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Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- Then I got a very fortunate opportunity with an alumni of the university, a distinguished alumni, his name is Adam Laubach, and he is running Helix Defense out of STAR Park. And so they're making counter-UAS weapons, basically, to take down drones that are lethal threats to public safety events and whatnot. So started working for him. And that was a startup, and it was really, really cool because, man, it was long hours, it was hard work, but it was fun. Startups are fun, long hours.
- One of the great things about the STAR Park idea is you bring faculty, students, and entrepreneurs together, and they're like, we're providing like an incubator for these businesses, and we hope they take off and do well. And sometimes you just need a little protection while you're starting.
- For sure.
- And then there's great opportunity for these entrepreneurs to engage with the students and faculty. Hey Bobcats, Kelly Damphousse here, President of Texas State University. Welcome to "The Current" where we meet with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the university to find out what is happening at Texas State. And today we have a twofer, a faculty member and a student, and actually one of my former bosses, a student regent as well. Quinn Valentine is the director of the Center for Student Entrepreneurship at the McCoy College of Business, And Donavan Brown is one of her students and one of our students graduating sometime next year; also a super entrepreneur and former student regent in the Texas State University system, wearing the TSUS belt buckle today. So wear it every chance you get, right?
- Yes, I do.
- Well, it's great to have you guys here. One of the things we love to do is to find out where you all came from. What's your Texas State story? So Quinn, let's chat with you first. How did you end up here at Texas State?
- Well, my story's gonna be a little bit longer than Donavan's, just because I'm, you know, a couple of five years older than him .
- And I discovered you're the oldest sister in your family too, right?
- Right.
- So you always have the floor.
- Right . But my journey actually started when I got my undergraduate degree in entrepreneurship. I was a first-gen. I went to Cal State University Dominguez Hills, had absolutely no guidance in what I was doing. And my mom and I, we went back and forth. She said, "The only way you're gonna make money in this world is if you get a business degree." So I took a couple classes, and I went . And I found this new degree, entrepreneurship, and it was kind of you got to do your own thing, both after you graduated and during your time at the school. And I graduated with this degree with five other people. There was five of us total, I should say. And when I walked across the stage, I though, "Okay, I'm ready to be my millionaire." An entrepreneur, they are always millionaires. Well, it was all theory. And there's nothing wrong with theory, but I never got my hands dirty. And that's gonna be the basis of my whole story for today is that getting your hands dirty. So it took me 14 years to start my own business after getting a degree in that. But anyway, how I got to Texas State was when I got into education and started teaching entrepreneurship, I was lucky enough to meet up with Ryan Van Zee, who also taught entrepreneurship from getting your hands dirty. And we clicked, and we started running. This was the first university where I taught. And the students just got so much more out of it. So that is where I started. And then I moved to the next university, and they gave me a lot of runway to do what I wanted. We started pop-up markets and so on and so forth. And then when this opportunity came up, and being a first-gen and knowing that it was all about first-gen here and grit and all that other things, I just jumped on it. And I said, "This is where I need to be." And so far, amazingly so good.
- How long have you been here?
- Two years yesterday, the 16th of August.
- Wow. It seems like you just got here.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. I was just meeting, by the way, a sidebar, with someone who's at the chamber, director of the Chamber for Austin, and we're talking about hiring Bobcats. And I told her: "When I talk to employers, I hear the word grit a lot and that our students are different. They come early, they stay late, they work hard, they don't complain." And I said, "That's a story I hope that your folks get to hear as well if they haven't hired a Bobcat yet." Speaking of Bobcats, Donavan, why don't you share your Texas State story?
- Yeah, so my story is short and simple and probably similar to a lot of other Bobcat stories. I was graduating high school from Bandera, Texas. I went to high school in Bandera, Texas. And I sent my applications around. I applied to UT Austin, really wanted to go to UT Austin. I applied to Rice. I applied to A&M and I applied to Texas State. Applied to Rice, wasn't gonna be able to afford how expensive Rice is. And then wasn't feeling A&M. Then Texas State University was the one I landed on, and I got a really, really good scholarship from Texas State. So it made it easier to go. And that's why I'm here.
