Tucked away in a couple of nondescript offices in downtown Durham’s South Bank building, three NCSSM student interns work intently on projects that may one day propel the startups for which they work into multi-million dollar corporations. They are among eight total NCSSM students, from both the residential and online programs, who are participating in the school’s brand new Entrepreneurship Fellowship Program at seven startups or early-stage ventures in the Triangle.
Ocean Isle native and rising NCSSM senior Jewel Marlowe has been working this summer with Seguno, an embedded email marketing startup firm located in the 70s-era former bank building. Neelam Runton, a rising NCSSM Online senior from Research Triangle High School, works in the same room as Jewel, though he’s part of the team at data science startup Wrangle. The two companies — and all of their employees — scroll, type and click away in the same room on opposite sides of work tables pushed end-to-end and back-to-back.
Over the five weeks of the summer fellowship, Jewel had a chance to delve into a number of aspects of the company’s operations. “My mentor at Seguno (Chris Geiss) wanted me to get the full experience of entrepreneurship,” Jewel says, “so I was pretty much doing everything from demo calls and analyzing data to customer support.”
Originally published July 24, 2019.