E@DU’s 2025 BASE Camp accelerator concluded with The Final Pitch Aug. 28
BASE Camp—Entrepreneurship@DU’s summer startup accelerator—isn’t unlike preparing to climb 29,000-plus feet of treacherous terrain. A climber wanting to summit Mount Everest doesn’t just show up and walk up the world’s largest mountain. Without proper preparation, they’d almost certainly face catastrophic failure. Climbing Mount Everest starts with months of training, acclimation to the elements and a milestone trek to Everest’s Base Camp.
What happens after they reach Base Camp? “A long, cold, hard hike,” answered a middle school student from DU’s Ricks Center for Gifted Children. His class came to watch the Entrepreneurship@DU BASE Campers’ Final Pitch on Thursday, Aug. 28, in Marcus Commons at the Daniels College of Business.
The event celebrated and concluded the 2025 cohort’s intense five-week journey, where they learned new concepts, tried them out in real life, talked to their customer base and leaned on industry mentors for advice.
At the Final Pitch, the three teams that survived the rigor of BASE Camp presented their progress to an audience of Daniels faculty, industry professionals, BASE Camp alumni, Ricks Center students, family members and friends.
First up, Sean O’Connor (BA 2023, film production and entrepreneurship) pitched his progress with Vivaday. Named for its goal of allowing high school students to metaphorically “live a day” in the life of a college student to increase transparency in the college search process, Vivaday stemmed from O’Connor’s experience transferring to a new college. The first university wasn’t the right fit, and he realized that access to more honest, open information could have helped him make a better choice the first time.
Vivaday is an online platform where prospective college students can ask questions of current students to access true, unbiased and current information about anything from academics to campus social life at various schools. College students get paid for providing high-quality, personalized video answers. Next, O’Connor plans to leverage his background in sales to form strategic partnerships and attend events for wider market adoption—necessary to increase both the supply and the demand for his product.
You can help by sharing Vivaday.org with high school seniors, parents of students and college advisors within your network.
Next, Jacob Brassard, an undergraduate student studying history, and Peter Stamm, a computer science graduate student, pitched their company, Lorecal (spun from their original InsightAI concept). Lorecal helps legal professionals find expert witnesses for litigation services by aggregating contact information for experts from reliable, online databases and yielding high-quality search results with the help of a proprietary AI algorithm. Lorecal seeks to grow its database from 53,000 experts to one million within the next year and is currently focused on sourcing contact information for qualified expert medical professionals.
You can help by sharing Lorecal.com with attorneys, paralegals, doctors and other industry experts who can serve as litigation witnesses.
Finally, Harrison Tarr, a third-year undergraduate student studying music, entrepreneurship and business administration, pitched his progress with StageReady—the only musician-first booking platform in Denver to connect venues with live music groups for events.
StageReady uses AI to match musicians with booking inquiries based on criteria like availability and musical genre. Tarr leverages his expertise as a musician to personally vet and onboard other musicians and helps them build marketable digital profiles to secure gigs that might otherwise go to large corporate talent agencies. Thanks to the $5,000 seed funding provided by BASE Camp, Tarr was able to purchase a top-tier sound system to add sound production packages to StageReady’s service offerings.
You can help by introducing Stageready.live to the musicians and event planners in your networks.
Now that BASE Camp 2025 is over, the cohort’s equivalent of a long, cold, hard hike is beginning.
In a panel discussion following the pitches, Entrepreneurship@DU instructor and program advisor Alisa Chalakhyan asked the startups to share how they will define success on their journeys ahead.
Stamm said success is more about learning than achieving. “I often find the journey more fulfilling than the destination,” he said. “It’s taking a step back and reflecting on where you were and where you end up. It’s the compounding effect.”
For Brassard, success is a single word: agency. The moment Brassard received the $5,000 check, he quipped, was also the moment he realized his efforts alone would determine his success.
Tarr described success as personal and subjective—and not determined by other people’s expectations. For him, it’s all about consistency. “I feel like when I’m the most successful, I’m the most consistent,” he shared.
O’Connor said success means “being the best in the world at something,” which requires putting in the work and focusing on every detail “to the nth degree.” “Why wouldn’t you want to be the best in the world at what you do,” he asked, adding that the benefit of being “the best” is the experience of getting there, not the glory of the title.
Though undeniably intense, all teams expressed gratitude for the experience that helped position their new ventures for success. When asked if he would do it all again, Tarr answered, “Yes, 100%, and there isn’t anyone I wouldn’t recommend this program to.”