Get Up and Start Something!
Meet Scott Block, a co-founder of VentureBoard and a current University of Maryland student. We first met back in May of this year at Day of Fosterly, an entrepreneurship conference held in the DC area. Since then, Scott has been making great progress in school and with his startup. So I thought I would ask him a few questions to glean some of his insight to provide inspiration for those of you who might be thinking about starting a company. Enjoy!
How do you exercise your brilliance everyday?
My typical day is a balancing act of school, running VentureBoard (customer support, sales, business development, programming), and maintaining a social life. I think my brilliance, if I have any is the ability to quickly shift focuses from one task to another in order to get everything done from day to day. I try to work smarter, not harder, and never lose track of spending time with the people around me who help keep my head on straight.
 How did you gravitate toward technology?
I always thought it would be fun to have my own website. Having a platform where I can quickly share my thoughts with the rest of the world seemed pretty powerful. Then I learned that I could make interactive websites, where instead of just spreading words, I could present ideas in new ways, and even help connect people from all over the world together. This power, coupled with how many free resources are available online to learn the technical side of things really pushed me towards web development.
 Tell us about your startup.
VentureBoard is an online platform that makes it easier for students to start companies and empowers universities to better track, manage, and advise student startups. We sell instances of our software directly to universities.
 What is the most important lesson you have learned so far?
If it was up to me, I'd spend the majority of my day writing JavaScript. I love making software. But if that's all I focused on, VentureBoard wouldn't have any customers or revenue. Running a company, even if you have a strong team, requires you to step out of your comfort zone everyday in order to perform all of the tasks needed to stay afloat.
What's your take on the importance of education?
Education is of course incredibly important, but a large part of why I founded VentureBoard is that I think the way we look specifically at entrepreneurship education is fundamentally broken. Entrepreneurship can't be taught out of a textbook or through a lecture. In order to really learn what it takes to start and run a company, students need to actively get their hands dirty, talking to customers, failing, and iterating. The idea that failing is a central part of the learning process contradicts the way students and universities typically think about classes, where failing is bad.
What's your favorite thing to do outside of VentureBoard?
I'm a huge sports fan. I love watching and going to football, basketball, and baseball games. To me sporting events are the best form of reality TV ever invented. On any given night, you can watch something historical, and the raw emotion displayed by athletes shows just how important passion is to becoming the best in a given field.
Anything else you'd like to share?
VentureBoard (http://ventureboard.co) is actively expanding to new colleges and corporations looking to increase internal collaboration. If you might be interested, feel free to contact me directly at [email protected]
