This past week was one of my absolute favorite weeks of the year: Women Entrepreneurship Week. Throughout the week, I attended (and ) several amazing events. It was at these events that I had the opportunity to meet countless amazing women entrepreneurs and women leaders.

Every speaker, panelist, and attendee was full of insight and enthusiasm. The environment was absolutely an incredible place to be to network and connect with other aspiring and successful entrepreneurs. One attendee took connecting to the next level, and that was Kim Guadagno.

As Lieutenant Governor of NJ, and currently acting Governor, she is a very busy woman, but she took the time to speak at the day-long Women Entrepreneurship Week Conference at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß and share her story with students like myself, leaders in the community, and hundreds of entrepreneurs.

When it came time for her to address the large audience she immediately went against the norm. Instead of taking her place on the stage, she walked around the conference center, weaving in and out of the attentive crowd. This highlights a strong point in her character. She is not afraid to break barriers and switch it up. We need more of that in our world today. In closing, she offered her cell phone number to anyone who may need her when “NJ is standing in their way.”

On my way home from the conference at about 9:30 p.m., I was thinking about all that I had learned at the event. I thought to myself, “I really should text Kim to thank her for her inspiration and insight.” I dismissed that thought because it was getting late at night and I didn’t want to bother her. But she had made it clear at the conference that she wanted us to contact her, she wanted us to reach out.

Through the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship, I have learned the power of networking and the power of action. (Click here to see what else they taught me!) So I texted her. And you know what? She answered. She truly wants to help, she wants women to succeed, and she is humble despite her success. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to connect with her. Thank you Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß and the Feliciano School of Business for continually providing great opportunities to connect with and learn from the leaders in our community!

is a senior Marketing major at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß, and a member of the Student Publicity Committee for Women Entrepreneurship Week. She received the university’s Certificate of Entrepreneurship in 2015.

Photos by Mike Peters, Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß photographer

As a female public speaker and entrepreneur myself, it was an honor to introduce four amazing female entrepreneurs who were on the panel, “How to Grow Your Business,” during the Women Entrepreneurship Week Conference at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß. As much was to be learned, I’d like to give an overview of what I personally took home from each individual.

First, I would like to introduce you to Cheryl Biron, who is the president and CEO of One Horn Transportation. Cheryl began to speak about how much of a risk-taker she was and still is, and how that’s impacted her success. At a young age, Cheryl was never an entrepreneur, but more of a school girl who graduated from Ivy League schools for her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Within a few years in the corporate world, she went from valedictorian to entrepreneur, and demanded a better life for herself; one where she would be able to afford a day off for her children. After a few bank loans and mortgaging her home, she was able to throw everything into something she was passionate about, which gave her even more motivation to work hard. Cheryl gave us all a wise tip to join a peer advisory group, or to form your own mastermind group to help with mentorship along the way. She ended by mentioning she wishes she had the opportunity to major in entrepreneurship to help teach her the small important things in business, such as making payrolls, collection calls, and other small details that took her a while to learn the hard way.

Next, I would like to introduce Janine Iannarelli, the president and founder of Par Avion Ltd. Janine is most definitely a lady boss! Janine showed her competitive and risky nature while expressing ways she was able to dominate a male dominated field.

“People tend to learn ‘just enough,’ but I wanted to be the smartest on the block, and I realized education was power. I challenged people with questions that people couldn’t think of themselves,” says Janine.

Janine also had a mentor, and says it’s extremely important to find somebody who can take you under your wing, as her boss did for her, to teach you everything you need to know about the field and market you’re entering. She ended by explaining how we can draw upon our inner strength, and to remain fearless when it all looks difficult.

“Find the right person to fill key positions. Slow to hire, quick to fire. Don’t try to make people work the position. Address people who don’t fit immediately,” Janine says as she finished up. Great advice!

Last, I want to introduce Marilyn Grabowski, the president at Atlantic Infrared. Many entrepreneurs have instilled passions within them at a young age, and this was the case for Marilyn who asked for work boots at eight years old! Marilyn’s grandmother was a huge inspiration to her; she was an Italian immigrant who was brave enough to mentor and inspire her granddaughter by getting her high school education, driver’s license, and real estate license. Once Marilyn began working, people would call her phone and ask for a man; she would reply “I’ll be glad to help you,” but the line would stay silent waiting for a man. She would mention again, “I’ll be glad to help you.” People wouldn’t believe she was a female good enough in the field. Marilyn is also a great inspiration for females who want to dominate male fields!

