Shaker LaunchHouse Offshoot Seeks High School Entrepreneurs for Accelerator

Three college freshman are looking for high school students with a passion for entrepreneurship to participate in a summer business accelerator program tailored to young business minds.

The LightHouse Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program (LEAP) is accepting applications for its inaugural course, a six-week program slated to start in late June, that will help teens launch or expand their own businesses.

But this is no fluff summer gig, said co-founder Zach Schwartz.

“We hope the students will come away from the program not only learning a lot about entrepreneurship and becoming a more complete entrepreneur, but having a viable startup,” he said.

That means turning a profit, eventually — a feat that businesses run by experienced adults can struggle to do.

The LightHouse is an organization modeled after a business incubator in Shaker Heights.

Their first project was to recognize 14 successful young entrepreneurs — three of whom attend Shaker Heights schools — last fall.

Schwartz and co-founders Vibhu Krishna and Samir Amrania attended Solon High School together, where they were friends and each honed their own entrepreneurial passions in their own ways.

For Krishna, it culminated in a poetry slam she organized that raised money for the World Hunger Association and became the largest fundraiser in the school’s history.

Her expertise is in marketing and graphic design.

Amrania and Schwartz founded the Solon High School Future Business Leaders of American. Amrania designed a website for Keller Williams Realty Company in high school, and Schwartz ran a college consulting firm the summer after his senior year in high school.

And Schwartz, during his application process for Cornell University, met Dar Caldwell, an interviewer for the school and they hit it off right away. That summer, Schwartz returned to the LaunchHouse to pitch his idea to nurture entrepreneurship in young people, and Caldwell told him he had been batting around the same idea.

So Schwartz recruited Krishna and Amrania as managing partners, and they added two more young people to handle marketing and public relations.

Schwartz said that high schoolers interested in applying for LEAP need not already have a business idea — and those who are already running a business can use it, too.

The program will accept 10 teams of two or three students each and offer guidance, a curriculum based on the three partners’ experiences as well as the LaunchHouse Accelerator’s curriculum, mentoring by adult business professionals in the community and $600 to get their idea off the ground.

The students will also continue their relationship with LightHouse throughout the 2013-2014 school year to continue to build or grow their businesses.

Click here to apply.