As the community celebrates 10 years of the Innevation Center, the Â鶹´«Ã½AV is spotlighting the people and ideas that have shaped its vibrant community.
Below, new Innevation Center resident and University undergraduate student Jonathan Berrien answers questions about innovation, entrepreneurship and the impact the Center has already had on him.
I, alongside my co-founder, Chad Sherf, started Atlas – an online platform to optimize personal training. I got involved with the Innevation Center after the LaunchNevada pitch competition. There was almost this mystery about the office, and I thought the only way I was going to get in was by winning a university-backed pitch competition.
I got second place, but I still figured it was worth a shot – so I sent in an application, expecting I’d have to pitch myself into this place as well. Turns out, they were far more welcoming to young entrepreneurs than I expected. Soon enough, I had access to this beautiful downtown office – as a 21-year-old undergrad. Working downtown as an undergrad gave me this sense of legitimacy. It created a formal process for my work.
It all felt more real, and I quickly learned that your environment shapes your mindset. And mindset was exactly what I needed heading into our first major challenge: the SONTAG pitch competition. My partner and I knew this competition could be a huge opportunity for us. But it felt like the odds were stacked against us. From what we’d heard, most of the heavy hitters didn’t even bother showing up for LaunchNevada – almost as if the prize money wasn’t worth their time.
That was a scary thought. We were a kinesiology major and a computer science major. I had two entrepreneurship classes under my belt, but when I looked through the LinkedIns of past competitors, the same three letters kept showing up: MBA. At this point, we just had to lean into what we were good at and hope it could buy us enough time to figure out what we were doing. So, we started fast and we started early – learning everything we could about our market, how to pitch to investors, and what a startup was supposed to look like. We sent in our application and crossed our fingers.
We were accepted into the first round, and we were looking down four rounds of competitions, two business plan revisions, and 40 other competitors. But we stuck to our plan, worked relentlessly and learned as fast as possible. Looking through the schedule made me smile – the location for three of the rounds was right here at the Innevation Center. Some true home court advantage. We fought hard through the multiple rounds of pitches, took the feedback of the judges and learned as much as we could. Three months later, the home court advantage seemed to work, and we ended up winning the competition.
One of the most valuable things the Innevation Center opened up for me was the opportunity to collaborate. In the SONTAG competition, mentorship was formal – you scheduled meetings and came prepared with as many questions as possible to fine-tune your business plan and pitch. But in the startup world, speed is everything; and that process can take weeks.
“The Innevation Center offered something different: real-time collaboration.”
If you caught someone during a lunch break or between meetings, you had a chance to get a fresh set of eyes on a problem you were working through. And it worked both ways – offering feedback on other founders’ projects not only created a sense of community but also helped build mental flexibility, giving you new perspectives to apply to your own business.
A recent example of this kind of real-time collaboration happened when I spoke with Rajeev, another member at the Innevation Center, about a sales problem we were facing. Within just 30 minutes of brainstorming together, we landed on a solution that not only resolved the bottleneck we’d been stuck on, but also revealed an entirely new channel we hadn’t considered. That half-hour conversation unlocked something major for our business, and it’s exactly the kind of progress that can only come from being in an environment built for unscheduled collaboration.
This is the greatest time in history to do a startup – AI is creating new industry opportunities, it feels like on a weekly basis. And you don’t need to know what you're doing at first. If you're willing to learn. The only thing that can stop you is a self-limiting belief that you're not capable – which I promise is not true. If you have the desire to build something, then do it. If you're in your 20s, you will never have this much time and opportunity to fail. And failing, which you’ll learn quickly, is just a part of the game. With a network of people here in Reno who want to see startups succeed, you now have every reason to give it a try and build something people will love.
