Melanie de Vries

Michigan Entrepreneur Summit (MES) was originally founded in 2021 by 5 five University of Michigan students (Ryan Morrison, Addison Viener, Adithya Sanjay, Adam Schreck, Brooke Dukellis) as a way to bring the winners of various pitch competitions across University of Michigan together to compete for the title of "most likely founder to pursue entrepreneur as a career" and "most likely startup to be successful post-graduation."Amulya Parmar, founder of LeaseMagnets won the competition in 2021 and used the $5k check to open his first HQ in Ann Arbor. That summer, he was accepted into YCombinator, and he is still scaling his startup 2.5 years later (delivering 500k tours and $100M in leases). Ryan led the charge with Adithya to bring the competition back in 2022 after 4/5 of the original team graduated and moved on to corporate / startup careers. Oliver Broacto and Tabs Chocolate won the competition in 2022, and they did over $1M in revenue selling their aphrodisiacal chocolate on Tik Tok. Today, MES is a part of Ryan's original vision for a community called Maximize, designed as a community for founders to join as students and grow together beyond the college classroom and campus. MES is one of three programs created by Maximize, including their non-profit Venture Catalyst incubator and Venture Studio. Michigan Entrepreneur Summit (MES) 2023 is a partner of Michigan Tech Week. Co-hosted by Ryan, Founder of Maximize and Michael Meadows, Co-Founder of Protein Pints, the vision for this year is to bring the top student startups from across the state of Michigan to compete for the summit in-person for the first-time. To learn more about MES, our community and programs supporting student founders, send us an email: info@michiganentrepreneursummit.com