Thomas Baldwin at the Wharton Journal has brief interviews with the 5 recipients of the Wharton Venture Award.
After a highly competitive selection process, five student-led ventures were selected to receive the 2012 Wharton Venture Award (WVA). The WVA Program provides selected student entrepreneurs with $10,000 in funding to pursue the development of their ventures during the summer between their first and second years. WVA is one of several high-impact programs sponsored by Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs (WEP) as part of its ongoing mission to foster entrepreneurship and innovation throughout the Wharton community.
1Docway (Samir Malik WG ‘13)
What: 1DocWay is an online doctor’s office. We connect hospitals with underserved patient populations, through our lightweight technology and implementation service. With 1DocWay, rural, elderly, disabled, and busy patients can schedule appointments online and see their doctor through our secure video chat platform. In doing so, we help hospitals expand their reach of services into underserved areas, building hospitals’ referral base; we work with underserved care facilities to increase access to specialist physicians and improve community health/wellness; and we help physicians improve scheduling flexibility and revenue by expanding their patient pool.
Inspiration: I had always been a start-up kind of guy. I had experience with a few prior startups and when I saw an opportunity to innovate in healthcare, from my perch as a healthcare consultant, I dove right in. Healthcare is a huge space in need of disruption.
Wharton: The HCM program has been a fantastic resource in that I have been able to connect to numerous brilliant colleagues who bring a wide range of perspectives on the healthcare space. My business has got many holes shot through it because of peers in HCM and that has made it stronger and more robust.
cloubable.me (Steve Lau WG ‘13, Jon Dussel WG ‘13)
What: cloudable.me is an intuitive online platform that enables users to easily share, organize and discover the best stuff online. The internet is getting unruly with unorganized, real-time only sharing – cloudable solves this with true social organization, empowering you to filter the internet with your friends.
Inspiration: Studying online consumer behavior, people are in more need of ways to filter content with seemingly infinite amounts of new content and finite amounts of time, and are definitely interested in and influenced by recommendations from their friends. I personally wanted a useful way to get social recommendations for everything from news to youtube videos to wine when I wanted them, rather than ‘real time’ via fb news feed, twitter or emails. I think giving people a way to easily share and then access what others have shared, when they are actually interested in it, is a huge opportunity.
Wharton: The network. First, we are both members of the same learning team and the opportunity for us to meet in this environment was immensely valuable. Having worked with each other on projects and simulations gave us a very good idea of what it would be like to work with one another before committing to work on a venture together. The alumni and faculty at Penn have also been extremely generous with their time and advice and Professor Michael Kearns, Nat Turner and Rob Coneybeer have even agreed to be our mentors. Lastly the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs have been beneficial by providing us validation and capital with the Wharton Venture Award, introducing us to alumni through the Entrepreneurs In Residence programs and granting us work space through the Venture Initiation Program.
Campus Entrepreneurship 