Linda Bowden, the regional president at PNC Bank and moderator of our event, mentioned a few highlight at the end of the event. Lessons she mentioned included:

1. Fear can be your best friend.
2. There is no substitute for knowledge.
3. Get a mentor.
4. Be smarter than the next person.
5. Ask for help when you need it!
6. Join organizations that have similar focus to yours.
7. Have inner strength and believe in yourself.

And last but not least…

8. BE A LADY BOSS!

is a junior Economics major at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß, and a member of the Student Publicity Committee for Women Entrepreneurship Week. She received the university’s Certificate of Entrepreneurship in 2014.

By Yanli Zhang

During the balmy weather of late January in Florida, I attended the USASBE (United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship) Annual Conference in Tampa.On the first day we visited the Tampa Bay WaVe, a co-working space/incubator with a 15,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility near downtown Tampa.

Linda Olson, the founder and president, shared with us the experience of Tampa Bay WaVe. After working with startup companies in Boston during the heady days of the dot-com boom of 2000, Linda moved to Florida for family reasons. Still excited and believing in the future of tech startups, Linda tried to create that kind of entrepreneurial community and fill in the gaps of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Florida. In 2006, she founded the predecessor of Tampa Bay WaVe, which was practically just a Meetup group of like-minded tech entrepreneurs at that time. Gradually they set up an advisory board, who met once a month discussing how they could build up the entrepreneurial community around Tampa Bay.

In sharing the lessons of how to get private sponsorship, Linda said it was important to find people who are well connected in the community. She also used the idea of contingent sponsorship to get people onboard about the idea. For example, while applying for the federal EDA funding which requires matching, she was able to secure an in-kind contribution of $300,000/year real estate value office space from the owner of the current building they reside in (which happened to be vacant 50% at that time), who was suggested by a member of the advisory board. In 2012 Tampa Bay WaVe got the $1 million federal EDA funding from the i6challenge program. This dramatically lifted the visibility of Tampa Bay WaVe in the community, and got the community excited. Interests in getting involved rolled in, which helped it recruit many mentors.

In order to manage the vast number of mentors, Tampa Bay WaVe put in some process and allowed mentors to take different roles based on their situations. Dedicated mentors are assigned to companies which require higher commitment of time; while mentors-at-large include subject experts, entrepreneurs-in-residence, and provide office hours, workshops, or just-in-time demands. MOU are signed to help set the expectations, which usually specify the time frame that mentors need to be involved (e.g. 6 months for dedicated mentors). In order to increase mentor engagement, Tampa Bay WaVe tries to recruit dedicated mentors who are genuinely interested in the companies they are mentoring, and tries to give them recognition by featuring them on the website and also providing mixers for mentors to network with each other.

Tampa Bay WaVe assesses the companies that apply and puts them into three stages: Build, Launch, and Grow. The Build stage is typically pre-revenue, very little validation, still bootstrapping, seeking around $1-100k investment; during Launch stage the company has secured some paying customers and objective validation and is typically seeking angel funding of $100k-1m; finally at the Grow stage companies will have achieved at least $1m in revenue, found product market fit, and are seeking $1m+ Series A or above funding.

Different from other incubators/accelerators out there, Tampa Bay WaVe does not take equity but charges a very low fee (about $150/year for belonging to the peer-to-peer network, $1,000 for being in the 6 month Build stage, $300-500/month for dedicated office space). However, Tampa Bay WaVe requires that the companies there devote at least 10 hours per month giving help to other companies. Another major difference from other incubators/accelerators out there is that Tampa Bay WaVe allowed the founders to work part time during the initial stage (min 2 to 4 hours per week) and consequently extended the time from 12-16 weeks for a typical accelerator to 6-18 months, since many founders have to continue to rely on a source of income before their companies take off given the availability of venture funding in the community.

Tampa Bay WaVe also has a robust internship program with nearby universities such as University of South Florida, University of Tampa, etc. Interns are recruited to work in Tampa Bay WaVe, supervised by WaVe staff, and occasionally assigned to help the resident companies. First 6 months were unpaid and after that it became paid. During the visit, we saw that quite a number of the staff there came from interns, and some interns went on to work with the companies there.

With places like Tampa Bay WaVe filling in the gaps in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, I’m sure it will make it easier for entrepreneurs to start a business anywhere. In the end, I hope more people will be like Linda who resisted the exhortations of friends who urged her to go back to Boston to start a startup, and decide to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in their own communities.

