Innovation has been heavily stressed on campus this year, and on Monday two entrepreneurial heavyweights came to share their experiences.
Chancellor Holden Thorp held a forum on Monday night with Steve Case, co-founder of American Online, and Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, founder of the Deshpande Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship as a catalyst for change in the United States and India.
To begin the Innovate@Carolina speaker series event, Case discussed his decision to leave a promising job to work with a company named GameLine, but after plummeting sales, he left.
“I learned a lot from the company,” Case said. “A lot of it was perseverance and sticking with your ideas even though there’s lots of ups and downs.”
Deshpande, also the chairman of Sparta Group LLC, said that while many start-ups have a “near death” experience, those experiences actually help broaden their comfort zones and help them in future endeavours.
He also said that innovation and experience are only one part of the formula for success.
“Innovation plus relevance equals impact,” he said.
Case said he had always been fascinated with being able to connect people through the Internet but had to fight through adversity before becoming successful.
“I remember spending several years trying to convince PC manufacturers to put modems in PCs, saying someday people will want to actually connect these devices to other devices,” Case said. “People in the ‘80s thought that was far-fetched.”