- Then it worked out, right?
- It worked out.
- You were also student body vice president last year as well. So you've done a lot of stuff, and you're really involved with your fraternity as well, at BYX Fraternity. So super involved in campus, not just in this center, but in all aspects of it.
- All sorts of circles.
- Yeah.
- Mm-hmm. I was going to my classes in my freshman year, started getting involved in some orgs. I rushed around for fraternities. I didn't know that what was in the cards a couple years later was coming through the Center for Student Entrepreneurship. That was gonna be exciting. I didn't know that student government was gonna be spelled out for me later or even a role as student regent with the Texas State University system, which was crazy. Such a good opportunity. And getting such a cool home in my fraternity, that was amazing. So my freshman year was kind of like the intro of a book that you know is about to get good, but you're kind of going through the time.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- They said the days go slow but the years go fast.
- Oh my gosh.
- Yeah. Well, so great. Quinn, why don't you tell us about the Center for Student Entrepreneurship, because, as you said, you used the term "getting your hands dirty" a couple times in the intro. And I know our listeners would love to hear more about what that really means.
- I live and breathe that, get your hands dirty. And I tell students, don't be afraid to try while you're in college. And it is baked into their DNA, these Gen Zs. And I'm kind of afraid of these up-and-coming alphas, 'cause one of the words I've read that is used to describe these Gen Alphas is entrepreneurship. But anyway, when they get here, to get their hands dirty, what I mean by that is don't just listen. Don't just listen to the professors. Put it into play. Get your hands dirty now. Make the mistakes now because you have that umbrella. And if you fall, you have somebody like the center, you have professors, you have other entrepreneurs. Because being an entrepreneur is very lonely, hands down. And so while you're in college, make all those mistakes. And so when you get out there, even if you get a job, which I'm not kidding myself, they're not all gonna graduate with a business. But when you get and start working with somebody, they go, "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know what it's like to manage your inventory? You know what it's like to do this, that, and the other thing that's running a business?" And the only way they get that experience is by getting their hands dirty. So like I said, I live it and breathe it. Get your hands dirty, start a business. I don't care what it is. One of my favorite businesses, and people laugh when they first hear me say it, but one of my favorite businesses for students to start, if they really don't know what to start, is start a sticker business, okay? The giggles out of the way. Why I say start a sticker business is because, first of all, who doesn't love a good sticker? But you have to learn how to buy your inventory. You have to learn how to market because there's a lot of sticker businesses out there. How are you different? You've gotta learn how to manage your finances, everything that goes with it. But the thing that's really great about a sticker business is when you're done with it, you still have your inventory so you can turn around and sell it, do an exit strategy. All that is entrepreneurship. All that is getting your hands dirty, and you did it with just a sticker business. And that's what I mean. And so when you get out there, you start working for someone, and they start talking about managing inventory or whatever. You can like, "Yeah, I know. I know what that means. I know what it means to go back and forth on pricing. And do we price here? Do we price there? What do we do?" They're a resource the minute they walk through the door.
- So talk about what it means to be getting your hands... Like, what are they doing when they join the center?
- So we have a three-level system. We call it the lifecycle model of an entrepreneur at Texas State. They start with: "Okay, gee whiz, I just had this really kind of cool idea. It sounds like fun. Everybody's an entrepreneur." And they go to these basic classes. And it's really, you are listening, but you can kind of go back home and say, "You know what? I do have that thing on Instagram, and I learned a little bit about marketing. I'm gonna put it into play." So that's that level one. Then the level two, that's where you actually are doing something. We have Student-Made here on campus, which is a platform that we purchased. And it's at all the different universities across the nation. I think they're up to probably 20, 30 universities. We got Fastest-Growing University award-
- Excellent.
