Who Owns the Ice House?

This past weekend I attended a program at Cafe Commerce, the public library in San Antonio. The program was solely for Trinity University Entrepreneurial Hall students and it is called Who Owns the Ice House. This program was based of the book, "Who Owns the Ice House" written by Clifton Taulbert about Uncle Cleve, an unlikely entrepreneur. The book is a series of eight lessons and the program is based solely off the book. The program is originally intended to be stretched out for sixteen weeks, and operates that way across the country. However, they decided to condense the program for us, because being college students, it is not feasible to go downtown to the library every weekend for sixteen weeks. Thus, the weekend was packed with knowledge and meeting galore, but it was informative and educational.

The entire weekend helped me cultivate and formulate potential start up ideas,  and really had me thinking with "invention glasses" on. Now, whenever I come across a problem or a convenience in my life, I think about who thought of that, or what sort of problem someone had to go through to create a solution. 

Which brings me to Entrepreneurship class, ENTR 2190, a class with a total of seventy people, which is a lot of people in one classroom for Trinity and definitely not the norm. However, it proves great for bouncing ideas off of people. Last week we were all assigned brainstorming groups, mine met a couple of times, and as we pitched our business ideas to each other, I realized that the brain is truly like a rubber band, the more you stretch it, the larger it gets. In this case, my rubber band for entrepreneurship was being stretched beyond limits I thought were capable and I surprised myself by coming up with some half decent ideas, albeit they are mostly directed at college students, and somehow all involve food...but I think I was just hungry when I came up with some of them. Another wonderful, yet scary requirement of 2190 is that we all have to pitch business ideas. Now, I love public speaking, and find the rush exhilarating, so I voluntarily pitched an idea last Tuesday. However, later on in the class when we actually have our true business partners, one of us every week will be required to pitch the idea, randomly, on spot. Although, some find that terrifying (even though I love speaking, I still find the idea terrifying), I do think that it is a great, resourceful rule, and I'm sure all of our public speaking skills will improve over the next semester.