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On October 15th, 2014, as part of Women Entrepreneurship Week in NJ, I had the opportunity to meet several women entrepreneurs; what an incredible experience! I can talk about each and every woman I met, as they were all incredibly helpful and inspiring, but I’m going to focus on just one: Kim Guadagno.

As Lieutenant Governor of NJ, I’m sure she has an incredibly busy schedule, however, she made the time to come to Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß to speak with students and entrepreneurs, such as myself, about her experiences. As a 19-year-old entrepreneur, I held so many unanswered questions.

As I am currently working on opening a business myself, it was such an inspiration to hear Kim talk about her busy schedule while being a family oriented woman. I always felt pressured because I didn’t want my work ethic to interrupt my family life, as I know the vision I hold for myself entails many hours of consistent work. She specifically emphasized that there is always time for what you make a priority, and if family is your priority, then there should never be a worry about not having time.

Students and entrepreneurs were honored to listen to Kim speak; however, to add to this great experience, being at the event gave me the opportunity to get her personal phone number and reach out whenever I needed to. Her passion to help others was incredibly evident when I left her a voicemail and she called me back, willing to help me with my business.

As she kindly led me to the right people to help me in what I needed, I couldn’t help but feel so thankful for the opportunity Â鶹´«Ă˝ÔÚĎß opened for me. I wanted to thank both the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship and Kim Guadagno for the wonderful experience!

Ashley Zahabian is a sophomore Economics major in the School of Business, and is taking two ENTR entrepreneurship courses this semester.

During my recent visit to China, I had the opportunity to sit in the Garage Café, a well-known entrepreneurs’ café in Beijing, China. The café is located on the second floor of a building in the Zhongguancun district of Beijing — an entrepreneurial and IT hotspot widely considered as the Silicon Valley in China. On entering the café, I was immediately struck by the large crowd working here, the grass-roots environment, and the earnestness on the face of everybody working away at the computer. Order a cup of coffee or other drink here, most of them between 20 and 30 Chinese Yuan, which is equivalent to 3 to 5 dollars, and you can sit and work here for a whole day. The café features super high-speed broadband, much better than the erratic ones I had at the hotels. If you pay extra for a membership, you can have a fixed workspace without having to move. You can also rent meeting rooms with projectors at about 20 Yuan an hour. Near the door is a bulletin board with all kinds of ads looking for partners, team members, programmers, designers, or angel investors.

Sitting in the café, I could hear words such as angel investor, seed capital, series A, series B flying around, and people sharing their ideas and progress. I also saw a few eagle-eyed angel investors talking to people and scouting for projects, which I was told happens very frequently here. I talked to some people working in the café, who said even though this café is not as nicely decorated or upscale as some of the others on the same avenue, they actually felt more at ease working here in this more grass-roots environment, surrounded by energetic people. Some of them told me that working here made them feel they were not alone as entrepreneurs and helped them persist along the way. The café also routinely organizes entrepreneurship-themed events, and rents out space for other companies, such as Google or Baidu, to organize such events. For example, some events invite well-known entrepreneurs to share their success lessons, and some connect entrepreneurs to investors, and help select worthwhile projects to be funded.

Garage Café was established three years ago in 2011 by Su Di. The street on which it was located used to be a center of bookstores, which was deteriorating at the time. Garage Café pioneered the concept of offering an open work environment for entrepreneurs, a platform for entrepreneurs to work together and share ideas, and a bridge between entrepreneurs and investors. Since it was started, a few outstanding startups have walked out of its door, and became successful IT companies. Following its lead, a few similar cafés have opened on the same street, including 3W Café, Dark Horse Club, 36Kr, etc. Some of them have both a café and an incubator. Others combine offline and online entrepreneurship services, like 36Kr with 36kr.com. In June, the Zhongguancun government formally named this street as the “Entrepreneurs’ Avenue” and made it a highlight of the entrepreneurship services offered in the district and provided certain incentives and support to such services.

