This past weekend’s TIA Incubator brought together a packed room of students, founders, and mentors for a session that balanced hard-won wisdom with bold new ideas. Between two dynamic venture pitches and an honest, energizing presentation from Nick Freud ’15, the atmosphere felt equal parts pep talk and community gathering of people who genuinely want to build things that matter.
The day opened with pitches from two ventures that approached problem-solving from totally different, yet equally compelling, angles.
Yabesi Witinya ’26 kicked things off by addressing a frustration nearly every student shares: the campus discovery gap. With more than 100 events happening weekly across seven disconnected channels, students are overwhelmed by emails, underwhelmed by paper posters, and often unaware of opportunities they would actually love. His venture, DeBillboard, proposes a streamlined, personalized event-discovery app that aggregates all campus events—club meetings, athletic games, dorm programs, and more. He partners directly with the student body to keep the platform authentic and active. His pitch resonated with anyone who’s ever missed a great event because it was hidden somewhere in an inbox.
Next, Mike Ahearn Wilcox introduced EchoScape, an interactive meditative soundscape video game designed to make mindfulness accessible to people who find traditional meditation daunting. He highlighted a key insight: silence can actually increase anxiety, especially for beginners. EchoScape solves that by combining sound healing elements like binaural beats and sound baths, a real-time responsive soundscape that shifts with player interactions, and a gentle, game-based engagement that improves focus and reduces stress. The result is “meditation in motion”—a new doorway into mindfulness that meets users where they are.
The highlight of the weekend was a discussion with Freud, founder of Campus Reel and new venture Fellow Humans. His presentation was honest, funny, and packed with lessons that students scribbled into notebooks at record speed. Freud shared the story of graduating without landing any of the jobs he wanted, traveling abroad, and eventually returning home with the seed of an idea: virtual campus tours. Campus Reel grew from VR tours into a massive, crowdsourced video platform that today partners with more than 150 universities and earned him a spot in ǰ’ vaunted “30 Under 30.”
But behind the success was a reality many founders face and rarely discuss. Freud spoke candidly about burnout, family health challenges, and the emotional toll of building a company: “Everything just hit me at once. … I had to step back, get help, and get my head straight.”
Out of that experience came his new venture, Fellow Humans, a mental-health support ecosystem focused on accessibility: celebrity live events, free peer-support groups, and premium structured programs built on research showing that group therapy often outperforms individual sessions.
Throughout the conversation, Freud offered guidance that ranged from strategic to deeply personal. He advised students that their job as a founder is to simplify chaos: break problems into component parts, solve them, then unify the whole. He reminded them that “Entrepreneurship isn’t glamorous—highs and lows will coexist.” And, above all: “You don’t need permission to start.” It can be scary to start something new before feeling ready, but taking the leap is an important and rewarding part of the process.
Between the pitches, tackling on-campus and global challenges, and Freud’s grounded take on what it really means to build something, everyone left the room with a shared sense of both reality and possibility. Students walked away inspired not by a glossy highlight reel, but by the idea that meaningful ventures start with problems you care about, a willingness to stay scrappy, and the courage to begin before you feel “ready.”