LU Moment: LU Venture Center builds an entrepreneurial ecosystem | S9 Ep. 15

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Podcast: S9 Ep. 15
Date: June 01, 2026
Title: LU Moment: LU Venture Center builds an entrepreneurial ecosystem | S9 Ep. 15
Host: John Rollins

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JOHN ROLLINS: Welcome to the LU Moment, where we showcase all the great things happening with Lamar University faculty, staff, students, and alumni. I'm John Rollins, Associate Director of Community Relations and Public Affairs here at LU, and I want to welcome you all to this week's show. Today, we'll be putting a spotlight on the Venture Center at Lamar University, and I've got Kyle Scott here with us to tell us all about it. Welcome to the show, Kyle.

KYLE SCOTT: Hey, thanks for having me, John.

JOHN: So, go ahead and tell me, what's your title here at Lamar?

KYLE: So, I'm the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship, which is a perfect academic title, because it's extremely long.

JOHN: Yeah, we love a long title around here, for sure. And so, you told me this August will make a year at Lamar University for you?

KYLE: Yeah, it's been a year, and it has flown by. I used to be able to get away with the excuse that I'm new, but I'm kind of starting to lose that excuse, and now I'm actually needing to know some things.

JOHN: So, let's go ahead and talk about the Venture Center, which I believe was formerly the CICE. You can correct me if I'm wrong.

KYLE: Yeah, so this can get confusing, but CICE was the Center for Industrialization, Commercialization, and Entrepreneurship. It's taken me as long as I've been here to actually remember what that stands for,

JOHN: That’s a mouthful, right?

KYLE: Yeah, so within the first month we did rebrand it to the Venture Center, and the responsibilities are essentially the same. That is, we serve three broad populations: first, the students, through workshops, pitch competitions, restructuring some of the curriculum, and offering some entrepreneurship classes. We also work with the faculty in terms of technology transfer. You know, as well as I do, we have a lot of really talented faculty here, so we're looking to be able to unlock that to find a product market fit for some of that research that they're doing, particularly in computer science, engineering, some of the STEM fields, and then, of course, the broader community, because our general mission is to build economic prosperity and opportunity through entrepreneurship in Southeast Texas, so that means everywhere in Southeast Texas, if you're looking to start a business, if you're looking to grow a business, come on, we take them all.

JOHN: Well, that's good to know. And I think even though the resource itself has been on Lamar's campus for a while, I kind of like the rebranding and feel like you are breathing new life into it, and kind of putting us back on the map in that regard, so excited to hear more, and a little bit about what y'all have some of the programs and the things that you're putting efforts into, for sure. But I do want to make sure we allow time for you to introduce yourself. So, let's hear more about you.

KYLE: So, I am an accidental entrepreneur, right? I started my professional career as a high school teacher, realized within about two years that I was not tough enough for eighth graders, so I went back to school, earned my Ph.D. in political science, and was on the tenure track at the university level for a few years until we started to build our family, and my wife said, "You know what, I need to get back to Houston. This was 2008. If you remember anything about 2008, not a great time to start looking for a job, so I created my own job. So, over the next six or seven years, there were just a few sort of start this, sell that, jump into another one, and then in, let's say the summer of 2023, Sam Houston State University asked me to join their faculty as a professor of entrepreneurship. I was there for about two years. This position opened, I met Ed Sturrock, who was leading the search for this position. Just got super fired up. He's a super, just ambitious, energetic guy. I mean, you talk to him for five seconds, it's like, what wall do you want me to run through? So, I jumped at the opportunity. President Taylor, Provost Welch, super supportive of this. So, to have that senior level sponsorship, to have the community buy-in, the campus buy-in, it's just been a really great first year to be here.

JOHN: Fantastic. So, from teacher to professor to entrepreneur, executive director.

KYLE: Yeah, just like I always grew up wanting to do.

JOHN: All works together, right? So, let's go ahead and kind of pull back the curtain on the Venture Center and talk about some specifics. You know, you can discuss the programs that are currently in place, things that are coming up in the pipeline, and then you know, what does a typical day look like in your role? I guess it's probably not all the same, obviously.

KYLE: So, again, we have our students, and for the students, there are really two pillar programs that we run, which are two pitch competitions. We have the fall pitch competition in November. This is a really big undertaking that gets the entire campus community involved, and there are, I think, last year we gave away $9,000 in prizes. Yeah, so we gave away $5,000, $3,000, $1,000 for first, second and third. Then we had what we called a speed pitch, which is just a 60 second pitch in the top three. Got $500 prizes. It was really a great event. I'd been here about two months, and it was just like full head of steam. This is what we're doing.

