Business Matters

We are delighted to share with you our annual entrepreneurship panel held every February. The entrepreneurship panel invited a range of entrepreneurs and was moderated by Dale McCauley, Assistant Director of InnovationX.  

Your student listened in on honest and empowering stories from entrepreneurs launching businesses and developing ideas. Over 700 first-year business students came together in the Memorial Union to hear Cam Anderson, Avery Hadley, Ophina French, and Camille Kendrick to learn about how each of them approached their entrepreneurial journey and how students could follow in their footsteps. Each represented a different stage on the entrepreneurial journey with an established entrepreneur, a launched venture, and a startup still in incubation.

Cam Anderson is an OSU alumnus and the founder of Blacktail Studio, a manufacturer of beautiful resin-cast wooden tables and custom furniture. Anderson shared his journey from achieveing his dream career as a helicopter pilot before making the change to a boutique furniture maker as he followed his next passion. Today he is also a major wood-working influencer with millions of views on YouTube and Instagram where he shares his latest projects and teaches others how to build amazing wooden objects. Anderson shared how one can take a passion project and turn it into a full-time business as well as practical tips for growing an online audience for your content.

Avery Hadley ’24 is the founder of Hadley Creative (a marketing consulting firm) and Demolition (a clothing brand) he launched as student member of InnovationX. He began his entrepreneurial journey as a first-year student in the BA 160 series of classes, developing his initial business concept as a classroom microbusiness and then continuing with his teammates to form a founding partnership to launch the company. His message is an important one for our students: There is nothing stopping you from starting to work on your ideas immediately and launching while you are still in college. In his last term, Hadley has built his business to a point where will be full time post-graduation and looking to expand.

Ophina French and Camille Kendrick are the co-founders of SureSip, an innovative new product designed to detect date-rape drugs in beverages. The SureSip began as a project in BA 260, Introduction to Entrepreneurship, and then was taken to the OSU Launch Academy Incubator to be developed further and begin prototyping. SureSip is just beginning the journey to bringing their product to market, offering students unique insights into the early stages of a startup venture. French and Kendrick shared the steps they took to make the leap from having a class project and turning it into a real business they are pursuing while also taking college courses – a real balancing act for any full-time student.

We would like to thank all of these amazing entrepreneurs for spending an evening with us and sharing their stories and wisdom with our students. We look forwards to next year’s Entrepreneurship Panel with the next group of innovators.