Please join us for a Q&A panel featuring esteemed alumni from Dartmouth, Georgia Tech, Illinois, and Ole Miss who have experience with entrepreneurship and are excited to answer your questions. Learn about our panelists below:

Terren Klein, Dartmouth ’17

Terren is the CEO and co-founder of College Pulse–the leading research and analytics company dedicated to understanding the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of today’s college students. College Pulse offers custom data-driven marketing and research solutions, utilizing its unique American College Student Panel™–an online community of over 650K students from 1500 universities in all 50 states who have contributed over 115M survey responses over the past two years alone. The data we collect from our panel powers a suite of data products that provides actionable insights to different customer segments, including campus recruiters, product/marketing teams and universities. Prior to founding College Pulse, Terren graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2017, where he majored in Government with a concentration in political theory and data science. Outside of Dartmouth, Terren has worked for the US Embassy in Argentina, the Office of US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Public Religion Research Institute, and Bridgewater Associates. Terren is originally from Edgemont, New York.

Connect with Terren on Linkedin

David Van Vlierbergen, Illinois ’15

David is a 2015 Stamps Scholar Graduate from the University of Illinois. David majored in Finance & Accounting with a minor in Engineering Technology & Management. He had multiple start-ups throughout college, but he decided to start his career in corporate finance as an investment banking analyst at J.P. Morgan. After a few years at JPM, David transitioned to Fine Capital Partners where he was a hedge fund analyst. In October of 2018, David started working on Fernway, a cannabis branded products start-up, with three other co-founders he met through a mutual friend. As a Co-Founder and the Chief Financial Officer at Fernway, David oversees Accounting, FP&A, HR, Supply Chain and IT departments, and works closely with Business Development, Operations, Sales & Marketing as well. Fernway has grown to 50 employees as of January 2023, and it completed the calendar year 2022 with $21M in revenue ($40M+ GMV), up from $10.5M and $20M in CY 2021, respectively.

Connect with David on Linkedin

Ben Branson, Ole Miss ’18

Ben Branson graduated from the University of Mississippi with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, but quickly discovered that he was ill-suited for a desk job. After a brief foray into outdoor education, he got a job as a carpenter and realized that was his passion. During the pandemic, he moved home and started a house-flipping company with his mom, which was dissolved 8 months later. He then started Branson Carpentry and focuses on residential repairs and remodels.

Connect with Ben on Linkedin

Prateek Shah, Georgia Tech ’19

Prateek received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech. During his time in school, the Stamps Scholar network was essential to gaining more experience, such as working on wearables at the GT Research Institute, and rocketry at SpaceX. However, he has spent most of his career working on self-driving cars at Zoox. Being an early employee at Zoox gave him exposure to multiple steps of the entrepreneurial process, from defining engineering culture to pitching investors. About a year ago he started Spanning Labs, a startup to blend emerging technologies from disparate fields. While the early days of the company were based around Web3, the lab is now largely focused on the new wave of large language models to create AI-assisted tools. Over the last year, his team has raised $8.5 million at a $37 million valuation, grown the company to 8 employees, and set up an office in downtown SF.

Connect with Prateek on Linkedin