Zachary Kellerman ’24 — First, I want to Associate Dean Roland Morin, Anthony Mendez ’20, and the Center for Innovation, Business & Entrepreneurship (CIBE) at Wabash College for hosting the Business Innovation Program (BIP). Without any of them, I would not have had the great experience that I did with Endeavor this summer. I also want to thank all those who help fund the CIBE and BIP for creating the opportunity that allowed me to gain all the experiences I did this summer. I would also like to thank the folks at the Endeavor office I worked at in Louisville, Jake Budler ’18, Jackson Andrews, Raechele Gray Smalls, and Tim Barr. This team is truly exceptional and did a great job bringing fellow intern Jackson Bologna ’23 and me in and making us a part of the team. I also want to thank everyone in the Endeavor network, from the mentors to the entrepreneurs to the board members. Specifically, Ankur Gopal, Stacy Griggs, Brook Smith, Matt Thornton, and Emily Kaplan for speaking to me about your experiences and caring to give great insights and advice to the questions I had.
This summer, I had the great fortune to work at Endeavor with the Louisville office. I got to work in a variety of environments, each with its pros and cons. The most common environment was working from home for 2-4 days of the week. I am fortunate enough to have been able to create office space separate from my room and work in a comfortable home environment. This had the advantage of a flexible schedule and more time spent productively without all the travel time. The second environment was a co-working space in Broad Ripple named the Speakeasy, which I worked at once a week. This had the advantage of working with the team located in Indiana in person at a convenient location. A co-working space has many great individuals within the community, and in my time there met three Wabash alum. The third environment was going down to Louisville. I went there on three separate trips for a total of six days and three nights. This had the most significant advantage of being in person with the whole team and meeting many great individuals within the Endeavor network, from CEOs of highly innovative companies to venture capitalists to founders of start-ups. All these amazing people taught me a lot about entrepreneurship, enterprise investments, and the business world at large. While in Louisville, I got to sit in on Endeavor’s board meeting, sit in on mid-year review meetings of two companies within the Endeavor network, be a part of the Scale-Up 2021 Acceleration Panel, where four companies in the Scale-Up program pitched and receive feedback from mentors in the Endeavor network, get some coffee with the CEO of Interapt Ankur Gopal and CEO of El Toro Stacy Griggs, attend and network at two different happy hours, and sit in on a roundtable discussion with Rebecca A. Fannin, an expert on global innovation, with top Louisville entrepreneurs. These experiences in Louisville are priceless and invaluable, as connecting and poking the brains of this many exceptional individuals is not an experience you can get anywhere except Endeavor. I have learned different types of investments such as seed deals, venture rounds, series rounds, private equity, and angel. I have learned about all sorts of industries such as SaaS, FinTech, AdTech, AgTech, healthcare, big data, manufacturing, and education and talent.
I have worked on two major projects, a few minor projects, and sitting in on many meetings and taking notes between candidate companies and mentors while working from home. The first main project was creating the profile for a company preparing for the Local Selection Panel. In Endeavor, there is a four-step process to becoming an Endeavor Entrepreneur. The First Opinion Review, the Second Opinion Review, the Local Selection Panel, and the International Selection Panel. It is about a 3% selection rate for companies getting selected at the International Selection Panel. DemandJump, the company I am creating the profile for, will be at a Local Selection Panel in late July. The panelist uses these profiles to have a detailed background on the company and the entrepreneurs. Within a profile, there are seven main categories: company, team, financials, market, offering, growth, and context. Together it tells the whole story of the company and how it can fit into a market. The second main project I have been working on is Salesforce data entry. The first part of that was filling the mentor database. One of the best benefits for companies and candidates in the Endeavor network is access to great mentors. The issue is having all the data on mentors for entrepreneurs to easily find these mentors or Endeavor staff to locate one better. The mentor database already existed by good data about the mentors from the Louisville office did not. I spent a lot of time researching these mentors and turning them into data and entering them on Salesforce. It has been worthwhile as I found out three hours before writing this that someone from the Endeavor office in Peru could find a mentor from the data I created and connected that mentor with a company in Peru. The second part within Salesforce is data for investors and their companies. In the same situation as the mentors, there was not good enough data to easily set up a connection with companies and investors in the Endeavor network. One of my minor projects was writing a blog highlighting some of the key mentors in the network. Another minor project was starting a little bit on another company profile. Overall, these experiences have given me hard skills such as CRMs, soft skills such as networking, and deep knowledge about entrepreneurship and what investors are looking for in companies. Thank you, Wabash, and thank you, Endeavor, for all that you have done for me this summer.
