A Day at the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship: Experiential Lessons and the Power of AI

Our day began with an enlightening meeting with our new Chief of Staff, Maria Fernanda Ruelas Valdovinos , a senior in the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship (WCE) at the University of Houston, C.T. Bauer College of Business . She had arranged a meeting with her WCE professor, Keith Rassin , an entrepreneur, investor, and Co-Founder of eConserve LLC , a company dedicated to multi-family water conservation.

Having actual entrepreneurs teaching entrepreneurship is one of the many reasons the program is repeatedly ranked #1 in the nation. Since 2008, eConserve has been at the forefront of helping properties across the nation save water and reduce utility costs. Specializing in custom water conservation strategies for multifamily properties, owners, and management companies, their mission is to lower water bills, boost property values, and promote sustainability.

Our discussions not only covered a breadth of digital and content strategies used by his company and other companies in Houston and beyond, but we also touched on private equity, angel investing, scaling, social media strategies, social metadata for boosting SEO and web traffic, consulting, and teaching what we've learned over the last 10 years in business at Goodspero.

Then we sat in on Keith's class where he had a guest speaker...

Keith's class, featuring guest speaker, Deets Hoffman , the Founder & President of Leaf & Grain provided an opportunity to hear the journey of establishing a fast-casual restaurant focused on healthy salads and sandwiches, where Hoffman detailed the challenges of scaling and selecting prime locations for expansion in Houston. His venture began in 2016 in a downtown Houston mall, realizing a dream seeded in high school.

With a mission to show that food can be both nourishing and fulfilling, Leaf & Grain has been offering healthy meals with high-quality protein being their customer's key reason for dining with L&G. Their dedication to healthful food with prime locations from the start, has led to overwhelming success and a steady stride achieved in 2019 and lasting through the pandemic, even expanding to another location.

Hoffman opened the floor for a Q&A-style discussion with students.

Takeaways:

• Dunkin Donuts CEO taught him that opening a location on the commuting side of the street is the difference between a location succeeding or closing. Being on the traffic commuting side is key.
• Being located on a street that doesn't have a high-speed limit also helps so that naturally, less traffic flies by.
• Parking breaks more deals than all the other criteria. People won't come if they can't easily park.

Post-class, David Cook , the Director of WCE, shared a presentation with the seniors, incorporating photos and videos from their weekend retreat and a rhyming poem about their memories - a poem generated by AI I later found out.

Back in his office, the discussion turned to AI (per usual in many of our conversations these days) and its revolutionary impact across industries. Among the tools we discussed, OpenAI 's Custom GPTs standing out for their ability to tailor our conversations and generate content specific to our needs, offering a personalized interaction experience. Do we really need to pay a counselor or therapist when we can make a CustomGPT therapist? Introverts and extroverts - weigh in. ;)

Descript , on the other hand, is a powerful tool for creating and editing media content, enabling us to easily edit audio and video files by just editing a text document. Its application spans from podcast editing to video production, with diverse capabilities of AI enhancing creative processes and saving tons of time.

It also came to our attention that Dave is in the top % of people using these AI tools! For reference:

• Just 17% of 30 to 44-year-olds have used ChatGPT
• About 9% of 45 to 64-year-olds
• And 5% of 65+ year-olds use ChatGPT

We left completely impressed and even more excited about the unlimited potential of AI. Dave went from needing tech support from students for decades to now having Superhuman.ai sending top AI tools to his email that he tests out regularly. If a 100-year-old man is using AI, we all can! Love you Dave!

And actually, Dave is more skilled than 99% of 20, 30, or 40-year-olds in terms of using generative AI like ChatGPT. He's so well-read and knows so many methodologies and theories, that he is so much more equipped to prompt AI with the right knowledge base, which we keep saying is the skill to master in this space!

We hope you enjoyed this taste of a day's conversations and experiences at the Wolff Center and we hope to continue offering richer insights into the innovative and transformative minds and technologies shaping the future of entrepreneurship and industry.

*Save the date(s): April 8-11, 2024

Wolffest is where teams of students from the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship raise money for scholarships and student activities by running pop-up food stands and selling various goods in a friendly 3-day food-fest-like competition on UH's main campus, right in front of the MD Anderson Library. *Check out the video below.

And if you're interested in becoming a vendor, donor, or in-kind sponsor, and connecting with thousands of college students across campus, alumni, and community leaders that attend each year, please reach out to Maria Fernanda Ruelas Valdovinos , and her Wolffest team, The Wolves, for all the deets. ;)

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