Technical Entrepreneur

Willhem Delventhal was an entrepreneur and coder at the age of 15 when he sold his first mobile application game. With this experience he knew he wanted to end up working and innovating in Silicon Valley. In selecting a university that would help him continue down that path, Delventhal chose RWU.

“There's a vast range of opportunities and support at Roger Williams. You can pack a lot into four years here.”

While attending, Delventhal chose to major in business management to build his entrepreneurial skills and minor in computer science and web development. He completed a summer internship in Silicon Valley at Lumosity, an online brain-training game company. While interning there, he had an idea for his own company – an electronic greeting card service that delivers messages to senders in the form of a game. With the guidance and help of Mario J. Gabelli School of Business Professor W. Brett McKenzie, Deleventhal took that idea and pitched it at Rhode Island’s Elevator Pitch Contest. Delventhal launched the company after winning.

Along with off-campus opportunities, Delventhal discovered RWU offers its students avenues for exploring and developing their passions on campus. For Delventhal, that passion was being a technical entrepreneur. He started the Tech-E’s club (or Technical Entrepreneurs) as a way to innovate app-designs to benefit the RWU campus. The club created HawkStop, a map-based application for the campus shuttle, which it then pitched and successfully sold to the University.

Looking back, Delventhal says he never imagined that his transition from student to professional would be so seamless. He now works for Lumosity, the company he interned with. He believes it was the perfect combination of his hard work and skill with the experience of four years at RWU that made his transition so smooth.