Guest Blogger: Omar Hashwi

Omar Hashwi is the vice president of the student body at the University of Michigan. He ran one of the most impressive campaigns in U of M history and won as an independent candidate in the face of adversity. He is a junior majoring in Arab, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Islamic studies (AAPTIS); minoring in Science, Technology, and Society; and earning a certificate in entrepreneurship. He is a founder of PILOT, a student organization on campus dedicated to the personal and organizational development of its members. He is also the founder and president of Stamp.fm, a music company.

A Michigan native, Omar is a proud graduate of Fordson High School in Dearborn. The best year of his life was when he studied abroad in Indonesia. He is the oldest child and loves his family dearly.


Start-ups Work with Tomorrow's "Fundable Founders"

It is an uncontested belief that the most efficient way to learn entrepreneurship is to get out of the building and become an entrepreneur. While in college, the summer is a good time to do just that. However, once the school year resumes, it's back to accounting and finance. Students return to the same structured learning environment. For the majority, a traditional education and the hard-earned bachelor's degree after four years is just what they need to land a good job. For the few who have chosen not to become anyone's employee, school always seems to get in the way.

Fortunately for University of Michigan students, both groups' needs are addressed. The B.B.A. curriculum at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business is incomparable to any business school in the world for students interested in landing a corporate job. It also has some of the best entrepreneurship courses available anywhere. What makes these entrepreneurship courses amazing is the level of doing that takes place. Students are not lectured to and just taught entrepreneurship but are challenged to work on or join others' ventures.

"Financing Research Commercialization" is a course at Ross taught by David Brophy that brings in distinguished speakers and experienced entrepreneurs from around the United States to share their experiences and teach us what they've learned. It also groups 6-7 students to work over the course of the semester with one of 13 individually chosen startups by Mr. Brophy. It is a nearly perfect process of immediately applying what we learn for the purpose of creating and growing a viable business in a semester.

By the end of the course, the goal is for all of the students to become fundable founders. Fundable founders are those whom investors will trust with their money to grow a business. However, the students are not the only ones to benefit from the course; the startups get the pleasure of working with intelligent U-M students at no charge! Taking it a step further, we realize that these students and startups are mainly based in Washtenaw County, and in a few years, we may see a vivid, positive change in our economy and to the world because of their successes. Several life-altering entrepreneurs have graduated from this university, including Google co-founder Larry Page, real estate developers Stephen M. Ross and Samuel Zell, and Domino's Pizza founder Tom S. Monaghan. I am confident that in the years to come, several more high impact entrepreneurs will emerge from U-M!

This year, the companies chosen for the course and given the chance to become the next success stories are: ArborWind, Blaze Medical, Dolorix, ExcelFore, GPX Software, Genome Dynamics International, PCS Technologies, PiezoPower Tech, Qlovi, Senal, Sigilo, Tasty Kale, and TeraHertz.

As a student in the course, I was chosen to be on the PCS Technologies team, working with the CEO, Pavan Muzumdar, and our mentor, Bill Rauwerdink. Our vision is to be the tool of choice for leadership teams around the world to manage their companies and execute their strategic plans. In doing so, we created a cloud-based solution for Gino Wickman's Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS). EOS, which has traditionally been a paper process, is a simple and complete business management system that empowers leadership teams to run successful companies. See a related video here.

The skills I've gained while growing PCS Technologies in this course are priceless and the lessons learned will never be forgotten. The experiences have been recycled and are already being used as I work on a music startup of my own in yet another astounding entrepreneurship course, "Entrepreneurial Management", by the legendary Len Middleton.


Omar may be reached here.