My return to the working world began in earnest last month.  On April 11th, Adam and I stood before the final selection committee of the inaugural Wharton Venture Award (a grant intended to allow entrepreneurs to pursue new ventures full-time during the summer) and presented our summer plans for PlaceVine.  Just as being in the “real world” for 7 years taught me to appreciate the joy of returning to academia, being in a classroom for the past 9 months made me antsy to get back to executing in the “real world”.  I have written before about “the urge to create” and being back in front of an audience, pitching our vision, was energizing.

By that evening, PlaceVine had been declared a winner.  Though only $10K, I walked home that day feeling like we had raised a million (I think I would have felt that way had the award been for $5K or even $500).  The simple fact that a professional committee of entrepreneurs, investors, and academics had deemed an idea of our own creation worthy of any funding was enough to leave me completely jazzed.  Having been involved in fundraising activities before as part of GetActive’s management team, it was not a completely foreign sense of victory.  However, it is an entirely different high when it is an idea that you personally conceive from scratch.  It is inspiring to know that your funding is not to increase sales or improve marketing or speed up product development, but rather to take nothing but an idea on a Powerpoint slide and attempt to make it a working service.

So, this week, with school wrapped up for the year, I have reported to my version of a summer internship as co-founder of PlaceVine, Inc. (now officially a Delaware corporation).  We are, for the moment, our own bosses, working to turn an idea into a reality, and that to me is what it’s all about!