It’s that time of year. The stream of talented student entrepreneurs we’ve seen come through our doors begins to thin out with the arrival of finals, commencement and (at last!) winter break. But in the quiet of their absence, we can fondly reminisce on the outstanding semester we’ve had at the Dingman Center. In the past couple of months, we’ve seen a record amount of energy and engagement from the community in our programs. Read on for some of our favorite highlights from the semester.
Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship
Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship
Category Archives: Community
Entrepreneur-in-Residence: Rashad Moore
The Dingman Center is pleased to announce the addition of another successful founder, Rashad Moore, to our impressive group of Entrepreneurs-in-Residence. Rashad is excited to become more integrated into the Dingman community and to do what he enjoys most of all—helping young entrepreneurs. He started attending Dingman Fridays a few years ago and loved getting access to smart people with great ideas. He states, “Dingman is doing a lot of great stuff—if I had this in college, I may be further along.”
Rashad began his career in the defense industry in the outskirts of Washington, D.C., working for Northrop Grumman where he saw an unmet need for software engineers within the defense industry. After learning how to win government contracts while working for Clear Solutions, Rashad quickly realized it didn’t matter what company got the government bid, they would still come to him for software engineering.
spark: Where Fearless Ideas Start
Last Friday was the start of something new and extraordinary at the University of Maryland: spark: Where Fearless Ideas Start, a two-day idea festival co-hosted by the Dingman Center and Startup Shell featuring design-thinking and brainstorming activities that encouraged students to find solutions to problems they want to solve. spark has filled an essential niche at UMD by providing students who are interested in entrepreneurship but haven’t yet founded a venture with a means to discover and explore how their passions can translate into business ideas.
A Review of Dream, Girl: A Documentary About Female Entrepreneurs
This fall, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship will be launching the Ladies First Initiative, our commitment to increasing the number of women in entrepreneurship at UMD.
by: Alison Scharman
Last week, women across Smith and their male allies gathered to watch Dream, Girl, the
story of how Erin Bagwell, a young graphic designer from New York City, made a documentary. But this film wasn’t just the story of Erin and how she made a movie from inception to funding to distribution. Erin’s objective was to tell the stories of female entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds representing a variety of industries to inspire girls and women of all ages to pursue their entrepreneurial aspirations.
A Round of Golf with the Dingman Center Angels and Baltimore Angels
On June 8, the Dingman Center Angels ended their 2015-2016 investment year. This year, the Baltimore Angels were also extended an invitation to the final investor meeting and annual golf event. In the morning, the investors reviewed a strong lineup of startup companies including Cybrary, Devensoft, InHerSight, Inky and Zoobean. After some engaging discussions and light lunch networking, the Dingman Center Angels and Baltimore Angels joined the Dingman Center team for a round of golf.
Each group played a 4-man scramble, so both early stage and mature golfers had opportunities to shine. Closest to the pin and longest drive contests on the 8th and 9th hole kept things interesting for the more competitive players. The positive energy of the morning investor meeting coupled with the beautiful weather made for a relaxing, fun afternoon. We hope that even more players will sign up for next year’s golf event. Angels, have a great summer and we’ll see you in the fall!
Interested in joining the Dingman Center Angels? Find out more on the Dingman Center website.
Featured EIR: Polly Vail
By: Justin Taubman ’16 
MBA Candidate
This week, I am very happy to feature Polly Vail, one the Dingman Center’s biggest supporters and Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR). Her illustrious background as an intrapreneur and entrepreneur makes her a valuable asset to the University of Maryland community and the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. If you have never been to Dingman Fridays to discuss your business ideas with an EIR, maybe this feature about Polly will change your mind. Polly’s perspective and experience are valuable to students considering entrepreneurship.
Polly began her career before the days of Craigslist and Monster, when newspapers “owned” the classified advertising business. One of her first intrapreneurial experiences was launching the first online job search platform for The New York Times where she worked in marketing. It was disruptive and successful. But, ultimately it was shut down. At the time, The New York Times, and others in the industry, were afraid of the changes and retreated to their old ink and paper model. Polly experienced the limits of intrapreneurship and how tough it is for successful organizations to change from within. Polly was able to launch other successful new products for The New York Times including a College edition, a Spanish language edition, and what are now called “native advertising” sections. And, she became the first Managing Director for the paper’s Washington D.C. office focusing on advertising and revenue.
From there, Polly moved to the D.C. Women’s Business Center, where she coached women who were interested in entrepreneurship. The Women’s Business Center served a range of talented women from professionals to women on public assistance. Polly’s main focus was helping low income women move to financial independence through micro-enterprise training. She helped her clients start businesses in the fields of entertainment, childcare, food service, beauty and apparel. After some time at the Women’s Business Center, Polly decided to practice what she had been preaching and began her own independent consulting practice. She helps clients with branding, web site design, social media, and revenue generation. She has worked extensively with the Water Alliance and the International Lyme Disease Association. As an independent consultant, Polly used a crowdsourcing creative services firm called GeniusRocket. Her relationship with the firm led to her tenure as President of the company. As President of GeniusRocket, Polly grew the business and developed a strategic merger with a larger firm.
Polly is still an advisor to GeniusRocket and does consulting in the non-profit space. Having such an enthusiastic, successful, and empathetic EIR as Polly Vail is invaluable.
