made decisions how you've validated invalidated hypotheses cool well I think that just about covers everything we're just about out of time here that has covered all the different topics that we wanted to discuss I think we got a lot of valuable information especially for students who are looking to become entrepreneurs and maybe aren't totally secure in the decision yet so I think we're going to end it here thank you so much you guys for attending the panel especially our panelists who spoke and I wish you guys well and good luck