Celebrating the Past, Present & Future of Duke Entrepreneurship

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“I have some really cool Duke alums that I lean on—I could go down the list and drop names, but I won't do that,” joked Alana Beard ’04, eliciting laughs from the audience.

Beard was an alumnae panelist at Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship’s recent Centennial event, which drew together hundreds of people in the Duke entrepreneurial ecosystem to hear insights from prominent entrepreneurs, as well as pitches by promising student founders representing the next generation of Duke innovation (see below).

The supportive nature of Duke’s entrepreneurial community was a theme of the evening, with Beard and her fellow panelists Melissa Bernstein ’87 and Aaron Schumm MBA ’07 emphasizing the value of mentorship and giving back.

"It’s a testament to the energy, generosity, and collaborative spirit of our Duke community that these remarkable alumni didn’t just participate—they were enthusiastic about traveling back to campus to mentor, inspire, and engage with the next generation of Duke innovators and entrepreneurs,” said Duke I&E Director Jamie Jones, who moderated the alumni panel. “Their willingness to share their journeys and give back reflects the essence of what makes our network extraordinary: a passion for creating meaningful impact and a deep commitment to helping others unlock their potential.”

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Duke President Vincent E. Price, in his opening remarks for the event, underscored the role of entrepreneurship in Duke’s success and promise for the future, saying, “Our community of students, faculty, and alumni have powered innovations that solve problems, save lives, and enhance human happiness. As we look ahead to the tremendous promise of our second century, we're investing more than ever before in our community of people whose innovations will make a positive difference in the world.”

Duke alumni, President Price continued, “have reshaped industries with companies like Airtable, Plaid, and Cameo, and they've changed the way we live and the way we learn, whether that means learning with Duolingo or learning how to crochet with the Woobles—one of the fastest growing and, I'll say, one of the cutest companies here in North Carolina.”

How It Started: Passion & Problem Solving

After retiring from the WNBA, Duke basketball legend Beard made the transition into the venture capital space before quickly realizing it wasn’t the right fit for her. She returned to her hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana and decided to follow her passion of giving back to the community. She began with a listening tour, explaining, “I was away for 18 years, so it would have been foolish for me to come in and tell the community what they needed without understanding it.” Based on what she learned, Beard established the 318 Foundation (318 being the Shreveport area code) to empower girls and marginalized communities through mentorship and immersive experiences.

When Schrumm was doing product development in New York, his entrepreneurship story began when his boss proposed going into business together. The two had a post-work brainstorming session (“literally writing on a bar napkin”) considering what the wealth world needed, co-founded a wealth management fintech platform, and went on to build and sell the company. On the heels of this success, Schumm decided to do something with a broader impact. He considered his own experience trying to build his company’s employee retirement program. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why is this so expensive, clunky, and difficult? How big a problem is this for everyone else in the country?’” Schumm founded Vestwell with the mission of solving the savings gap in America, powering retirement savings and education programs for small and large businesses as well as state governments.

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Duke trustee Bernstein joked about the false start of her own career after graduating, saying, “Even though I graduated way back in 1987, I pursued the extrinsic validation of investment banking.” She got a job at Morgan Stanley and worked for a few weeks before realizing she was “like a flower without sunlight and water.” So she and then-boyfriend Doug Bernstein went away for a weekend. “We said, ‘We’re not coming back till we decide what we want to do with the rest of our lives.’” The pair quickly honed in on making products that could be “a catalyst to unleashing imagination in children,” the beginning of Melissa & Doug toys, which the two built into a popular and beloved brand before selling the company. And after 35 years of “pushing a boulder up a hill and having it roll to the bottom every day,” Bernstein said with a laugh, “we decided to do it again.” The couple founded Lifelines, a well-being company that creates sensory immersion products that interrupt people’s stress response and activate a state of calm and joy.

Program Highlights:

On empowering others

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Beard: “It’s something I take pride in and is important to me because I had others who empowered me throughout my journey. Both of my parents only have a high school education, so I needed individuals along my journey to pour into me. I've always understood the importance of having mentors, so the 318 Foundation is simply that—ways to leverage the community and the network I've built over the course of my 20 years and pouring it back into the community.

