Stories & Updates

Horn Entrepreneurship offers many opportunities for you to make the most of your tuition! Its home, the Venture Development Center (VDC), is open to anyone at UD. Whether you have an idea or not, you can participate, network, be inspired and learn.

Horn Entrepreneurship’s pre-accelerator program, Summer Founders, ended with Demo Day on August 18, 2022. Demo Day is a showcase for entrepreneurial students seeking help from our community. Held in-person for the first time in three years, the room was filled with University of Delaware alumni, former Summer Founders, Horn team members and notable entrepreneurs and business leaders. The agenda included presentations by the 2022 Summer Founders and selected Summer Founders alumni, a networking reception and award ceremony.

Calling all Blue Hen student entrepreneurs: apply to University of Delaware’s premier startup funding competition, Hen Hatch. This program is a once-a-year opportunity for UD students to put their best ideas forward and compete for a portion of a $50,000 prize pool. The submission deadline is September 16.

“I bet you twenty bucks I can beat you in this game.” Playing video games and involving money in the equation is a situation which tends to occur regularly among gamers. Alex Pickett and Dan Goodman had a goal to create a platform where gamers can play for money. 

The last six months might have flown by for you, but the last six months these students, alumni, faculty and staff were building their businesses, becoming better students and professors, and more. Take inspiration from their achievements in this article. 

It’s a bright, blue, sunny day and you decide to take a trip to the ballpark with your friends. The game is tied and everybody is excited to see what happens next. All of a sudden your chest tightens up and you begin to wheeze. It feels impossible to get a breath and now your friends all begin to panic. You pull out your inhaler and head for the car. Just a moment ago your biggest worry was your favorite team winning, and now it’s hoping to make it out of the hospital before the day ends.

The summer founder teams at orientation on June 6, 2022, await a full 12 weeks ahead of them.

This summer six teams have been selected to participate in Horn Entrepreneurship's Summer Founders, a 12-week pre-accelerator program for student ventures.

The Summer Founders opportunity provides its participants with a combination of training sessions and resources, coaching, mentorship, and events to facilitate their venture's journey from idea to launch. At the end of their training in August, the teams will be prepared to present for demo day, where each team will pitch their ideas to members of the local business community.

In the US, there are currently thousands of incarcerated students attempting to gain an education, yet their environments lack the needed resources to effectively facilitate learning. Working feverishly to solve that issue is Sia Precision Education, a software development company that uses artificial intelligence to improve education for students in low-resource settings. Acting as their Chief Business Officer is Carlos Benito, a senior at the University of Delaware and an avid member of the Horn Entrepreneurship community.

Dear colleagues and friends,

Horn Entrepreneurship has a tradition of developing a new annual theme and rotating through t-shirt slogans and window clings. While we have previously gone back to a classic – “Making our own waves” – we have generally moved on from one year to the next. As you will undoubtedly notice next time you visit the VDC in person, the theme of achieving “Equity thru Entrepreneurship” (ETE) represents a notable and worthy exception.

Many great innovations, societal changes and inventions begin with the question, “what if…?” Fourteen Delaware Innovation Fellows (DIF) hailing from 11 majors presented answers to their “what if” questions at the 2022 DIF Innovation Showcase. Their answers were the basis of their capstone innovation project and the culmination of work completed during their three-phase fellowship.