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Stephen Gilfus, Blackboard Founder, Discusses Academic and Professional Background at Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration 2009

Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration 2009 – Panel – Using Social Networking in Building an Entrepreneurial Venture. This panel discussion is from the 2009 Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration event. This discussion was entitled, “Using Social Networking in Building an Entrepreneurial Venture”.

Panelists included: Kirsten Barker, President and Co-Founder of Prendismo; Jay Fluegel, VP of Product Management at Event Innovation; Stephen Gilfus, President and CEO Gilfus Education Group and Colleen Wainwright, Principal of Communicatrix.

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Transcript

I am Stephen gilfus. I started a company out of Cornell University in 1997 down on College Avenue, and believe it or not, Student Agencies, called CourseInfo which you may or may not recognize but it was the precursor to what is now Blackboard Incorporated, the leader in online learning both in the domestic United States and internationally. I had the opportunity to, during that, experience to really, one, provide an opportunity to change a marketplace and educate the marketplace on new technologies but that experience really me drew me through, in may cases, the evolution of the internet from what was at the time, Netscape 2 working in some older social networks like billboards and community boards online, Gopher, LISTSERV, which actually still exist here at Cornell, through the development of web-based application, through the whole dot com, Web 1.0, Yahoo, portal, social kind of capability now into the world we exist in the Web 2.0 environment. I left Blackboard about a year and a half ago and developed my capabilities of being a serial entrepreneur and got involved in an internet retail company so I have some interesting topics.

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