With the goal of teaching their peers about business and entrepreneurship, several Dallas teens founded a speaker series where students could learn directly from experts in the field.
The Dallas Entrepreneurial Alliance, or DEA, was founded by several students at the St. Mark’s School of Texas. On April 13, the organization will host its first event: a speaker series featuring local successful businesspeople, such as Jerry Jones Jr. and Mandy Ginsburg.
“The goal of the DEA is to be able to connect high schoolers in Dallas with Dallas-based entrepreneurs and business owners that are extremely established here and give some insight into their story, how they started their company, how they’ve come to where they are, and give advice to these high schoolers,” DEA co-founder and senior at St. Marks Aamir Tinwala said.
Inspired by similar events such as Litfest and STEM fest at their own school, the founders of the DEA decided to organize a series for students modeled after those events, centered around connecting local businesspeople and students.
“We have these other events called LitFest and STEM Fest, where people learn literature and STEM. We thought it would be a cool extension of that,” DEA co-founder and senior at St. Mark’s Tarik Syed said. “That’s how we got the idea for a speaker series.”
The group debated several different formats for the event, but ultimately decided a speaker series would be the most popular and effective.
“We thought that a short speaker series with three very experienced entrepreneurs, and a short 45-minute environment where [students] can ask them a broad question [would be] the most effective thing we could do in a time that people would actually want to come to,” DEA co-founder and junior at the Episcopal School of Dallas, Henry Swann said.
While the original plan for the event centered around St. Mark’s, the organization eventually decided to extend their reach to other Dallas high schools.
“We figured that this would be a really cool mission that would resonate not just with St. Mark’s students, but with other students across the DFW area,” Syed said. “We thought, why just keep this confined to St. Mark’s if it isn’t going to be a St. Mark’s organization? Why not expand it to everyone who would find it interesting?”
Founding such an elaborate event posed many challenges to its originators, including inviting speakers, finding a location, and marketing the event to local teenagers.
“Through networking with other people, we’ve been able to come across others who have some loose connection to these people, like Jerry Jones and Mandy Ginsburg,” Tinwala said.
When looking for speakers, the group focused on finding entrepreneurs based in Dallas.
“These speakers have their prominence in Dallas. That’s where they call home. That’s where they’ve had their success,” Tinwala said.
For the April 13 event, the speakers are Jerry Jones Jr., who is the Sales and Marketing Officer of the Dallas Cowboys, Mandy Ginsburg, the former CEO of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, and Kevin Fine, the co-founder of Lunar Batteries.
Currently, the event is being held at The Banner House on April 13 from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. Attendance is free, and anyone interested may RSVP or find more information at https://effervescent-lokum-8ca5a7.netlify.app/#event.
“If [students are] in a room with these successful entrepreneurs hearing about how they did it, there might be a good chance that when they actually are in college, they go and start their own business,” Swann said.
