UC Center of Entrepreneurship
Selected for the 24th Cohort of the Venture Lab pre-accelerator. Refined PhizzIO's business model through customer discovery, mentorship from healthcare EIRs, and pitched to the Cincinnati startup ecosystem.
I've always been drawn to startups, where building something and running a business meet. My own path into entrepreneurship started with co-founding PhizzIO, a startup tackling accessibility and patient adherence in physiotherapy. The idea came from watching a friend struggle to stick with their physiotherapy and realizing how common that problem actually is. I wanted to do something about it.
Venture Lab, a pre-accelerator run by the UC Center of Entrepreneurship at the 1819 Innovation Hub, was where PhizzIO really took shape. We were selected for the 24th Cohort, and the program gave early-stage startups like ours structure, resources, and mentorship. Talking with the Entrepreneurs in Residence who specialized in healthcare taught me a lot about how the health tech market actually works. Through the program's exercises, my co-founder and I sharpened our sense of who we were building for, what made PhizzIO valuable, and how it could make money.
The program ended with pitch week. Using everything the mentors had drilled into us, I reworked PhizzIO's pitch deck and presented it to people from across the Cincinnati startup scene. It landed well, and it led to real conversations and connections with other founders.
Venture Lab changed me personally as much as professionally, mostly by teaching me how to handle criticism. Early on, I was surrounded by people who only encouraged us, and I learned to go looking for honest, unbiased feedback instead. Taking criticism as something useful rather than something to defend against turned out to be one of the hardest and most important skills I picked up. Founders fall in love with their own ideas, and that makes it hard to change course when the feedback says you should. This was where I learned to actually listen and adapt.
Venture Lab gave me practical skills I still use, and it changed how I think. It didn't just sharpen PhizzIO's direction; it made me more resilient and more willing to adapt when things didn't go to plan, which, in a startup, is most of the time.
