Last Friday July 22 marked the end of the first Promoting A Culture of Entrepreneurship program, PACE, held at Hub101 with over 20 participants.

The Danish program found its way to the states with the help of our very own Dr. William Gartner to see if their method of entrepreneurship would be effective on young American minds. Overall, the rigorous program was deemed successful.

“We needed to figure out how this would pencil out an American audience. It was designed to be a Danish program, and we wanted to see if there were cultural bias.

[Americans] were quite attuned to the model here,” Claus Thrane, mentor with the program and professor at Aarhus University, said.

The entire PACE course took place over a 10 day period with a weekend in between. Students labored eight to nine hours per day identifying a problem they wished to solve, leading up to a demo day at the program’s end.

“We had two great weeks with the student here. There was some frustrations on the way but that is to be expected. I think a lot of the students had a great learning experience,” Thrane said.

“The idea with the program is we see entrepreneurship as a method. We try to have student learn about these methods. They learn though a process where they use the tools they learned.”
Cal Lutheran students, high school students in the area and community members were all invited to the program, leading to a wide diversity of experiences, goals and perspectives.

“It is probably the best course I’ve taken at Cal Lu, definitely. For the short amount of time, I’ve learned so much,” said Cal Lutheran Senior Dana Kashani.

Kashani, as a Cal Lutheran tennis athlete, developed a web platform where tennis coaches, academies and athletes could come rate, view and find information about each other. As he describes it, “a Yelp for tennis.” He identified a specialized problem only he was attuned to, found out many other athletes faced similar problems with finding coaches and went about solving the problem. This is the PACE method.

Karla Honorato is a senior at Thousand Oaks high school looking to go into linguistics. Seeing the PACE program as a business leadership program, she joined.

“It was a really good experience because I was with people who had experience and I was able to see the world through them. Mainly I got to reflect on myself, that’s what the program showed me,” Honorato said. “It [also] taught me that people who build billion dollar companies, it took them years to get there, it didn’t just happen overnight.”

All of the teams were awarded a free month of coworking at Hub101 to continue to build on their ideas and work collaboratively. Are you working on an idea or business? Apply to be a part of our next Hub101 Incubator Program Season 2!

Operated by Cal Lutheran University in Westlake Village, CA, Hub101 offers coworking, incubation and community for entrepreneurs and small business owners to start, grow, and scale their startups with the help of mentors, coaches and service providers.
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