In mid-April, students, alumni and community partners gathered at Goizueta Business School for the 9th annual Emory Goizueta Entrepreneurship Summit, a signature event of The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Created to nurture entrepreneurship at Goizueta and Emory University, the event included interactive workshops, Luminary Entrepreneur panels, a Pitch the Summit competition with $25,000 in cash prizes, networking opportunities, and a fireside chat with David Glattstein 04BBA, president & co-founder of VEG (Veterinary Emergency Group) ER for Pets, a veterinary emergency company with 103 locations in the United States.
“The goal of the summit is to educate, connect and empower,” said Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education & Professor in the Practice of Organization and Management Andrea Hershatter. “To that end, the greatest thing we can do for our current students and the alumni who attended is to bring in these powerful role models to share their insights and stories.”
Kickoff Conversation: A Fireside Chat with David Glattstein
To open the summit, Hershatter sat down with Glattstein for a fireside chat-style conversation in front of approximately 200 attendees. After his earning his Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) at Goizueta, Glattstein immersed himself in the investment and private equity world, where he gained experience investing in and helping small businesses grow. Along the way, he earned an MBA from The Wharton School and in 2017, joined forces with David Bessler, VMD, to co-found VEG ER for Pets.
Glattstein and Bessler have reimagined the veterinary emergency business model. With a customer-centered approach, trained emergency veterinary staff, and rapid response times, each of VEG’s locations is open 24 hours, seven days a week, holidays included. VEG locations are open concept so that pet owners can “see everything and participate in” their pet’s care, notes the VEG website. “We want to provide mind-blowing customer experiences that people would never imagine,” Glattstein said.
Glattstein advised the students to think about the problem they’re solving for when they start a business. “For us, ER professionals—doctors and nurses—didn’t have a great place to build their careers, so we gave them that,” he said. To help existing veterinarians shift to emergency medicine, VEG provides a six-month fellowship program that offers mentorship and continuing education. VEG strives to create a culture that makes it “so obvious that that they would want to join us,” Glattstein said of employees, which are known as VEGgies. Glattstein admits that creating that environment took years.
Calling Glattstein amazing and “one of the kindest, most uplifting people I know,” Hershatter added that Glattstein is also “relentless and driven and expects his VEGgies to rise to the same level of commitment. He has built this into the incentive structure and into a culture of innovation.”
During his conversation with Hershatter, Glattstein also explained “IKIGAI,” the concept of combining one’s purpose and profession with one’s passion. “If I’m not going to be passionate about what I want to do and good at it, it’s going to be really hard to be successful,” said Glattstein. “You don’t just have to go into finance or banking or consulting to be successful.”
In addition to building a lasting, generational business and “genuinely doing something meaningful to drive positive impact,” Glattstein is committed to coaching and mentoring what he calls “the next generation of stars. I really want to be there for young people as they start their career and inspire them, help them, coach them,” he explained. “That’s something I really want to focus on.”
According to Glattstein, VEG ER for Pets’ revenues are growing 40% annually and are expected to top $1 billion in the next year. The company’s current investors include Fidelity Investors, Sequoia Heritage, and D1 Capital Partners.
Luminary Lessons: Breakout Sessions with Entrepreneurs
During two separate sessions on day two, after brief introductions, each of the luminary entrepreneurs went into breakouts with students to discuss pre-selected topics.
For the first session, Designing for the End User Experience, the entrepreneurs included Vanessa Jeswani 08BBA, co-founder of Nomad Lane; Adam King 09MBA, co-founder & CEO of 1587 Sneaker; Colin McIntosh 12BBA, founder & CEO of Sheets & Giggles; and Scott Roskind, Partner at R3 Venture Partners.
For the Venturing in Disruption & Technology discussion, the luminary entrepreneurs were Jeffrey Chernick 04BBA, the founder of several successful companies as well as an advisor and angel investor; Camerson “Cam” Duncan 17BBA, co-founder & CEO of Axle; David Gaspar 02BBA, co-founder & Head of Innovation at Gather; and Glen Surnamer, COO of Pensare LLC.
Students recorded their takeaways from their breakouts with the entrepreneurs. Those takeaways included:
+ “A bad product with a good team can succeed but a great product with a bad team will never succeed.”
+ “You won’t change the status quo unless you ask why. Ask why five times to get the answer—then dig deeper.”
+ “If you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice.”
“What these Luminaries share is a perpetual intellectual curiosity and cycle of continuous learning, an incredibly strong work ethic, resilience, and a strong desire to control their own paths and destiny,” explained Hershatter.
Pitch the Summit Competition
The Goizueta Emory Entrepreneurship summit concluded with the final rounds of the Pitch the Summit Competition, which provides Goizueta and Emory undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to learn to pitch an idea for a new venture.
The student teams competed not only for funding for their businesses in the form of cash prizes, but for access to the Emory Venture Mentoring Community. “This year featured perhaps the most competitive group of student-founder-led ventures in the competition’s history, all of whom are also participants in the 2025 Techstars Emory Founder Catalyst program,” explained Brian Cayce, managing director of The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Cayce adds that the luminary entrepreneurs had committed to mentoring the student founders as well.
The top teams were:
Undergraduate
1st place $7500: Subscription Intern
2nd place $3500: Commonology AI
3rd place $1500: Safe Squeeze Headgear
Graduate
1st place $7500: Workforce IQ
2nd place $3500: Corridor
3rd place $1500: moji
“Our panel of Luminaries was notably impressed by the caliber of innovation and drive they witnessed,” said Cayce of the student Pitch the Summit teams. “It is a powerful reminder that with the right support, Emory entrepreneurs are truly poised to lead transformative ventures,” Cayce added.
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