Veterans make great innovators, if given the opportunity, say RideScout co-founders Craig Cummings and Joseph Kopser. Most of the early money put into RideScout, an app that compares local transportation times and costs, came from fellow veterans. "We're huge believers in veterans, and we want to support them becoming entrepreneurs," says Cummings, the company’s chief operating officer.
After Cummings and Kopser sold RideScout in September 2014, they decided to invest some money from the sale to help veterans launch their own startups. Two months later, Cummings and Kopser introduced the $70,000 RideScout Student Entrepreneurship Endowment."As a 20-year Army veteran and an entrepreneur myself, I understand the challenges out there for service members looking to start businesses, but I also understand the huge opportunity," Kopser says. "We have been trained as leaders, and as veterans we have thick skin, a necessary trait for any entrepreneur."
Cummings and Kopser put $2,000 of the endowment toward creation of the James Pippin Veteran Entrepreneurship Award, an award named for the first veteran (after Cummings) to invest in RideScout. A program where competing teams of MBA students compete with startup business plans, Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition (TVLIC) awards the scholarship to the most promising startup with at least one veteran creator. Last week, the Texas VLIC announced that Blackbox Trainer had won the veteran award.
Adam Burke, ’04, is the founder of Blackbox Trainer, a website that provides personalized diet and exercise plans to those who cannot afford a personal trainer won the veteran award. Full Story»