- from them last year. But it's a place where they can set up at a pop-up. We provide the pop-up. They have to deal with customers, talk to customers, get your hands dirty. And we provide that for 'em.
- And it's online sales?
- Both. Both.
- Okay.
- Both, and they actually are more successful when they do their pop-ups. And Regina, who is our campus manager for our Student-Made, she has dug out places all over San Marcos. They go to the Square, Fresco. The restaurant Fresco has a little cutout area where they let 'em set up their businesses there. So they've been trying to do that once a month. They went to River Fest. They're trying to get in front of graduation. They're trying to do a lot of those kind of things. But they get out there and get their hands dirty. But they also can get online. And the campus managers, which are students, help 'em with marketing, help 'em with their finances, help 'em with just taking a picture of what they're trying to sell so it looks really good on the website. So there's that. Then we get to level three. This is where the big deal is. This is where this guy came in. They can go and pitch to donors, the Campus to Community Fund. And we named it that way because, okay, you got this campus business. It's doing really good. You're selling your stickers, you're selling whatever it is. They're floral designs. One of 'em was a floral design. You're doing this all very successfully on campus. But you know what? You could be even more successful in the community. And these four very generous alumni, they said, "We want to be a part of that." And so they put together a pitch. We teach them how to speak English when they're engineers .
- It's like "Shark Tank," right?
- Well, so that's interesting you say that. We try to stay away from the "Shark Tank" mentality. We don't want them to fight for it. We want them to be a partner with these donors. And they get mentorship, and they get all these other things. And they do learn so very much from 'em, and then they can take that business out into the community. And with Donavan, he's gonna tell an amazing story of his success. But although he didn't have a business that was bringing in revenue, he had already been out there talking to customers; and the customers are like, "Just get this together, and we want to talk to you more about it."
- Get this thing built. Yeah.
- And so these four alumni, they're like, "We want to be a part of that." So every single step along the way, they're getting their hands dirty. They're really doing it. And that third level, okay, we're gonna put you out into the community. And I say put you out in the community, not push you out into the community. We don't push you out and say, "Bye, good luck." Like, I was just talking to Donavan, though he's hard to catch up with, I was telling him, we're gonna have our reunion with the judges, the donors, the alumni, they all have that name, October 29 where they get to come back and they get to share what they've done. And I asked Donavan, I said, "Have you been keeping in contact with all these four alumni?" And he said, "Yes, but I haven't talked to 'em in the last 60 days." I said, "You gotta talk to 'em regularly 'cause they want to see your success." And he goes, "Well, I've had a couple of stumbling blocks." That's what they want to be a part of. And so they don't let go. They don't push you out into the community and say, "See you later, good luck." They're with them all the way.
- Well, great transition to our segue to Donavan. Tell us about your sticker business you're running.
- Yeah, it starts with this internship I was working a couple of summers ago in New Braunfels. And that's when I first discovered Y Combinator, which is a huge San Fran startup school, gigantic startup school. And so I learned about what startups were and how people start businesses and what that ecosystem looks like. And I was like, "Huh, I want to do that." Now, I didn't have very good engineering skills then, so it was in the back of my mind. It was churning, it was churning. And then I got a very fortunate opportunity with an alumni of the university, a distinguished alumni, his name is Adam Laubach, and he is running Helix Defense out of STAR Park. And so they're making counter-UAS weapons, basically, to take down drones that are lethal threats to public safety events and whatnot. So I started working for him. And that was a startup, and it was really, really cool because, man, it was long hours, it was hard work, but it was fun. Startups are fun, long hours.
- One of the great things about the STAR Park idea is you bring faculty, students and entrepreneurs together, and they're like, "We're providing an incubator for these businesses, and we hope they take off and do well." And sometimes you just need a little protection while you're starting.
- For sure.
- And then there's great opportunity for these entrepreneurs to engage with the students and faculty.
