Patrick McQuown | Are You The Cow That Gives Milk Or Steak?

Patrick McQuown serves as the executive director of entrepreneurship at Towson University. After listening to my interview with Desiree Melfi Bozzo, Patrick connected me with Former Syracuse Quarterback, Terrel Hunt and he invited me down to TU to record this interview on why athletes make great entrepreneurs and meet the fellows in his StarTUp Accelerator.

The StarTUp Accelerator, an intensive eight-week, cohort-based fellowship where selected fellows take residency and work in a collaborative space to accelerate their ventures. Terrel Hunt is participating in this program while working on his Good Choice Productions venture highlighted in episode 163.

Patrick launched his first company Proteus in 1996, working out of his dorm room at George Washington University. He started Proteus with $1,000 and no outside funding. Proteus grew into a mobile media industry leader and was first in the world to create an application that allowed users to send short text messages from a Web site to a handset. Proteus is also responsible for creating the text-polling for the reality television show American Idol. His second startup, SinglePoint, raised $50M in venture capital and deployed two of the largest-ever messaging campaigns—one for the 2008 Summer Olympics and one for Obama for America.