In these entrepreneurial circles, there’s a tendency, when hearing the term pivot, to immediately think about the word’s business implications.  But in layman’s terms, pivot is more commonly used as a synonym for rotate, turn...

   In the early days of Jack Daniels, the company did something revolutionary: it told the truth.  Rather than playing in an abstract space, their ads stuck solely to depicting the 5 Ps of Jack – product, process, people, place, ...

When Coco Sotelo pulls up a seat at the table, there’s an instant warmth and familiarity that emanates from her.  The mother of three girls (13, 10, and 3 years old) has a tendency to make everyone feel like family, and as she talks about...

Ashwinraj (Ashwin) Karthikeyan, a rising UVA Fourth Year and the CEO and Founder of InMEDBio, has long embraced his penchant for seeking out answers to tough questions, both about the current state of the world and about what the future holds. ...

Meg Greenhalgh wants your honest opinion.  No, really, she does.  As a serial entrepreneur and current Darden MBA student, she’s well-versed in the idea that feedback is an essential, though sometimes painful, part of growth and dev...

Little known fact: despite what cartoons and general lore might have you think, mice actually prefer peanut butter to cheese. They say that the devil is in the details, but as Alex Cowan’s recent Venture Design workshop proved, the best insig...

If forced to summarize it in terms even a small child could understand, one could say quite simply that Ian Pasquarelli is into food and sharing.  The founder of The Kitchen Network has devoted his schooling, work, and personal hobbies to the ...

We’ve heard it in songs, catch phrases, and quoted soundbites from any number of influential figures – the idea that “everything old is new again” is one of those timeless maxims to which we all knowingly nod our heads. ...

When viewing the success and scale of huge corporations, it’s easy to forget that many of them can actually trace their origins back to a daring entrepreneurial vision for an overlooked or neglected market, much like the ventures that comprise...

When Gina and Bryan Christ moved to Virginia two years ago, the mother and son duo thought that their days of working together were over.  Fortunately for the Charlottesville educational community, that notion didn’t last for long, and th...

NBC29's Madison Carter joined the 2017 iLab cohort on one of their first days of the program to soak up the energy and dive deeper into a few of the ventures selected for this year's promising class of startups.

 When Saras Sarasvathy tells a story, the room goes pin-drop silent.  As she weaves her tale with big, captivating words and movements, she engages each listener to lean in a little closer, anticipating each new word until the bitter end.&...

Describing the origins of his company’s name, kaleo co-founder Evan Edwards – a dedicated UVA alumnus and active mentor to Charlottesville entrepreneurs – shared that the Greek word loosely translates to “a specific purpose ...

Of all the miracles technology has made quotidian in the past century, the video chat remains among the life-changing and incredible. I can remember seeing the concept for the first time in the movie Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century and thinking it was impossibly cool—which, to a 1999 audience, it was. Little did we know it wouldn’t take ten years for video chatting to become a part of everyday life.

There…

To anyone who’s ever wondered how to start an interesting conversation with a high school or college student, I have a tip: bring up, no matter how casually or in passing, a problem in education. (Bonus points if you ask them about their own experience.) I’ve seen it happen time and time again: students get riled up about education, because it’s a live, sensitive area rife with problems at most every level.…

Most people think 1776 was the year America became America, and they’re not wrong, but they’re not right either. America is in a state of constant becoming, grounded by a written constitution that was itself composed in 1787. There was a whole decade of planning and putting-into-practice that had to happen before this USA thing started to take off—not unlike millennials’ finances.

Jean Borno, an…

If there’s a classic entrepreneurial story, it starts with taking who you are and what you know, and spinning those threads into gold. Lisa Skillman’s story is precisely one of these—and perhaps it’s for that reason that she radiates knowing what she’s about.

She started babysitting at the age of 15, and nannied on the side throughout high school and college. Her interest in business and…

It’s been suggested for years that standardized test scores are far more predictive of income than intelligence—so much so that commentators have come to jokingly refer to the SAT as the Student Affluence Test. There’s no doubt that education has a massive problem when it comes to income inequality. Wealthy families, it would seem, just have better access, whether it’s to top-notch schools or high-priced tutors—which…

If you’re like me, you buy your honey from the grocery store without thinking much about how it got there. You might pick a bottle because it’s a nice shade of gold, or because it looks like it would taste good. This is all too normal—and exactly the kind of thought process Melisseus hopes to reshape.

We have a bee crisis on our hands, and it’s part of a much larger crisis in the environment and in our…

They say that “the eye is the window to the soul,” but what I didn’t know until talking to Arjun Dirghangi the other day was that it’s also the window to the body. One of the only organs doctors can fully examine while the patient is living, the eye can clue us in about the progress of a whole host of conditions—both life-threatening and not.

When it comes to recording what they’re seeing…

One of the great tragedies of contemporary American society is our increasing disconnectedness. Where I grew up in Texas, the economy was booming, but as the houses got bigger and the yards got wider, it became more and more rare for people to know their neighbors. And we wondered why we were unhappy.

Technology and particularly social media have a great deal of promise when it comes to reconnecting us in ways that weren…

If there’s anything I’ve learned in the i.Lab so far this summer, it’s that there’s no one right way to start a company—just as there’s no one right way to paint a painting or make an earth-shaking scientific discovery. Showing up is a good start, but beyond that, there are as many ways to do it as there are types of genius.

There are, however, patterns you start to see in the effectual…

One of the beautiful things about a vending machine is that it can’t hustle you into purchase decisions. It can’t even speak. Traditionally, unless you like to talk to yourself, your whole transaction is made in complete silence (save, perhaps, the pressing of a few buttons and the slap of the Dorito bag against the bottom door).

This way of getting goods to a customer, though it certainly has its efficiencies…

If you’ve been around the i.Lab the past week, you’ve probably noticed something different about the energy in the building, mainly in the front lobby. The vibe is a little more dance-y, the faces looking more alive (and a few of them unfamiliar), and the air itself a little richer with the aroma of freshly-ground coffee—all pointing to the return of our beloved onsite coffee shop, which has reopened as Shark, too under…

We all know the old saying, “third time’s the charm,” but have you ever asked yourself why the third time is the charm? I just asked Google (which gave me completely worthless answers), but I have a hunch that in the case of Helme co-founder Brent Baumgartner, it has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with the hard-won wisdom that is failure’s sweetest gift.

Last Friday, I had an enlightening…