What Eight Student Teams Taught Me About Getting Out of the Way

 Meredith College held the 2026 Entrepreneurship Challenge earlier this month. Molly McKinley, the College’s entrepreneur-in-residence, reflects on this year’s event and what she learned from its participants.

I’ll be honest with you. We got off to a late start on communications for the Entrepreneurship Challenge this year, and for a few weeks, I was genuinely worried we wouldn’t have enough students to fill the room. I kept refreshing the sign-up list. I lost sleep over it. And then the registrations came in, and I had to laugh at myself, because the students showed up in full force, and they showed up ready.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. These women didn’t know what they were walking into. They signed up anyway, got placed on teams with strangers, and were handed a problem bigger than anything on a syllabus. Build something real. In two days. Around a UN Sustainable Development Goal. Go.

And they did it. It happened to fall on the weekend of International Women’s Day, which felt exactly right.

On March 6 and 7, eight teams competed in the 2026 Meredith Entrepreneurship Challenge. Teams were deliberately formed from people who didn’t know each other. Alivia Briton, a junior, said it best: “What worked was being placed with new people and seeing what ideas bounced off each other.”

Jennifer Cruz Ciprian, a Studio Art major graduating this spring, put it this way: “I found incredible people I hadn’t met before, and we quickly became a team because we shared a vision of sustainability and helping others. This experience reminded me that creativity can drive meaningful change.” 

Ciprian came in as an artist. She left with a second-place win and a new vision for what comes next.

Yes. Exactly that.

None of this happens without the mentors. And I want to name them, because this is one of the things that makes the Triangle entrepreneurship ecosystem genuinely special. People here show up for each other. They give their Saturdays. They push students hard and invest real energy in the process, not because they have to, but because that’s the culture we’ve built together here.

Melissa Crosby, who co-founded LiLa and leads programs at GrepBeat, spent the full day with us. So did Majela Fonseca, who co-founded Carolina Climate and leads marketing and ecosystem development at Hutchison PLLC. Raven O’Neal, cofounder of Startup Women NC and Savvy Gal Media, who has helped guide 300+ founders. Charlotte C. Louis, founder of SenterME, who brings twenty years of financial and systems-thinking expertise to every conversation she enters. Rachel Anderson, fractional CMO, cofounder of Startup Women NC,  and author of Being Human (Centric). Angela Liu, a fractional COO who spent her Saturday helping students think through the many dimensions of a real business model, has already raised her hand to help next year. Ruth Wieder of Trialogue Studio, whose visual strategy lens pushed students to see their own ideas differently. And Ashley Davis from First Flight Venture Center, who showed up in the afternoon not just as a mentor but as a scout, getting an early look at the talent heading to March Madness. We were also lucky to have two of our own in the mix: Professor Michael Altman, whose breadth across business strategy and branding made him one of the most versatile voices in the room, and Professor Bing Yu, who brought his finance expertise to bear on the business model station in the afternoon.

These are not people with spare time. They chose to be there. 

Students rotated through three mentoring stations: problem validation, business model development, and pitch strategy. The feedback about the mentors was some of the warmest we received. Students loved the access. They loved being challenged. Angela Liu noted that students were coachable, willing to pivot as their thinking got sharpened in real time. By the final pitches, the ideas had genuinely matured. You could see it.

But the ideas themselves. Let me tell you about the ideas.

Second place went to AFGo Shoes, pitched by Kinley Copeland, Aleena Rosenzweig, Jennifer Cruz Ciprian, and Meghana Chebbi. A sustainable footwear company designed specifically for people who wear ankle-foot orthoses. A market that gets ignored constantly because it’s not big enough to attract mainstream attention and too medically specific for most founders to bother with. This team bothered.

Third place went to Offcuts, led by Amy Hill and her teammates. An intermediary connecting furniture manufacturers with buyers when products have minor cosmetic defects. Grade them. Disclose them. Sell them as-is. Keep them out of the landfill. It’s so obvious once you hear it, which is usually the sign of a genuinely good idea.

First place and the Impact Award went to the same team. That doesn’t always happen.

Graduating seniors Angie Amaya and Elaina Irving pitched Wired Health, a community-integrated primary care clinic serving immigrant and low-income communities through culturally competent, language-accessible care. They built their model around HB 67, a North Carolina policy passed last year that creates a streamlined licensure pathway for internationally trained medical professionals. Foreign-born individuals with medical credentials earn their licensure by working four years at the clinic. The community gets providers who understand their culture and language. The providers get a real path into the profession. It’s structural. It’s specific. It works for everyone involved.

The Impact Award exists separately from the main competition for a reason. Pitch polish and genuine impact are not the same thing. A team can finish fourth and still win the Impact Awardif they’ve done the work of actually understanding the people they’re trying to serve. Angie and Elaina didn’t just win the room. They won it because the work was real.

Balaji Vasudevan from First Flight Ventures said their work bridging the gap for internationally trained professionals while serving low-income communities was highly relevant to the North Carolina landscape. I’d say that’s an understatement.

Angie and Elaina went on to represent Meredith at First Flight’s March Madness Open House on March 19, going up against teams from Duke, NC State, UNCW, and ECU. 

Here’s what I keep thinking about, though. This competition isn’t really about producing founders. Some of these students will start companies. Most won’t. That’s fine. What they walked away with is harder to put on a resume: the experience of building something real under pressure with people they just met, getting genuinely hard questions from people who’ve seen a lot of bad pitches, and finding out they could hold their own. Amy Hill is a Math and Computer Science double major. She didn’t come in thinking about business development. She left, seriously considering roles that combine engineering and business for the first time. One weekend opened that door.

That’s the whole point.

The winning team, Wired Health, participated in First Flight’s March Madness on March 19. We’ve also been invited to attend Duke’s pitch battle on April 9, and Qodeo’s Democratizing Venture Summit on March 26 at North Carolina Central University, which focuses on expanding access to venture capital for Black entrepreneurs and founders from diverse backgrounds. Panelists include Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams and regional VC Zakiya Lee. Student attendance is free.