Another such café that I visited is the 1898 Café near Peking University. The café is named 1898 Café after the year that Peking University was first established. 1898 Cafe is a crowd funding café, funded by the alumni in the Alumni Entrepreneurs Club of Peking University. Over 120 alumni are shareholders, with each contributing 30,000 Chinese Yuan. Each alum got in return an expense card of the same amount and the privilege to use café space to organize entrepreneurship-related events. I interviewed the founder, Yang Yong, about the origin, structure, and operation of 1898 Café. Two of the major reasons for opening the café, according to Yang Yong, are to solve the problem of funding and space for events of the Alumni Entrepreneurs Club. After opening, 1898 Café soon became a lively hub for alumni entrepreneurs to meet other entrepreneurs, share ideas, meet angel investors, and organize various kinds of entrepreneurship events. One of the biggest benefits of the crowd funding café concept, according to Yang Yong, is that it not only sources funds, but also sources talent and knowledge. One of the rules of 1898 Café is that each shareholder must organize at least one activity each year and be the waiter/waitress that day. This helped shareholders not only contribute money, but also brought together their ideas, intellect and friends, making the café a vibrant community for entrepreneurs.

From what I can see, services such as Garage Café and 1898 Café are a brilliant concept. It offers an entrepreneurial ecosystem that cafés like Starbucks cannot offer and allows everybody an opportunity to tap into that ecosystem. All of these cafes are open to everybody, although they are designed to be located in less visible streets to reduce non-entrepreneurship-related visitors. It further lowered the entry barrier of entrepreneur workspaces, because compared with incubators where entrepreneurs need to apply and get selected, here you can just walk into a café, order a cup of coffee, and work for the whole day in the company of like-minded entrepreneurs and hope to find partners and investors there.

From the experiences of places such as Silicon Valley, we know that knowledge flow and social networks are very important to fostering entrepreneurship. Perhaps we can learn a lesson or two from here in building an entrepreneurial ecosystem in our respective local communities. Cafés like these provide entrepreneur workspaces at a very low cost, and are thus accessible to people at the most grass-roots level. Everybody feels equal as they walk through the door, whether big shot or struggling nobody, all working hard toward his or her dreams.

Yanli Zhang is an associate professor in the Management department of the School of Business, and a member of the faculty of the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship. 

5. She’s one of the top women in New Jersey’s construction industry, a traditionally male-dominated industry.

4. She’s on the board of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which means this lady has influence.

3. Her company has had more than 20 years of profitable performance under Perry’s leadership, which means she can share secrets of success.

2. She’s an incredible role model for overcoming obstacles and never giving up on your goals.

1. She’s so cool that she was recently willing to be in a selfie with me, but also no-nonsense enough to give up on my failed selfie attempts (see attempt #3 below) and ask someone else to take the picture.

(OK, so this won’t be retweeted as much as Ellen Degeneres’ Oscars selfie, and I obviously don’t have Bradley Cooper’s selfie-shooting abilities. Although, c’mon, if I’m pining for something from Bradley Cooper, it’s definitely not his ability to shoot selfies.)

Don’t miss Marjorie Perry’s talk at 5:30 p.m. Wed. March 5 in University Hall room 1010. Maybe she’ll even shoot a selfie with you.

 raises some interesting ideas in her essay, most notably: how often are entrepreneurs running from a bad situation, instead of running toward a good one. Her point is, some would-be entrepreneurs may be pursuing their startup with a fantasy vision of what owning a business will really be like as a way to escape the grind of their full-time job. They may not have a grasp of the tough reality of being an entrepreneur. (Plug: our 3-course entrepreneurship certificate gives students a real-world, immersive entrepreneurship experience so they’re not someday launching a startup with a starry-eyed outlook.) I especially loved this line from Aarons-Mele: “Starting a company doesn’t mean being freed from the grind; it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if it’s Sunday morning or Friday night.”

I’ve been in this boat at least once, of wanting to escape the 9-to-5 work world (who hasn’t?). Although I wasn’t going to quit my job to start a company; instead, I wanted to quit so I could do volunteer service, full time. While seeking advice on whether to do this, I (subconsciously, at the time) stacked the deck to get the answer I wanted by going to talk to my favorite priest. I mean, of course a priest would tell me I should quit my job and go serve the poor, while family and friends might point out the practical problems and repercussions involved with such a move. Except, alas, the priest didn’t do that; instead, he said something along the lines of, “Nothing you have said to me indicates what you want to do to serve. Spend a year figuring that out, and then we’ll talk again.” A lot changed in that year, and I will always be grateful for that priest’s sage advice.

So maybe that’s a take-away from Aarons-Mele’s article: spend some time figuring it out before making the leap. She asks, “What if 2014 could be the ‘year of working for someone else — and loving it’?” Or maybe, 2014 could be the year of exploring what it really takes to be an entrepreneur (our  will give you great insight on this) so you don’t get seduced by the “entrepreneurship porn.”