Career Development Series

Learn how to structure your business for success and grow sustainably with the real-world advice and experiences of successful founders this March. Chart your path to success as a business leader with a four-part career development series about the lifecycle of startups. Attend one, two, three, or all four events to create an impactful business.

This four-part webinar series takes aspiring entrepreneurs through the full lifecycle of building a startup: from the first spark of an idea to the realities of launching and scaling. Each session blends practical instruction with candid insights from founders who’ve been there. Through mini-lectures, guided discussions, and honest storytelling, participants will learn how founders identify real opportunities, structure their business for success, test and refine their products, and grow sustainably. Whether you’re simply curious about entrepreneurship or exploring an idea of your own, this series offers insights, examples, and inspiration from those who’ve built something from the ground up. 

These programs are presented in partnership with the GT Venture Lab, founded in 2001 to collaborate with faculty and students to create startups based on Tech research. Since then, they have supported the launch of hundreds of startups which, combined, have raised over $1.5B in investments. A recent study ranked VentureLab #2 worldwide among university startup incubation and support programs.

The VentureLab team is comprised of engineers, entrepreneurs, and educators with decades of experience in a wide range of industries and startups. 

Melissa Heffner, Associate Director, GT VentureLab 
Melissa Heffner creates, modifies, and implements programs centered around evidence-based entrepreneurship and the Lean Startup methodology. The vast majority of her time is spent executing the I-Corps South Node award, which is housed at VentureLab, and on internal commercialization programs. Melissa merges her education and classroom experience with strong writing and editing skills to develop custom curriculum for various clients, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In addition, she teaches customer discovery and business model development at Georgia Tech (Scheller College of Business and GT1000 Startup), Institut Lafayette Georgia Tech (Metz, France), and Grupo Guayacán (Puerto Rico). 

Prior to joining VentureLab, Melissa spent her time in curriculum development and manuscript editing with organizations such as Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, CDC, and Georgia State University Department of Biology. 

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Birmingham-Southern College, and a Master of Arts in Teaching English from Agnes Scott College 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissaheffner/

Sara Martin Henderson, Principal, GT VentureLab 
Sara Martin Henderson is the co-founder and co-director of the Create-X Female Founders program, a Principal at Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, and a lead instructor for the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub. She specializes in human-centered innovation and entrepreneurship education, with deep expertise in Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Service Design, and Strategic Foresight. During her time at Georgia Tech, she has secured major grant funding and led the development and delivery of multiple training programs for entrepreneurial teams, mentors, and instructors. 

Sara has taught hundreds of early-stage, research-based startup teams and has advised Fortune 500 companies across industries on innovation strategy, culture transformation, and new product and service development. She co-developed key programs including the GTRI STING program, the I-Corps Southeast Hub Mentor Academy, the Science Foundation of Ireland I-Corps Program, and MTU Cyber Innovate Program. In addition to her teaching and coaching work, she builds strategic partnerships to expand entrepreneurship support in Atlanta and in emerging ecosystems abroad.  
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-martin-henderson/