- Yeah, so I got a super cool opportunity through that. So that's when I started building drones. And I learned, okay, building drones is like building a computer. It's like you put the parts together. And that part isn't too hard, but making all the software work, ah, it's a little bit harder. So there's learning curves to it, definitely. And so right about then, during that spring when I had that internship is when I had a fortunate interview, and I had my start date coming up soon for my NASA internship. So I moved to Houston for the summer, and I was working at NASA. And my brother had just bought a boat. And it was like July 2 or something, this is last summer, and he said, "Hey, do you want to go on Canyon Lake on the 4th of July?" I was like, "Absolutely." So then I am driving over back to San Marcos the night of July 3. And then I wake up at like 9:00 AM, 4th of July, and my brother texted me. He said, "Hey, did you hear what happened in Kerrville?" And I was like, "No, what happened in Kerrville?" And that's when all the floods came through through Central Texas, when that huge rain cloud just sat over Kerrville and they got rained out and flooded out so bad. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." And I was seeing videos and pictures on Twitter, on Facebook. And I texted my brother and I said, "Hey, let's go down to Kerrville tomorrow." And he works for an excavation company, so they had a bunch of skid steers that they could use to help with flood cleanup. And so I got some of my friends from Texas State, and we drove down the next morning, which was the 5th of July, I believe. We got there as first responders were getting there. We got there before kind of like that next wave of another thousand first responders who came in. My brother and I, my friends and I were cleaning up this riverside property, and we really saw the damage. I mean, that flood came through and just destroyed things. I hadn't seen damage like that. Indiana, where I was born, we got flooded a couple of times. We would see damage to houses and whatnot, but I hadn't seen damage that looked like an act of God. Like, it was crazy. FEMA was flying their helicopters around. People were flying their DJI drones around, trying to find the girls from Camp Mystic. And it was an aerospace nightmare, but also miles and miles of destroyed territory from the rivers, from the floods. And I was like, "Man, there's a better way to do this. You just use a bunch of drones just like that one, put some cameras and some good enough compute on there and scan the whole river and look for shapes of people or people waving around or dogs or trucks, and there's your clues." And then I looked around and there was nobody doing it. And so then I reached out to FEMA executives through LinkedIn, and some of them responded, thankfully. And I was like, "What do you think about this idea? Is this a waste of time? Is this dumb?" And they're like, "No, this would be really interesting. You should work on that and let us know how it goes." I started working on it and kept doing some customer outreach to see if it was still a relevant thing. Started coming around the Center for Student Entrepreneurship where I met Quinn. And she started pointing me in the right direction and saying, "Here's what you should do." Got to meet Yatin and the STAR Park kind of community, which ended up bringing some good tidings later down the road, 'cause November, December was right around the time that I started gearing up for the pitch competition for the C2C Fund to pitch for $10,000 in front of these huge funding donors, like, crazy people.
- They are important.
- Really great people. And I was getting more involved with the Center for Student Entrepreneurship. I pitched my pitch deck like nobody had ever pitched a pitch deck before. I freaking killed it.
- You did.
- I walked back into the room after they deliberated, and they were like, "It was an easy choice. We say yes; we're really excited to see where this goes. We think you really have something here." So that was fantastic to hear because it meant that I wasn't working on something useless, but also that I had gotten some money to start working on what I wanted to. Then, fortunately, I reached out to Yatin and Matt and Reddy at STAR Park, and I was able to get some space at STAR Park. So I have a lab over there, and I've got my team that work over there. They've worked over there all summer. So that's where all of my drone stuff is. It's a bit of a mess because labs are always messy. But yeah, I mean, huge shout-out to the Center for Student Entrepreneurship, to Quinn, and to the STAR Park community for giving me space, but also giving me a community for where I could fall back into, but also get resources that I need. But we'll start demoing soon to search and rescue groups to use these as a swarm for finding people after big natural disasters.
- What's different about this than someone just getting a drone and flying it around?
