Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship

Ghedalia Gold-Pastor, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland and one of the Dingman Center’s Fearless Founders, was recently featured in the Huffington Post for his innovative and socially minded startup, Puzzable.

While brainstorming one day, Ghedalia and his college roommate decided to channel their extra energy beyond the basketball court and start their own gaming startup. Their app, Puzzable, is a social gaming meets SnapChat concept that also empowers charities.

The grandson of a holocaust survivor, Ghedalia has a unique perspective on perseverance and brings this spirit in his approach to entrepreneurship. In the article he says, “There will be plenty of distractions and disappointments throughout the journey but as long as you maintain focus and continue to push forward you will reach your goals.”

Ghedalia is no stranger to hard work. After bootstrapping his company, he began seeking funding and secured an additional $2,000 from the Dingman Center. He is currently seeking an additional $250,000 to further grow Puzzable.

Click here to read more about Ghedalia’s entrepreneurship journey in the Huffington Post.

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The Dingman Center is excited to announce the next class of student entrepreneurs who have graduated to the Fearless Founders Hatch course. These entrepreneurs have completed important milestones from the Idea Shell stage, including customer development and building their minimum viable products. Now in the Hatch class, students will use the lean launchpad methodology to further develop their ideas, iterate their business models, and perfect their pitches. During the first class, Elana Fine set the tone for the semester by telling the cohort they would each be expected to conduct 100 customer interviews. Throughout the semester they will also build experiments, find metrics that matter and measure them, and finally learn from key assumptions. Then lather, rinse and repeat.

Meet our Fall 2014 Fearless Founders Hatch Cohort: Continue reading →

By Danielle Bennings

Co-Founders Emmanuel Kaska and Chike Nwankwo first began developing their idea for Kivvik during the summer of 2013. Their original goal was to build a platform that would help college students find jobs. After examining the market through months of customer interviews during the Fearless Founders program, they discovered that there was a divide in the way businesses hire candidates. Large enterprise companies such as GE and Boston Consulting have the capital to assess all their candidates with behavioral analysis assessments, in tandem with an interview. As a result, they are able to receive a full picture of their candidates. Chike and Emmanuel saw an opportunity to partner with universities to deliver robust assessments to businesses that cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars for all candidates to take assessments.

Since then, Kivvik has formed a full team including Jeremy Horowitz, VP of Marketing, as well as messaging, assessment and sales staff. The current version of Kivvik’s product is designed to integrate various assessments covering the categories of risk and stress analysis, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking to provide employers with complete candidate recommendations.

Continue reading →