A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
The Darden School of Business is the graduate business school of the University of Virginia, a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. The school offers MBA, PhD, and Executive Education programs. Darden is consistently ranked as being among the top business schools in the U.S. and in the world.
The McIntire School of Commerce is the University of Virginia's undergraduate and graduate business school that specializes in Commerce, Global Commerce, Accounting, Management of Information Technology-IT Management, and Business Analytics. It was founded in 1921 through a gift by Paul Goodloe McIntire.
Halsey McLean Minor Sr. is a prominent American entrepreneur who gained fame for founding CNET in 1993 - the first technology content publisher aimed at consumers. He is also the founder or co-founder of various technology start-ups, including Live Planet, a virtual reality start-up, VideoCoin, and Vivid Labs.
The Fuqua School of Business is the business school of Duke University, a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. It enrolls more than 1,300 students in degree-seeking programs. Duke Executive Education also offers non-degree business education and professional development programs.
The Lawn, a part of Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village, is a large, terraced grassy court at the historic center of Jefferson's academic community at the University of Virginia. The Lawn and its surrounding buildings, designed by Jefferson, demonstrate Jefferson's mastery of Palladian and Neoclassical architecture, and the site has been recognized as an architectural masterpiece in itself. The Lawn has been designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark District, and is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with the original buildings of the University of Virginia and Monticello, Jefferson's nearby residence; this designation is due to the site's architectural and cultural significance.
John F. Davis III is an entrepreneur, educator, and a member of the Texas Christian University Board of Trustees. He is a co-founder of 1-800-Flowers and a former CEO of Pegasus Solutions, Birch Street Systems and Room Key.
Steve Blank is an American entrepreneur, educator, author and speaker based in Pescadero, California.
Vinny Lingham is a South African-born American Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder & CEO of an identity protection and management startup based in California called Civic. He was also previously the founder and CEO of Gyft & Yola, Inc. He is also the co-founder of SiliconCape, an NGO based in South Africa that aims to turn Cape Town into a technology hub.
Habib Haddad is a serial entrepreneur and early stage investor. He is currently the president and managing director of the E14 Fund that invests in spin-offs from MIT. Prior to that Habib has spent his career in startups as a founder and early employee.
Lisa Gansky is an American entrepreneur and author.
Mike Cassidy is an American entrepreneur, and was CEO and co-founder of five previous Internet start-ups including Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit, Xfire, Ruba.com, and Apollo Fusion. In January 2012, he became director of product management and subsequently a Vice President at Google and led Project Loon with Google[x]. In April 2017, it was reported he was working on a clean energy startup, Apollo Fusion, using a hybrid reactor technology based on fusion power.
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. Lean startup emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. This methodology enables recovery from failures more often than traditional ways of product development.
Brian Joseph Chesky is an American businessman and industrial designer and the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. As of January 2024, Chesky is the 232nd richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $9.4 billion, mostly due to his ownership of 76 million shares of Airbnb.
Gagan Biyani is an American of Indian descent serial entrepreneur, marketer, and journalist. He was a co-founder of Udemy, an online education company, and was co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company.
Mona Olsen is a British-American entrepreneur and academic. Olsen is the founder and president of the board of iMADdu Inc., an educational nonprofit (501c3) based in Fairfax, Virginia that launched in 2010.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is an entrepreneur, speaker and angel investor, best known for being the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), a government-funded agency to support entrepreneurship in Malaysia and ASEAN.
MACH37 is an American startup accelerator that was established in 2013 as a division of the Virginia-based Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) with funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2017 CIT partnered with VentureScope, a strategic innovation consultancy and venture firm, to revamp MACH37's operating model and curriculum. Following a successful partnership between CIT and VentureScope, MACH37 became fully owned and operated by VentureScope in 2020. MACH37 focuses primarily on honing and strengthening startups' product-market fit through extensive customer discovery and market research, expanding emerging companies' professional networks, fostering founder wellbeing, and providing emerging companies in the cybersecurity industry with access to investment capital and an immediate customer base. In an October 2020 article Forbes named MACH37 'the Granddaddy' of top cyber accelerators giving a nod to the fact that MACH37 was one of the first accelerators in the world dedicated to cyber and cyber adjacent technologies, and it has lasted far longer than many of its peer accelerators while strengthening over time. The name 'MACH37' is a reference to the escape velocity of Earth's atmosphere. VentureScope applies Lean Startup methodology at MACH37 as an efficient and successful approach to assist startups to rapidly adapt their search for a successful business model and test their hypotheses about customer needs and market demands.
Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) was a collaborative advisory group created by former United States President Barack Obama tasked with creating entrepreneurial growth in America.
Joost de Valk is an entrepreneur and application software developer from Wijchen, Netherlands who is best known for Yoast SEO. De Valk started out as a consultant and blogger in 2004 before developing Yoast, one of the most successful plug-ins for WordPress.
