TiE Young Entrepreneurs teaches a range of business skills to local teens

Photo above from the presentation event courtesy of KDKA-TV.

Some budding entrepreneurs have been busy pitching their ideas to seasoned business owners and investors here in Pittsburgh in a new program for high school kids. The pilot program, called “TiE Young Entrepreneurs,” culminated in a pitch presentation at Carnegie Mellon University at the end of July.

The students had spent seven weeks working with an online program that offered educational videos about how to start a business.

North Allegheny High School junior Avyukt Iyer was excited to win the competition with the business idea that he pitched. He says participating in TiE Young Entrepreneurs taught him a lot of things he hadn’t previously known about marketing and revenue.

“I created actual robots to move,” Iyer said about his winning business idea. “It’s autonomous robots to assist inbound logistics. So it specifically helps with logistic handling and ‘put away,’ which is the way a robot moves in a company to a specific destination.”

The program was developed and run by the Pittsburgh chapter of the global non-profit TiE, which supports entrepreneurship.

“Over the short span of seven weeks, most of these kids have taken ideas or products that didn’t even exist and built actual functioning mock-ups of them,” says TiE Pittsburgh Executive Director Alex Dalton.

The program allows students to learn at their own pace, watching the videos on their own time and also working with a friend as a team.

“There’s a curriculum designed for them to let them learn the nuts and bolts from people who’ve done it before,” says TiE Pittsburgh President Robin Prasad. “It’s sort of difficult to teach out of a textbook or classroom, because it’s real world stuff.”

Click here for more information on this summer program, which will be expanding to include more students next summer.