Ignite Conference

The highlight of March in the middle of an endless winter quarter was the Ignite Conference co-hosted by Rice University and UC Davis.  This is just a preview of the first Bay Area tour day, which was followed by two days of speakers.  

Each founder had very different reasons and motivations for building their company but they all faced and surmounted relentless amounts of challenges.  I especially learned a lot from Nicholas Seet and Mark Randall's talks, and how a technology first approach could have drawbacks.

Best part of the entire experience was meeting like-minded and passionately bright students from Davis, Rice, Lamar, Baylor.

HackDavis at Davis and VCIC at Yale!

I got to partake in a ton of awesome activities this February.  Starting with volunteering at my first hackathon at HackDavis on the 9th, I got to meet with many talented student developers.  They all had fantastic ideas like matching students to laboratories, detecting falling injuries, tracking groceries and incentivising recycling.  Hearing about their projects and getting the opportunity to give feedback was the highlight of the weekend.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to stay the entire event.  All the finished projects are on Devpost here: https://hackdavis2019.devpost.com/submissions

Mid-February our Venture Capital team flew out to New Haven for the VCIC competition!  We learned a lot about the challenges of evaluating companies as potential investors, and got a taste of East Coast pizza.  My biggest takeaway from the competition is that investing is not as clear cut as black and white.  There are so many unknowns when creating a new venture that you really have to focus on the business relationship, the potentials, and the industry numbers.