- Let's take the most average drone everybody gets. It's like the DJI Mini or DJI Matrice. Those are really good drones. They're built over in China, but they don't have very much compute on them. They don't do a lot of scanning and whatnot. They kind of have just as much brain to fly around and operate their cameras and whatnot, and they can do a little bit of path planning; whereas each of our drones has enough brain on it to communicate with as many drones as we want to put into this cloud or swarm of drones. And they'll all know where each other are, and they'll use this information to fly over these huge swaths of land and property and acreage to look for people and coordinate: "Okay, we see a shape here. Let's go look over here a little bit quicker." And then give all of that information down to the ground station, to the operator as a much better comm and operating picture than what they have for some floods now and some hurricanes and whatnot. So that's the big thing, is the brains on it and the software that we use to make them communicate as swarms.
- Can I just say one thing? That made so much sense. But the first time he told Kendall Perkinson and me about what he was doing, we looked at him like, "What?" That's what I mean by... That I think was our biggest accomplishment. I mean, he did all the hard work, but we had to get him to translate what he was saying into everyday people language. And now, yeah, he can talk to anybody about what he's doing. And that's a big jump.
- And actually, that's part of the skill you're teaching them, right? So you got to be able to translate this great idea and help people understand it. There was a kind of famous movie called Philadelphia, and the lawyer could-
- Talk like a two-year-old.
- Yeah.
- Explain it to me like I'm a second grader or whatever.
- Yeah.
- And sometimes people aren't dumb. They just don't know the context or the importance or the value of it. And you've got to explain it to them if you're gonna get them to invest or to buy.
- He's been an absolute joy to work with because everything, 'cause we set him up with mentors, and then Kendall and I worked with him. Everything we told him to do, he put it into practice. He didn't carry all of it. He might not have taken everything to the final pitch, but he tried it. He gave it a try. And like he said, he knocked it out of the park when he got in there.
- And I love the fact that our alumni are coming back. And sometimes alumni say, "How can I help the university?" And I said, I always talk about time, talent, and treasure, and treasure is last. If you can provide your time and your talent, that's huge for us, just coming back and speaking to a class. The College of Business does a great job bringing alumni back. It is nice when they add the treasure part as well.
- Yes.
- But I know, speaking to these people who are involved in this program and other programs on campus, they get more out of it than they're giving, and they recognize that. They said, "Boy, listen to these young people. First, I get inspired about the future, but also I kind of learned something about how young people think. And I hadn't been thinking about drone technology before and how that could be useful besides just flying around and taking cool videos and so on." Quinn, tell us a couple, and we talked about stickers and now drones, but give me like three or four examples about companies that started that might be kind of interesting for our listeners.
- Let's start with Kyla. She was one of our last people to pitch. And she knocked it out of the park, got her $10,000. But she identified the micro wedding business. So weddings used to be a big production.
- Spend $60,000.
- Just ridiculous, ridiculous. And brides don't want... The brides and grooms don't want that anymore. And she identified that. And so I think she named the industry, the micro wedding industry.
- I had not heard of it till this second.
- Yeah, and just working with it-
- And I pay a lot of attention to this kind of stuff. I really don't. No, but I can see it. A lot of young people, they just want a practical experience. I want to get married, and I don't need all the bells and whistles and all the money.
- And the things that she puts together and puts out looks like you spent a million dollars. But she knows how to shop it. She knows how to find the best prices. She knows what she's doing. Then the other one is another engineer, ah, Bernie Mesa.
- Bernie.
