This summer, a handful of McIntire students and alumni put their classroom training to the test with ventures of their own. They landed, separately, in the same place: the i.Lab Incubator at UVA’s Darden School of Business. For them, the months were less a startup contest than a quiet trial of one idea: whether a Commerce education holds up once real customers get a vote.
Run by the Batten Institute, the Darden School’s entrepreneurship hub, the i.Lab guides founders from idea to market readiness over a single full-time summer, ending in a pitch at Demo Night in the UVA Rotunda. What it really offered the McIntire contingent was a place to ask, in the field, the questions the classroom helped foster.
Zave Greene
For Zave Greene (McIntire ’27), that framework has guided a fast-changing venture. CorridorIQ, founded with Luke Anderson (Engineering ’29), began in real estate migration intelligence. That work brought them to Bonaventure, founded by Dwight Dunton (McIntire ’96), where they began deploying AI company-wide. The experience pushed CorridorIQ to evolve into an AI-deployment company. Its platform, Corridor Context, organizes knowledge from meetings, documents, decisions, and recurring workflows into a company-owned context layer that preserves data and judgment. McIntire, Greene says, taught him “to take the business side as seriously as the product: who the customer is, what decision we are improving, and why the answer is worth paying for.” Bonaventure now serves as the proof case for taking that model to other organizations.
Andrew Katz. Photo by Lathan Goumas | University of Virginia
The Katz brothers found that answering an important question meant abandoning their original business altogether. Andrew Katz (Darden ’27) and Matt Katz (McIntire ’21) entered the i.Lab building a national security IT staffing company. Then, as friends and family around Charleston, SC, braced for another hurricane season, they realized they were pointed at the wrong problem. “Our govcon infrastructure was already built; we just needed to point it at the right problem,” they say. The result is a rethinking of Katalyze, aimed at helping close the gap between city planning and private sector response to the more than $1 billion in drainage work facing the Charleston Lowcountry.
Matt Katz
Where Greene and the Katz brothers used the framework to build and rebuild, Tina Yao (McIntire ’27) used it to sharpen a mission. Her venture, Girls Who Innovate, is an entrepreneurship education program and network for high school and college girls. Originally launched with co-founder Miya Livingston (A&S ’26), it grew out of a gap she once felt herself. “I really wanted to provide my past version of myself with the mentorship and resources that I wish I had,” says Yao, who is the organization’s CEO. This summer’s four-week online bootcamp reached roughly 75 girls across the U.S. and beyond, culminating with a pitch competition to procure funding.
Tina Yao
Yao also notes that she and COO Parker Walls (McIntire ’29) benefited from working alongside founders at i.Lab. “It’s is really great for getting their insight because they’ve had industry experience,” she says. Asked what from her coursework showed up most, she named the unglamorous but essential skill of productively working in teams and dealing with conflict.
Walker Ferguson
McIntire lessons even transfer to ventures in athletics. Ascend Performance, co-founded by Walker Ferguson (M.S. in Commerce ’26), delivers short, structured mental training for athletes on skills like breath control and visualization, built to slip into existing practice routines without adding to a coach’s workload. Founded in part by former Division I athletes, it works to make a resource that is often expensive and stigmatized both scalable and practical, driven by the same instinct to pin down a specific customer and address a real need worth paying for.
Wesley Ferguson
Wesley Ferguson (McIntire ’27) aimed the same discipline at the founder’s own process. His venture, Hydra, is what he calls an AI-native operating system for early-stage founders, built to take on decision paralysis rather than disorganization: less about what to track than about which move to make next, and why. After interviewing founders and product managers, Ferguson reframed it from a productivity tool into a decision system that weighs a founder’s skills, network, and constraints to suggest a direction while leaving the final call to the person.
What ties these ventures together is not a specific industry but a discipline. Real estate, flood control, education, athletics—even the work of building a company—in each, the McIntire founders keep circling back to the questions their Commerce education taught them to ask first. That an alum from the Class of 2021 and a third-year can prove the same lesson side by side, trading notes with Darden MBAs and engineers, is its own evidence for how far that training travels. The i.Lab gave them a summer and a deadline to find out whether the idea is real.