Polly explained to me that she loves working with student entrepreneurs at UMD because she believes that the Dingman Center does a fantastic job of preparing its pupils for the rigors of running a startup business. She continued by saying that the most important thing for an undergraduate student entrepreneur to develop is a multi-disciplined team so they can execute quickly and effectively and avoid blind spots. The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship is very lucky to have the talented Polly Vail among its Entrepreneurs in Residence.
Dingman Center Angels Portfolio Deepens with New and Follow-On Investments
The Dingman Center Angels is a Maryland based angel investment group, managed by the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, which provides funding to early-stage companies within the Mid-Atlantic region. Since inception, the group has invested more than $12 million in more than 50 companies primarily in the enterprise software and consumer internet sectors. The Dingman Center Angels recently completed another successful year, expanding the portfolio and hosting meetings in College Park, Baltimore and Crystal City. Keep reading for an overview of the group’s activities over the past investment season. Continue reading
Hisaoka Fellow Spends Summer Working at Virtual Reality Startup
At the Dingman Center, we work with many students who want to start their own business. We also work with students who don’t yet have an idea to pursue. For both groups, we encourage them to spend a summer interning in startup land. To jumpstart students’ startup careers, the Center offers two fellowship programs. Through a generous gift from UMD alumnus, Robert Hisaoka ’79, we offer the Hisaoka Fellowship Program to MBA students. In order to be selected as a Hisaoka Fellow, students must secure summer internships with VC- or angel-funded startups and early stage companies. The Dingman Center provides each Hisaoka Fellow a $5,000 stipend to supplement students’ summer salaries.
Due to overwhelming demand among undergraduate students for startup internships, one of the Hisaoka Fellowships was offered to undergraduate student, Mike Mandl. Mike has participated in our Fearless Founders accelerator program and is passionate about virtual reality technology. He worked his network in the spring to land a summer internship with YouVisit in New York City. After three weeks on the job we interviewed Mike about his experience:
Tell us about YouVisit. What is the company’s mission and core competencies?
MM: YouVisit helps industry leaders in higher education, travel and real estate increase public awareness, online traffic, quality leads, and in-person visits with immersive virtual reality experiences and virtual tours.
Tell us about your responsibilities thus far at YouVisit?
MM: Creating and editing 360 3D videos. Hopefully I will have an opportunity to go film some shots in the upcoming weeks. I have also been helping out the business development team in any capacity.
What projects are you most looking forward to working on with YouVisit?
MM: There are a few different projects that I am excited to be working on, but most of them are confidential as of now. I can say that University of Maryland just became a client, so that will be a project I intend to work closely on.
Why did you want an internship with a virtual reality company?
MM: Before I found out about YouVisit I was creating a 360 college campus tour of University of Maryland with help from the UMD startup company, VisiSonics. The virtual reality industry is estimated to be a 30 billion dollar annual industry by the year 2020. I want to continue working in this field and the best way to do that is to get work experience.
What do you hope to gain from a summer spent in NYC at YouVisit?
MM: My goal is to make as many connections as possible within the growing industry and to learn as many skills as possible relating to creating virtual reality experiences while I am interning in New York.
Have you had any cool startup/networking experiences since you’ve been in NYC?
MM: Going into work everyday has been exciting. After all the work our team has put in I am one of the first people that gets to view some of the coolest cutting-edge virtual reality experiences.
What has been the biggest adjustment as an intern in New York City?
MM: I would say my biggest adjustment has been the change in my environment. There are people everywhere doing lots of cool things at all hours in the day. I have improved managing my free time so I can take advantage of everything this city has to offer.
Mike Mand
l is a University of Maryland undergraduate student majoring in economics. He has a strong interest in up-and-coming technology with the potential to disrupt markets. Mike started his own profit-generating businesses through his landscaping and cell phone repair services, ProTech MD. He spent the past year creating virtual reality college campus tours and plans to find his niche in the market after graduation.
l is a University of Maryland undergraduate student majoring in economics. He has a strong interest in up-and-coming technology with the potential to disrupt markets. Mike started his own profit-generating businesses through his landscaping and cell phone repair services, ProTech MD. He spent the past year creating virtual reality college campus tours and plans to find his niche in the market after graduation.Powering Women Entrepreneurs
By Elana Fine
Last Saturday I moderated a “Powering Women Entrepreneurs” panel at Forte Foundation’s annual MBA Women’s Leadership Conference. Over 450 current women MBA students from top business schools filled the conference hall wearing “Let’s Power Up” t-shirts while taking selfies with cutouts of powerful women leaders such as Smith School alumna Carly Fiorina, Oprah Winfrey, and Sheryl Sandberg.
The panel included three successful women entrepreneurs:
Tiffany Norwood, Serial Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur in Residence, Georgetown University
Arum Kang, Co-Founder and CEO Coffee Meets Bagel
Hillary Lewis, Founder and President, Lumi Organics
L-R: Elana Fine, Tiffany Norwood, Arum Kang, Hillary Lewis
I quickly realized what an opportunity our panel had to inspire such a large crowd of impressive women at such an important inflection point in their careers. As I told the crowd, my goal was for each of them to consider one entrepreneurial experience during their two years as MBA students. Continue reading
Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship 