Megha Devaraj, '21 | Spark

"If you had told me last semester that I would be helping bring a startup to life this summer, I probably have told you that you had the wrong person. And yet here I am, completing the 10 week Race to Revenue summer program and getting ready to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) pilot this August 2019.

Many undergraduate students choose to go the traditional route of completing an internship or working over the summer. I was the same, planning on taking classes and interning. However, I also ended up participating in Race to Revenue, where I learned just as much, if not more. Race to Revenue consists of weekly meetings during which you are exposed to some of the brightest minds in entrepreneurship, from Y Combinator investors to CEOs of successful startups to experienced mentors who guide you through every step of building your startup. During these meetings, you can get feedback for your own startup, as well as early exposure to potential investors. 

Race to Revenue also has monetary resources set aside specifically for the student startups. Using these resources, my team was able to contract a UI/UX designer, host our web app on AWS services, and even create our own Google Domain. The benefaction fund that Race to Revenue gave us access to helped us prepare our MVP and position our company to be in a more attractive position for venture funding.  

With the resources provided over the summer, we have developed a web app MVP that we are launching this fall. From there we hope to pitch to potential investors and obtain funding to develop a mobile app. Everyone on the Race to Revenue team made our process a lot more time, cost and resource efficient. If we ever had a question or concern, they were never more than an email or phone call away. Our team’s assigned mentors, John Henry and Ben Hoggan, were knowledgeable, supportive, and immensely helpful during the overall process.

Overall, I feel as if I have learned and grown a lot, both as a person and as an entrepreneur. This experience has been invaluable to me and I cannot wait to see where Spark will go from here!"