Bernstein: I've spent my life in a rabid search for meaning. I’ve realized that meaning comes from taking something in you and implanting it in someone else and really letting it flourish in them—I think your hard-fought journeys only become meaningful when you're able to share them with others and help others on their journeys. So for me there's nothing more powerful than using my experience to help uplift others.

Schumm: I never want to force someone to make a decision, but I want to be able to give them enough information to where they can make the right decision for themselves and feel really confident and comfortable in that. A lot of people are confused or overwhelmed by financial savings, or they just don’t have the time, so I wanted to remove those barriers and give people the empowerment to take whatever path is right for them.

On where they get their resolve to tackle tough challenges

Schumm: I'm a hyper-competitive person. I love when people tell me no—that’s my fuel, my motivation. So many people told me I could never build Vestwell, and that it had been tried so many times, and I just keep pushing and refuse to fail. I see the outcome and the impact when I sit down with clients, and with their kids, who say we’ve given them something they never had. That’s what keeps me going.

Bernstein: We talk a lot with our entrepreneurs [in the Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs accelerator program] about having a mission and a vision and how important they are—that’s the fuel that drives me. When you think about the thing you want to do that could potentially impact so many lives, you know you can’t quit. The second piece of that is my team. When you have people on your team who are even more invested and passionate than you are, you owe it to those people who are working so hard to do everything in your power to try to make that vision a reality.

Beard: I’m just a firm believer that when you have access and opportunity, you have a responsibility to pay it forward. I wake up every single day ready to tackle the world because I know I have 160 young women in Shreveport, Louisiana who are depending on me to be consistent and show up.

On dealing with failure

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Schumm: When I set out to build Vestwell, I was adamant I didn’t want to build this core infrastructure piece which is essentially sub-accounting, how money is split up and housed. I was like, “I don’t need to build that, I can do this other thing.” It took me close to four years before I realized I had to build it or we would fail miserably. Then I had to go raise capital, because it would take millions and millions of dollars to go build this, and I wasn’t even sure what exactly it was going to be. We were raising during Covid, and during the crypto craze—people were throwing money at anything, but they were not throwing money at us. We finally nailed it. But we failed for four years by not building it or acknowledging it.

Bernstein: As a product designer, I fail much more than I succeed. Someone once calculated the percentage of time I succeed, and it was 38%, so I fail 62% of the time. One of those colossal failures was early on, we did a line called Puzzle World, and it was an entire world made out of wooden laser cut pieces that spanned horizontally and vertically and it was the coolest thing ever, but it was a mystery in a box. It cost us about a million dollars to invest in the laser machines to make them, and they were expensive—the sets were $29.99 to $99.99 retail about 20 years ago—and they were kind of complicated to sell. At our biggest show, it sold out in a few hours, and we thought it was going to be a huge success. But when we called our stores, they said, “It’s not selling.” Ultimately we had to take it back from almost every store that carried it. I was so ashamed and humiliated that we spent a year of our time and nearly a million dollars of our hard-earned profits to make this that I could barely get out of bed for a week. I gradually learned that the only way failure is positive is if you can mine it for its learnings and its wisdom, and three lessons came out of that failure that were so powerful and so profound that they literally changed the next 20 years of product design for me. One was that we could never depend on a retailer to sell our product for us. Two, we couldn't create what I coined “mysteries in a box,” which are products that are amazing, but they're stuck in a box and you don't know what they are unless there's a lot of marketing and education. And three, our price points had to be much lower. So those lessons are still with me today, and that failure has paid off so many times in many millions of dollars.

Beard: The beauty of sports is you fail every single day at everything that you do, but the cool thing is that you get instant feedback. I think one of the biggest transitions for me going from sports to the real world is that instant feedback isn’t as common.

One of the things I pursued once I retired was acquiring the rights to a WNBA team in the Bay Area. I went through that process of leading that bid, partnering with the group based in the Bay Area, but understanding that if the Warriors decided to put their names in the hat, it was over for me. But I wouldn’t allow someone else’s journey or process to dictate what I did, so I went ahead and attempted to acquire the rights, which required me to raise $100 million to bring in an experienced team to convince the WNBA that we were the right ownership group to get it done. The Warriors came in after about a year and said they wanted a team, and it was all over, so that was a huge failure for me, but it was also a huge learning opportunity. One thing I took from that is never allow someone else’s agenda to dictate your direction or choices.

Promising Student Founders Pitch Their Ventures