UCF students don’t wait until they graduate to begin changing the world.
Emboldened by a campus culture of exploring “what if?” and the university’s support system of expertise and resources to back them, five Knights who started their companies while they were still students are making undeniable noise in their respective industries — so much so that Forbes just honored them on its annual 30 Under 30 list.
The UCF engineering grads are recognized among peers from the likes of Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Yale, Princeton and Columbia.
Joe Sleppy ’18 serves as CEO of Capacitech Energy, which is making supercapacitor technology practical by delivering plug-and-play, modular systems that eliminate power quality issues in data centers and microgrids responsible for downtime and equipment damage.
“UCF encouraged me to think outside of the box,” he says. “UCF is an innovative university because they’ll ask, ‘Why not?’ I think I share the same philosophy with running Capacitech. Let’s try it. The world is watching. Let’s use innovation and entrepreneurship to make it better.”
Mason Mincey ’23, Derek Saltzman ’23, Matthew Jaeger ’22 and Patrick Michel are co-founders of Soarce, which takes underutilized plant resources like hemp, seaweed and grass and transforms them into nanomaterials eight times stronger than steel.“We’re on pace to build what we feel is going to be the largest global nanocellulose production facility in the world,” Saltzman says. “And we are not afraid to say that and stand behind it. That’s a big dream, but that’s kind of what we’re here to do — make big changes.”
These grads all credit their rise in large part to the immense support and knowledge they gained from UCF’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and Blackstone LaunchPad. UCF invested $10-20,000 of alumni-funded awards from the annual Joust competition and UpStarts program to support their venture development.
“Capacitech and Soarce illustrate how investments in technology development and entrepreneurship education can work together to increase innovation diffusion and societal impact,” says Cameron Ford, William and Susan Crouse Endowed Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and Blackstone LaunchPad at UCF. “They also illustrate the arduous, fraught, years-long paths that entrepreneurs commonly travel when no one is watching to achieve ‘overnight’ success. We are immensely proud of the example they are setting for current and future Knights by combining their disciplinary expertise with entrepreneurial knowhow to positively impact others.”
To learn more about how these Knights are putting in the work today that is shaping the future around us, check out their stories (with video) on UCF Today:
