My Entrepreneurship Story

I am in enrolled in this class primarily as a requirement for my minor in Innovation. While I don't plan on starting my own business (at least for now), I hope that this class will help me develop an entrepreneurial mindset and refine the creativity and leadership skills that I have already started to develop in some of my previous classes.

As part of the Innovation Academy, I have been lucky enough to encounter entrepreneurship in many different forms, from meeting CEOs and founders of local businesses like Fracture and Knack, to designing and prototyping a travel app my freshman year as part of my Creativity class for the Innovation Showcase. But the specific experience that I want to tell you about was with Matt Hintze, the founder of Tutoring Zone. I chose this experience to share with you because unlike the other entrepreneurship encounters I have had, this one actually stayed with me afterwards.

I have actually known Matt Hintze for little over a year now. I first met him last spring when I took Financial Accounting and used Tutoring Zone to help me pass the class. Matt was, and still is, the tutor for that class, and over that semester and the following fall I got to know him a little better as I started working for Tutoring Zone as a campus representative.

About a month and a half ago, I was on my way to an IA Leadership, Enhancement, And Development club meeting when I learned that Matt Hintze was going to be the guest speaker. Anyone who has taken a class with him through Tutoring Zone knows how cool of a person he is, and I was excited to hear what he had to say about starting Tutoring Zone and the different challenges he had faced in doing so. That is what I expected him to talk about because that is what every other guest speaker who came to the meetings usually talked about. But what made that meeting stick with me, and the reason why I am sharing it with you today, is that he did NOT talk about that stuff. In fact, he barely even mentioned Tutoring Zone at all.

Instead, he spent the meeting talking about what he still wants to do. He talked about the time when he had been called on to head a project between the State and the University of Florida to create an online school, and how he had backed out when they refused to consider any of the ideas that he had, and how he still wanted to make those things happen. He talked about how he wanted to better the retention rate of online learning by tailoring to a student's specific learning style and matching them to professors with that specific teaching style. He did an ice breaker with us, and throughout the entire meeting he was constantly bouncing his ideas off of students and letting students bounce their ideas off of him.

I'm in my junior year, minoring in innovation with several creativity classes already under my belt, and I have never been in an environment with more creative thinking going on than at that meeting. I have had a multitude of opportunities to talk with different entrepreneurs, but this was the first time that I actually felt inspired by one, the first time that an entrepreneur actually got me thinking instead of just telling me their story. And this was someone that I had already known for year!

I am sure that many of the people in this class have used or at least heard of Tutoring Zone before, and if you ever find yourself in Matt's presence, I would highly recommend striking up a conversation with him. He is definitely one of the coolest entrepreneurs I've met!

The picture is of a puppy that someone had just adopted and brought to the meeting with them. It was a pretty epic meeting. Also I apologize for writing so much. It's a bad habit.