JOHN: Is this kind of Shark Tank-esque?

KYLE: Exactly, you talk about pitching. So, but nobody's really investing. This is price, right?

JOHN: Yeah, but still, $5,000. That's a nice little start.

KYLE: So we were really happy to have the sponsors on board to be able to make that, to make that possible. And then, of course, with the Office of Undergraduate Research, you know, they do their EXPO at the end of the year, and we added a pitch competition that, so that one was AI and software focused for the students who were involved, and we had high school to Ph.D. students involved in that as well. And then we run workshops, so you know something like that may come up. How to start a podcast, or how to get your first 1,000 followers on Instagram, anything that's sort of business related. We do that. Then we also run an entrepreneurship and residence program. So, in the Beaumont area in Southeast Texas, we have a lot of great business owners who just have this wealth of knowledge that they want to and are able to impart upon the younger generation. So we set up monthly office hours where you can come by and talk to a local business owner, and then in terms of faculty, like we talked about, it's like “I've developed this cybersecurity thing or this new way to do x,” so you know why let it die in that tombstone of or that graveyard of all good ideas, which are academic journals, and let's bring it out to market. So it's working with university administration to rewrite our IP policy. What's this looks like in terms of how do we structure these deals, and to put a technology transfer office in place, and then for the general community, this is really going to be our pillar program there, but it's entrepreneurship through acquisition. So, as you know, we have a lot of small businesses here in town, and what we don't want to have happen is these businesses, when they're looking ready to maybe retire, they don't have anyone to pass the business on to for an out of town buyer to come and take it over, because then the town dies. So we want to develop a pool of potential acquirers in order to be able to acquire these, put them in touch with funding, that sort of thing. Make sure that they have the right skills in place, and then also help the business owners. It's more complicated than you think to sell a business, right? You just can't keep it in Excel, Excel spreadsheets, or a yellow legal pad. You actually have to have three years of documented financials in order to get those going to maximize your value. So, we want to help them with that as well. Then, for anybody who's interested, we run an incubator. So, an incubator is exactly like you think, it's taking an idea and hatching that idea over a six week curriculum, we bring in a couple times a week, give you “homework” in order to help you get ready to pitch to investors, and we have some investors ready to hear you out. And then coming up in the pipeline, this is something I'm really excited about. I probably shouldn't be talking about, because we're so early in its development, but Veteran Entrepreneurs Program, HCC, Rice University, have done a great job addressing the needs of veterans through entrepreneurship, to give them the tools and the funding needed to start their business, and that's not just veterans, that's their spouses as well. Yeah, I mean, both have done just a tremendous amount of service to this country, and we want to do our part to see them succeed after their service, so we're tapping into that ecosystem to extend that Houston ecosystem out to Beaumont. So we're going to start a veterans entrepreneurship program that will culminate in another pitch competition, but be able to have that funding, the grants, the support, as well as an incubator specifically for those veteran founders.

JOHN: You’ve got a lot going on.

KYLE: Well, you know, it's really the only way to keep myself out of trouble. If I'm not busy, there's going to be something bad that happens.

JOHN: I like the connection to the community. And then you mentioned earlier about kind of helping businesses along their journey, so I imagine being in the same building as the Small Business Development Center, y'all partner a lot?

KYLE: Absolutely. So, at the end of the day, we do a lot of the same stuff, but I have a lot more leeway. The Venture Center has a lot more leeway in what we're allowed to do, because they get some of their funding from the federal government. There's just a lot of boxes to check on the things that they can and can't do, so I'm able to supplement that, but a rising tide lifts all boats, so we help each other as much as we can. Where the really true divide comes between the Venture Center and the SBDC. If you are a bankable company, that is, if you need a loan, that's where the SBDC takes over, but if you're an investable company, that is, you want to sell some equity to an investor, that's where I take over. They're not equipped to do that investor side, so I can take over there.

JOHN: You all kind of round each other out, I suppose.

KYLE: Yeah, absolutely. Partnership, and you know, John Lee's a great director there, he knows this community, he's, I mean, he's been one of my strongest advocates in the community, making sure that I. Get to know people that I know, you know where things are. Yeah, and no, John's just been fantastic. The entire SBDC team has.

JOHN: He's very well connected in this community, for sure, and knows the different neighborhoods and how to get in touch with people. And so, yeah, you’ve got some good resources right there in your building, which is now called the Dade Phelan Building.

KYLE: The Dade Feeling building, so that's where the confusion is. Because our program used to be CICE, the building used to be called named CICE. So now we're the Venture Center in the Dade Phelan Building.

JOHN: Did you want to expand on anything else on the programs that I know you said the Veterans Entrepreneurship Program is fairly new, and kind of in the beginning stages you're developing it, so anything else that you think people who may be interested in your services should know about?

