Eric Fortenberry – Entrepreneur & Mentor
November 29, 2011Today’s guest post is from our good friend and OrgSync Rockstar Jingshen Zhao. Jingshen is an Accounting sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, where he introduced a new chapter of the Learn To Be Foundation. He trained his chapter to take advantage of OrgSync, and actively advocates the effective use of OrgSync among other student organizations at UT Austin as well as the other Learn To Be chapters he helped to create at UT Dallas, Syracuse, Cornell, Northwestern and Harvard. To learn more about Jingshen, visit his ePortfolio.
It has been an exciting couple of weeks since Eric Fortenberry, CEO of OrgSync, was nominated to the Empact100 List of the successful business owners under the age of 30, and subsequently honored at the White House on November 17th. We at the University of Texas at Austin look up to Eric and the OrgSync story as one of the most inspirational examples of entrepreneurship. I wish more business leaders have the same infectious commitment to give back their time and money to stimulate innovation in their communities.
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| Eric and I before the screening of Waiting for Superman |
Eric and his team built OrgSync out of the frustrations from running a student organization at UT Austin. They worked with the UT McCombs School of Business to develop the most helpful tools for student leaders. Less than five years after he graduated from McCombs, Eric has already started giving back. This March, he guest lectured more than 30 UT students on bootstrapping and management information systems. Before we had a chance to breathe, he was on campus again soon after to help the Texas Exes finalize their most prestigious scholarships, and even signed himself up as a mentor for our pioneering 1SemesterStartup program. When May rolled around, he was back in town to celebrate the success of our organizations by sponsoring and attending movie screenings, chatting with our Student Body President, and shuttling young education reform enthusiasts to and back from a lecture and book signing by Wendy Kopp, Founder and CEO of Teach For America.
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| Learn To Be in Texas! |
But can you imagine having someone so awe-inspiring as your mentor? He talked me through my personal rough patches, let me into his life and aspirations, introduced me to work with the OrgSync team over the summer, and entertained one crazy idea after another. In freshman year I had started a Texas chapter of a California-based children’s charity called Learn To Be, and Eric has been nothing short of an unwavering, ever present source of courage as we went from 20 members to more than 250 in less than a year. Having offered more than 4,000 free online tutoring sessions for underprivileged kids in 2010, we are on our way to a projected total of more than 9,000 sessions this year. OrgSync’s ability to scale widely and quickly to acquire more than 200 institutional partners showed us the way to replicating our student organization chapter model to 30+ colleges and universities including: Harvard University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Penn, all while using OrgSync as a central recruitment, management and community exchange interface.
One of the most important lessons from Eric, however, is the necessity to focus on school work and making the most out of the educational experiences right at our doorsteps. This “don’t fade from school” attitude led me to find Hoot.me, another promising Longhorn startup that makes use of Facebook to facilitate online study groups. For a limited time, you can even support my nonprofit – the Learn To Be Foundation, by joining Hoot with this special link: http://hoot.me/join/ltb and get some studying done during final exams.
I’m very thankful for everything Eric has taught me thus far, and can’t wait to see what the future holds for Eric and his team.
