Inside Scoop: Entrepreneur Panel

Come learn from three diverse and successful entrepreneurs. There is something for every level and interest of entrepreneurship.

Danielle Burnett '05, President, Applied Technology Services - M.S.; Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, B.S.; Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Certificate in Electronic Government, University of Maryland, Baltimore 

County; Project Management Professional Certification, Project Management Institute

Danielle's entrepreneurial journey began with an exorbitant amount of preparation and education. She incorporated Applied Technology Services (ATS) the year after graduating with her Bachelors from UMBC. At the time, she was working at J.P Morgan Chase as an IT Analyst, but she had a dream of being her own boss, so she formed ATS. In 2006, she brought on a family member and her first technical staff to grow and support her business while she still worked full time developing the business to the point where she could leave to run it full time. When she finally made that transition, ATS began to grow by leaps and bounds. Revenue doubled year over year until 2014 and she now has a staff of 14 employees and contractors supporting more than thirty (30) contracts. ATS is an IT solutions integrator and services provider providing solutions from the enterprise to the desktop to Education, State and Local Government customers. ATS is also a family business with four (4) family members on full-time staff and another one that supports their website.

Arsham Mirshah '08, Cofounder, WebMechanix B.S., Bioinformatics / Computational Biology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County 

Being an entrepreneur is not as hard as it might sound. If you've ever had a lemonade stand, been paid to shovel your neighbor's driveway, or even participated in a fund raiser, you're pretty much an entrepreneur. Arsham started in high school, where he installed modified car stereos for fellow 

students, for a fee of course. He then tries some (and does not recommend) multi-level marketing. During the second half of his term at UMBC, Arsham was helping his friend grow a startup recruiting & staffing business. Today, Arsham is almost 7 years into growing his company, WebMechanix. The company's mission is to deliver impactful economic results for clients through expert digital marketing, and to do it faster than anyone else in the world. Arsham's personal mission is to empower and support people in reaching their full potential.

Mike Vess '98, Chief Technology Officer, Kinglet

B.S. Computer Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Mike has been a key player at several start-ups and is currently the CTO of Kinglet, a commercial real estate marketplace which provides flexibility and simplicity for small companies in search of office space. Kinglet's mission is to bring traditional office leasing into the modern sharing economy, like Zipcar did for cars and Airbnb did for travel. Since joining the company in June of 2014, Mike has been responsible for the initial launch and all iterations of the site and backend services that have followed. His previous experience includes Millennial Media, a Baltimore based mobile advertising company, where he helped the business grow over the course of 6 years to become a 

publicly traded company. He's fueled by Mountain Dew and misses his good friend sleep.