KYLE: Sure, so we do offer on a regular cadence, usually once a month, we do offer some sort of workshop, right? So in June we have some stuff coming up, we have a large part of has been real estate focused. It’s just kind of, you have an idea of what something's going to be, then you just, opportunities present themselves. So we're going to do something on carbon capture and its effect on property values in July, then we're going to do something else specifically for the real estate agency and bankers and lenders in August, but at the end of the day, if you have a business idea, if you want to get just informal advice, or if you want to take part in an incubator, these things occur on a rolling basis.

JOHN: Are folks able to reach out to you all and propose workshops or programs or things to you?

KYLE: If you've ever served on a committee, if they say, I have an idea for you, it's like, great, you can lead that. No, you know it's one of those things, and you learn this through entrepreneurship, is your ideas don't really matter as much as what the community actually needs. So, if somebody says this will work in this community, this is a community need that you need to address. Yeah, by all means, please bring that to me, and I would love to hear more about that,

JOHN: And I know we spoke a little earlier, before we started recording, about how, when this sort of launched, it was a partnership between the College of Business, College of Engineering, and then the CICE at the time. So you talk about how it's expanded beyond that. What do you think sort of launched the expansion? Like, what do you think just community needs, like you just brought up, or where did that sort of growth come from?

KYLE: Sure, I mean, there's a natural fit and alignment with the College of Business, College Engineering, for sure. They offer courses with entrepreneurship in the title, that's just a natural home for it. Yeah, but the skills of entrepreneurship, of being able to empathize with another, to be able to identify need to be able to take a project from idea generation to completion is a skill that any student would need to have. Just because you're going to be an artist doesn't mean you have to be a starving one. So, is there something that we can do with entrepreneurship in the arts, and to be able to just create an ecosystem of activity around entrepreneurship and individual empowerment to say I can build the life I want where I am. I don't have to uproot and go somewhere else at the same time. We all know there's a challenging job market out there, even if you have a stable 9 to 5, you're probably still going to need something else on the side. Well, you just can't let it fly and wing it. I did that, cost a lot of time and a lot of money. Let me save you the time and money, like let's help build out this ecosystem, and let's learn from my mistakes.

JOHN: I love that you bring that up, because this is the day and age of people not just having one job, you've got a side gig, or you've got a second job. This is the day and age where that's just the norm.

KYLE: That's the norm, and you know the days of, you know, just waiting around 30 years, putting in your time, getting a retirement check every month, when that happens, and your gold watch, those days are pretty much gone, you know. We hear about these job cuts all the time at some of the top companies, so you need to build what some may call an anti-fragile life, where you have sort of multiple income streams, so that if there is a hiccup in one place, while it's a safe setback, it's not debilitating.

JOHN: That’s a really great point. Like you said, it's not the same where you graduate at 21, 22 and you work at the same job for 30, 40 years. The world has changed.

KYLE: It is, and you know when you talk specifically about our students, but it even happens to non-students. I mean, an Uber driver, a DoorDash driver, this can occur at any point in time. So, then the question becomes, well, can I take this from something where I'm just an individual contributor and maybe make this a little something more? But even basic questions, when do I file taxes? Is it better to have these payments go into an LLC? Right, because if I don't need the money right now, but I just want a backup plan, why don't I just let it sit in this account that's going to grow without being taxed until I take a distribution of it, and these are just things that are basic business questions that most people don't need to know and never learn, because they're really business owner questions. Well, that's all of entrepreneurship is, is becoming familiar with every aspect of the enterprise.

JOHN: These are great points. Okay, tell us really quickly, for our listeners and our readers, how can folks keep up with the Center, and where can they find out more information, or get in touch with your team if they're, if they have an idea or want to reach out.

KYLE: So, I have a student worker, David, he's great. So, he keeps everything on Instagram and LinkedIn up to date all the time. So, that's @luventurecenter on both platforms. If you'd like to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, and it only happens once a month, on the last Wednesday of the month. I promise you won't get more. You can email me at Kscott74@lamar.edu and I'll get you added there as well.

JOHN: Okay, fantastic, that's an easy way to stay in touch. So, LU Venture Center, Facebook, and Instagram, and LinkedIn. Easy to follow, easy to find. So, Kyle, thanks again for joining me. Thanks for all you do for our community, our campus, and local industry and businesses around here.

KYLE: Absolutely, thanks for having me on.

JOHN: To catch the LU stories just like Kyle's, be sure to search LU Moment wherever you get your podcasts to keep up with the events, activities, programs, and people right here at Lamar University. This is John Rollins, your host. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.