First-time participants in prestigious national pitch competition earn honorable mention
Lipscomb’s first appearance in the highly selective Values and Ventures Competition created “buzz” among participants.
Janel Shoun-Smith | 615.966.7078 |
College of Business students Aiden Miller (left) and Matt Stuart (right) won an honorable mention award worth $2,500 at one of the nation’s top business pitch competitions this month.
College of Business students Aidan Miller and Matt Stuart this spring made a highly impressive inaugural showing at one of the nation’s top business pitch competitions, winning an honorable mention award worth $2,500.
Miller, a junior who currently runs Kwizera Coffee, and Stuart, a senior, who served as a business advisor, earned an honorable mention recognition at the Texas Christian University Values and Ventures Competition, held by the Neeley Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Cohu (left), Stuart (standing) and Miller (right) at the TCU competition.
Values and Ventures, which strives to highlight innovative business ideas that both make a profit and also making a real impact in a community, country or the world, has been ranked as the third best pitch competition in the nation by the Times of Entrepreneurship, an up-and-coming business news website funded by the Kauffman Foundation.
“This is one of the top two or three most prestigious undergraduate pitch and business plan competitions in the world,” said Jeff Cohu, associate professor of management and executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. “It is a major honor just to be selected to compete at the live event. Aidan and Matt did an outstanding job and there was a lot of buzz created around their performance.”
Out of 235 teams worldwide who applied to participate in the 2022 Values and Ventures, only 42 were selected, producing an impressive list of competitors including Brown, Cornell and Northwestern universities, which took the top three spots. Aiden and Matt pitched an idea to take Kwizera Coffee to the next level as a fully integrated coffee company with social impact goals embedded in its operation.
For 2022, 1,250 students from 28 states, 11 countries and 4 continents, participated in the values-centered competition hosted by the TCU Neeley Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Lipscomb's team was one of only five honorable mention awards at the 2022 competition.
Miller, the son of 20-year missionaries in East Africa who had already established a coffee shop in Rwanda before coming to Lipscomb, established a mobile coffee cart available for rental and then shifted to online sales of coffee during pandemic restrictions, during his freshman year, 2019-2020.
Despite pandemic obstacles in 2020-2021, Miller established a brock-and-mortar coffee shop in Nashville's Rocketown, a multi-use facility designed for youth activities, and purchased a 10-acre farm in Rwanda to produce coffee beans. Those moves sparked a proposal to expand Kwizera along with Rocketown nationwide.
“Aiden is in the process of building Kwizera Coffee into a fully integrated coffee company with major embedded social impact goals. The goal is to control the entire operation from the company farm, and local neighbor farmers co-ops, through the entire supply chain to the retail coffee shops and related product extensions,” said Cohu.
Kwizera products, now and in the future, include the mobile expresso bar, wholesale green coffee sales, bagged coffee sales direct to consumer, macadamia nuts, coffee flower honey, barista training services, and, coming this summer, a new eco-lodge built on the company farm to serve tourists and raise awareness about the coffee industry, said Cohu.
“Aidan’s business model is not only strategically sound but it also has points of social impact embedded at every stage and the plan is for this company to utilize block chain technology to produce a completely transparent supply chain,” Cohu said. “This business will provide retail jobs in the United States and many farming jobs in Rwanda as well as create fair trade markets for micro farmers in Rwanda while also supporting many economic empowerment initiatives.”
Aiden Miller (left) and Matt Stuart (right) pitching the business idea to build Kwizera Coffee into a fully integrated coffee company with major embedded social impact goals.
Stuart was also vital to the success in this competition, said Cohu. “Matt is an exceptionally talented young man with a strong understanding of both business and social entrepreneurship principles,” he said.
The team of Miller and Stuart helped lead Lipscomb to victory at Belmont’s Reverse pitch competition two years ago Stuart also helped earn Lipscomb its first University Innovations Fellows status from Stanford University in 2019.
Lipscomb’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation is working with about a 20 students this school year, focused on supporting and nurturing student businesses.
Aiden and Stuart’s success at the TCU competition is a great example for Lipscomb’s other student entrepreneurs, Cohu said.
“It just says we put in the work. There are no shortcuts to success. Success is the result of a process. You follow the process and you will succeed. No shortcuts,” he said.