Lehigh Highlights MBA Experience of Prominent Alumnus
This past week, the Lehigh University College of Business and Economics‘s MBA Newsletter profiled alumnus Raveen Beemsingh, MBA’13. He is using his MBA education from Lehigh to launch a new venture, Hammerhead Navigation. Hammerhead Navigation is a navigation system for bikes that crowdsources bicycle routes from all over the world.
Beemsingh met the chief and founder of Hammerhead Navigation, Piet Morgan, at a hackathon at Lehigh while Beemsingh was still an MBA student at the school. Laurence Wattrus, Morgan’s biking partner, is also part of the team working on Hammerhead. After Beemsingh graduated from Lehigh, the team moved to Jersey City. After three months, hey had a working prototype, and they began a crowd funding campaign for it. They hit their stated goal, and then surpassed their stretch goal. They plan to ship their final product by June 2014.
While still working on his MBA, Beemsingh found many opportunities to explore the startup world. He participated in startup events in New York and Philadelphia. He won the 2013 HackPrinceton Hackathon, and he was a finalist at the Unviersity of Pennsylvania’s PennApps13, establishing his credibility in local startup scenes.
Beemsingh credits his education for his post-graduation success: “My Lehigh MBA courses helped me a great deal to reach this point in my entrepreneurial career.” He says that both the MBA core courses and Lehigh’s VENTURESeries courses gave him the foundation in business he needed to pursue this venture. VENTURESeries, the entrepreneurship track in the MBA program, gave Beemsingh an understanding of the market opportunity, legal, and financial considerations of new ventures. He says that the most important courses he took were MBA 402: Managing Financial & Physical Resources, GBUS 419: Financial Management, and MBA 403: Managing Information. The first two courses taught him about valuation, options, and real options, and he credits the last course with playing a vital role in his decisions while working on Hammerhead.
