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Tuesday, March 19
The Indiana Daily Student

Entrepreneurial project stems from GLOWFest

With shows like “Shark Tank” and movies like “The Social Network” released in the late 2000s, young entrepreneurs across the country were inspired to make their ideas a reality.

Deuce Thevenow and Jack Shannon, former IU students from the Kelley School of Business, saw the emergence of entrepreneurship among college students and wanted to help.

The two created RECESS, a touring college music festival that includes performances, a speaker series and interactive networking opportunities.

“The whole point of it is that we’re bringing all these companies to campus essentially to promote entrepreneurship, to get students excited about potentially going to work for a start-up or being an intern,” Shannon said. “In general we’re just trying to make students more aware of all these cool opportunities to work at these really exciting young companies.”

RECESS came to IU for an all-day event Monday.

The idea for RECESS stemmed from Thevenow and Shannon’s first start-up, GLOWfest, which began four years ago.

GLOWfest was started at IU, but eventually brought artists like Avicii, Pretty Lights and Deadmau5 to colleges across the country.

Thevenow said though they loved what they were doing, it was missing a purpose.

“We were noticing that entrepreneurship on campus was exploding,” he said. “So we were like, ‘OK let’s take GLOWFest, the musical component, and put a positive message on it and figure out how to help these kids launch a business.’”

RECESS was launched last year with a number of smaller events, but this is a part of their first real tour. About 200 students signed up to attend, and walk-ins were also accepted.

RECESS’ visit to IU Monday was the second stop on a cross-country tour of seven campuses. It was a four-part event including interactive networking, a speaker series, pitch competition and concert.

Jake Udell, the manager of Krewella, and Tony Conrad, the Founder and CEO of About.me were among the speakers.

Shannon said he and Thevenow wanted to base the speaker series off of TED Talks.

“We wanted to take that general concept of 10-minute-long speakers sharing their experience and their story but make it relatable to college students and actually give practical advice,” he said.

RECESS was put on with the help of Union Board. Brett Bassock, UB Live Entertainment Director, said he didn’t have to think twice about bringing the event to IU.

“Deuce came to me asking for Union Board to be involved and explained to me the concept,” he said. “I immediately thought it was an incredible idea what they were trying to do. I love their vision. I love their mission.”

Before a Paper Diamond concert at the Bluebird Monday night, the day ended with a pitch competition where students with start-ups could pitch their ideas to a panel of judges.

Five businesses were chosen by Shannon and Thevenow from around 30 online submissions. Those students were given five minutes to pitch their business and then had five minutes of Q&A.

Haley Gedek and Max Brickman, founders of Clean Slate, won the pitch competition. Clean Slate is a cheating prevention tool with specially made scantron sheets that are unreadable from either side.

The two will be one of 10 chosen businesses to travel to Las Vegas to compete in the final competition.

“This is unbelievable, just the experience of being able to go pitch to investors, go to Las Vegas and be able to get some funding from that,” Gedek said. “This could really change the course of our product right now and allow us to do something we obviously wouldn’t have been able to do without it.”

Although there is no cash prize for the overall winner, the final competition provides an opportunity for Gedek and Brickman, as well as the other finalists, to network with entrepreneurs from around the world.

Shannon said ultimately he’s glad that, after years of building their company, they could finally give back — especially to IU.

“For us, we loved the concert element of it, but this is the stuff that will have an impact and will actually change students’ lives potentially, for the better,” he said. “That’s the stuff that we’re the most excited about.”

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