Although she didn’t present, Karissa Rund left this year’s Pitch Night as a winner. At the final event for THE CLIMB, a collegiate business plan competition put on by CU Denver’s Jake Jabs for Entrepreneurship, Karissa took home the Social Impact Award for 8 Percent. Her idea wasn’t a product or service though, like those pitched by the other finalists. Instead, it laid out her plan to launch her own book and speaking tour.  Read more

Whitney Setterberg and Peter Boardman, both students in the CU Denver Business School Professional MBA program, won the 2019 CLIMB Business Plan Competition on April 25 when they pitched their peer-to-peer storage service called STOWED. THE CLIMB, an annual event put on by Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship, is designed to help student entrepreneurs transform their ideas into viable businesses through education, mentorship, networking, and financial support.  Read more

DENVER (April 26, 2019) – More than 180 attendees packed the Curtis Hotel’s Four Square Ballroom on Thursday to watch aspiring collegiate entrepreneurs compete for cash prizes. Hosted by the Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) Business School, THE CLIMB | Pitch Night showcased six finalists and their business ideas as they presented to a live panel of judges.  Read more

There are more refugees today than ever before, and many live in camps of a million or more people. The camps need medical facilities, bathrooms, showers, water sanitation and other long-term structures to serve basic functions for people. Undergraduate students in the College of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a way to save time and tens of thousands of dollars in building these facilities.  Read more

On April 26th six collegiate startup teams battled it out on stage in front of a panel of judges and a record-breaking audience of 170+ people at THE CLIMB | Pitch Night. Hosted annually by the Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship, THE CLIMB is a business development challenge open to all Colorado universities. This year’s competition marked 17 years of empowering student entrepreneurs to blaze their own trail.  Read more

From student entrepreneur to founder and CEO, Rob Carpenter has always embraced a “never quit” mentality. The business for his mobile app and software development company, AppIt Ventures, took off when he won THE CLIMB | Jake Jabs Business Plan Competition in 2012, and AppIt has since been featured in top business journals and magazines, won industry awards and even expanded its offices to London and India.  Read more

If you’re living in Denver, you’re probably familiar with a restaurant named Rosenberg’s and its addictive bagels baked with replicated New York water. Yes – we said New York. That’s how passionate CEO and founder Joshua Pollack is about making an authentic New York bagel in the Colorado Front Range. But did you know how these bagels came to be? Rewind to 2012, when Pollack enrolled in entrepreneurship courses as part of the Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship’s certificate program.  Read more