Young Entrepreneurs at Trinity University

Cole Evans rehearses his lines for an Under Amour
entrepreneurship commercial in Trinity’s
Center for the Sciences & Innovation
Photos by Nate Borchers 

By Nate Borchers

When Cole Evans started college at Trinity two years ago, he already had in mind a business idea.

“Coming into college I really knew that I wanted to pursue a business degree mainly because how seriously I was taking the idea of launching Plova,” said Evans. Plova is Evans’ vision of a chewing gum that can replace brushing teeth, designed for businessmen or students on the go who don’t have time to brush teeth.

Evans took this idea to the Cupid’s Cup-Under Armour Entrepreneurship Competition, hosted at the University of Maryland last year. Competing with more than 500 businesses and despite being by far the youngest team, Plova made it to the finals.

“Pitching Plova to a room full of some of the most respected businessmen in the world was by far the most nerve-wracking experience I’ve ever had,” said Evans. “But luckily I had given the pitch hundreds of times to friends, professors and other investors that it was almost like muscle memory once I got up on stage, and in the end I think it went pretty well.”

“Pretty well” is perhaps an understatement, since the founder and CEO of Under Armour Kevin Plank rose from his seat and started throwing out to everyone in the audience the Plova gum that Evans was pitching.

Eventually, Evans’ start-up took the third place behind a coffee and tea product from a team at University of Maryland and a cricket chips project out of Harvard that had already amassed $1 million in sales. A nice consolation prize, however, was Under Armour tapping Evans as the Best Entrepreneur and granting him $5,000 to continue his work with Plova.

Although not every student coming to college with a start-up in mind, Evans certainly is not the only student entrepreneur at Trinity. Manny Menezes, who also majored in business and just graduated in May, is one of those students who became burgeoning entrepreneurs after being influenced by people at Trinity.

About a year ago, one of his close friends asked him to be a “business partner." “Together we have scoured over many different initiatives, and finally decided to roll with the one that we thought would be the most interesting and beneficial,” Menezes said. 

Manny Menezes works a booth in the Coates University
Center for the Coalition For Respect

That initiative? A social media platform called “We Don’t Fit In,” for people, including but not limited to, the millennials, who “seek positivity in a world filled with so much negativity,” Menezes said.

“We are all different and have different interests, goals, and aspirations that make us unique, and we want to encourage people to follow those dreams despite what others may think or say,” he added.

Menezes and his friends are working to launch a YouTube-like website, posting positive videos, quotes, blogs, and other content that expresses the idea of not fitting in.

“We will like to include rising, authentic music artists from a variety of genres from which to pull music videos. Eventually we would like people to submit content that they find or want to post, much like a feed from Twitter/Facebook,” he said.

The idea for such a social media platform was partly influenced by Menezes’ involvement with Coalition for Respect, a student organization that raises awareness about sexual assault.

Menezes and Evans have also involved in sports at Trinity. Menezes was a standout defensive back for the football squad for four years, and Evans spent his freshman year playing both soccer and golf for the university. 

Both Menezes and Evans regarded family and school as some of the primary forces that encouraged them to pursue their business ideas. “Trinity has helped us on many levels,” says Menezes. “Simply going to a great school that forces you to work hard and solve problems has provided us with the confidence in problem solving.”

Heading into the summer, both Menezes and Evans plan to continue working with their startups in their respective hometowns, San Antonio, Texas and Denver, Colorado. Freshly out of college, Menezes will have to juggle managing “We Don’t Fit In” with other endeavors. Evans, on the other hand, plans to commit to Plova full-time by taking a semester off in order to continue the company’s progress.