NCSSM Online rising seniors (L to R) Rishi Sarvepalli and Nicolas Nadra, and NCSSM-Durham senior Ethan Price, make their investment pitch for the ERN Probe, a device that helps gardeners respond to growing conditions. (photo: Brian Faircloth)
Like most entrepreneurs, NCSSM Online rising seniors Angelus Jones and Natalie Meiferdt and rising NCSSM-Durham senior Khoa Le had to revise the business idea they brought to the summer course “How to Do a Startup: An Experience in Entrepreneurship.” The course, based in Durham, is one of a number of offerings NCSSM provides to Residential and Online students on its Durham and Morganton campuses through the Summer Research & Innovation Program.
Over two weeks, they and 10 other students in the summer experience gained insight in how to start and scale a new business venture through regular workshops with successful Triangle-area entrepreneurs and group sessions with Chad Keister, an Instructor of Economics and Social Science at NCSSM-Durham who has been leading the summer course for five years now.
The idea that Angelus, Natalie, and Khoa are developing is called Safe See, an app designed primarily for travelers that alerts them to unsafe situations in their location through real-time inputs and updates from other users in the same area. But that’s not how it started out, says Angelus, who lives in Durham and goes to school at Triangle Math and Science Academy of Apex.
“Initially, what we were thinking about was a sort of a program that allowed you to get through buildings safely, like knowing where the exits were. But we pivoted towards more like neighborhoods, streets, communities, allowing you to get to where you want to be safely and knowing where the dangers are. Just recently, we’ve actually sort of pivoted our entrepreneurship plan to focusing more on families and vacationers, rather than just individuals.”
It was also originally intended to be a wearable device instead of an app, says Natalie, who is also from Durham. In addition to her NCSSM Online courses, Natalie is also doing coursework at Durham Technical Community College.
“We realized that, if it was going to be a wearable device, you’d not be able to fit the entire map of a building on that screen in a reasonable way. So then we started changing it so it would be more towards an app that would help alert people to danger in a certain location, because that’s what we thought they would be more worried about and more interested in.”
A willingness to adjust ideas and plans based on feedback from advisors, market research, and unit economics, is an important virtue the course seeks to instill in the students, says their instructor, Chad Keister.
“The students need to understand the mindset of an entrepreneur, they need to understand the complexity, the ambiguity of that space, and they need to thrive in that. We want them to realize that if they don’t have the right answer, if they don’t have the right idea or right plan at first, it’s okay. Rethink it and come up with a better one.”
For Khoa, who goes to D.H. Conley High School in Greenville, the two weeks in the course have been something of a trial run that has helped him become more familiar with the path every entrepreneur, whether a first-timer or a serial entrepreneur, must navigate to reach a desirable end.
“I eventually want to start my own pharmaceutical business,” he says. “The class has helped me gain more experience in figuring out what people would actually want to buy, and how valuable it would be to them.”
It will be no surprise if, in time, some of the projects that originated in this summer experience end up going to market. NCSSM has a history of producing incredibly successful entrepreneurs in STEM-based fields.
But that’s not the ultimate goal, says Keister. What he hopes for overall is that the kids take with them a new way of examining their life.
“When the program is over, and they’ve done everything they need to do to take the next step and they launch their product in the world, that would be great. That would be fantastic. But what we really hope they gain is insight into the reality that living life is not linear, that things happen that create a complex decision point, and that thinking through it with an entrepreneurial lens will benefit them in any part of their life.”
