Students at Saginaw Valley State University and surrounding high schools will get an extreme introduction into what it is like to start a business when the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour visits SVSU Thursday, Nov. 1 and Friday, Nov. 2.

“The jobs of tomorrow are going to come from new and innovative business ventures that don’t exist today,” said Barb Sageman, coordinator of the Business and Entrepreneurship Skills Training program at SVSU. “This is a tremendous opportunity for young people to explore their creative ideas and learn directly from young entrepreneurs who have already built successful businesses.”

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau, small businesses have created 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs over the last decade.

More than 300 local high school students have registered for Thursday, including those students participating in the Saginaw County Youth Leadership Institute, a joint venture of SVSU and the Bridge Center for Racial Harmony. Students attending will hear from a successful young entrepreneur and engage in workshops with facilitators to learn how they can make their start-up business ideas commercially viable. The day’s activities are scheduled from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Speaking to the high school students will be Sumaya Kazi, 25, who currently serves as Executive Director and founder of TheCulturalConnect.com, a burgeoning media publishing company that publishes five weekly e-magazines dedicated to young, driven and forward-thinking adults around the world. The CulturalConnect has been widely regarded as a refreshing and important young professional destination worldwide; its Web site receives more than 500,000 hits monthly and has a readership that spans 100 countries.

Kazi graduated from the University of California-Berkeley with a degree in marketing and strategic planning. She was recognized by BusinessWeek magazine as one of America’s Top 10 Entrepreneurs Under 25 and was recently spotlighted by CNN as a “Young Person Who Rocks.”

Around 200 college students are expected to participate in Friday’s events, which include similar workshops, as well as a speed networking experience and a panel discussion on entrepreneurship. Activities are scheduled from 3 to 7 p.m.

A young entrepreneur who built and sold a support automation company will speak to the college students. Veer Gidwaney is a co-founder of Control-F1, which had over 85 world-class enterprise customers when it was sold to CA, the world’s 6th largest software company, in December 2005. Gidwaney started Control-F1 in the midst of completing his degree at the University of Western Ontario.

Gidwaney currently is working with a team of researchers and entrepreneurs to build Neurosilicon, which develops novel brain-computer interfaces to expand the scientific understanding of the human brain and to revolutionize, streamline and improve the effectiveness of drug discovery and therapeutic practices for neurological disorders. He has been named to McLean’s Top 25 Under 30 and was a finalist for the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award.

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