- Bernie, yes. He was another one who... He was more on the shy side, plus, he spoke only engineering. And he was... He had something, but he didn't know how to express it. Last Christmas, his mom said, "Hey, I need a tortilla press. Can you weld it for me?" 'cause he's a welder. And he got his certification, I think, when he was still in high school. And he was like, "Okay." Puts it out on Etsy, and they're flying off the shelf. And he does not know how to market. So it was just a natural selling. They did so well. Plus, he does metal art that's just beautiful. Anyway, we had to really work with him. And when he finally got in front of the donors and pitched, he only got the $2500 out of the 10 to begin with because he still had, they called it homework. He had to go back and do his homework. And he had his PC when he was reading the pitch, which is a big no-no, but there was no other way he was gonna get through it. And he had his PC there, or his laptop there. When he came back to pitch for his remaining $7500, he pitched to me, Kendall, and Tyson. And we joked that he got his minor in business from just going through all this. Amazing who he was after this. He went in and got his 7500. And then Nijiah. I can't skip Nijiah. Between Nijiah and Donavan, they were our guinea pigs, really. They were our test dummies, but not dummies at all . We said, "Look, we don't know what we're doing, but please work with us." And they both rolled with it. But what Nijiah does is she was hair braiding here, very, very successful out of her home. Great customer service. Everybody knew Nijiah and her hair braiding. Well, she wouldn't charge very much, and she was so talented. So really working with her and having her identify what she's good at is giving an elevated experience to women who would want their hair braided because it really says a lot about them. So she went through the program. She did very well. She got her $10,000. She actually got a shop in South Austin, so now she has her own shop. And I follow her on TikTok. And she sets goals, like, "I want 20 new customers this month. By the middle of the month, I got 25." I mean, she's just an amazing human. But she's elevated the experience. And now she's telling me all the time, "Oh yeah, I have a lawyer coming in. I have a doctor coming in. Tesla people come in." So she's elevated the experience. She provides. I mean, when you walk into her shop, it's just like walking into just, ah, us women, we just really love that calm and everything. And she provides them a drink, some tea. And she's another one. She's gonna take over the world. Just be ready for her. These two, our first two, they're gonna take over the world, for sure.
- There's an old saying in this realm: Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. But if you build a great mousetrap and no one knows about it, then that's a problem. So marketing is important, sales is important, networking is important. All these things that actually are kind of awkward for people that are very thoughtful, but very kind of intimidated about getting in front of people and not knowing how to market, so on. So it's the whole thing. It's not just one aspect. It's not just inventing something. It's also inventing or creating an environment where that invention, or that new product or whatever can get out into the world, and building your client base and so on. And then capitalizing on making sure... There's another saying about, for barbers: You can cut a man's hair a thousand times, but you can only scalp 'em once. You got to have good quality stuff too. So it's about building good quality product, identifying a need, a niche that doesn't exist, and then creating a product that fixes the problem; and then marketing it, selling it, and then going on it. Your drone you have now will look different 10 years from now because you gotta keep building the product. All right, so we got one more thing. So this is something we started when we started the podcast. Donavan, I'm gonna give this to you.
- Yeah, I have it.
- So we have listeners submit their own questions. And you get to be the podcast host now and ask me a question.
- Okay.
- And so I don't know what the question is, so it's cold on me. But if it's a good question, I'll ask you guys to answer it too, so be ready. Don't just be sitting there and then get stuck, all right? So fire away.
- If you could open a business or start your own business, what would it be?
- How did this one go? Oh, what a weird-
- Yeah, it's a weird thing for this group.
- I know.
- Start a business. I've always wanted to open a restaurant because I go to restaurants a lot. And there's actually a local business here, Gumby's Pizza, that turns itself into KDamp's Pizza. And I was like, "You can just leave it that way. Maybe we could go partner together." But I've thought about... I like breakfast food and I eat pancakes for supper. I eat waffles for supper. And to me, it'd be like breakfast all day. We all know what your business is gonna be, but Quinn, it took you 14 years.
- Yes, it did.
- What was your first business?
- I inherited a plot of land in South Dakota, like, all the places, South Dakota. And it's been in my family for way over a hundred years. I went to the courthouse and did all the digging and everything, way over 100 years. And when my grandmother died, I got it. It's 11 acres out in South Dakota. And I was a single mom with three kids. And I had this plot of land, plus, I was living in Arizona and on a teacher's salary, raising these kids and had that household there. And I was like, "I'm not gonna lose this farm. This has been in my family. It's not gonna happen on my dime." So I had to figure out something. And what I did is, after talking to some really helpful people, even though I should have been the one that knew, I opened up a hunting and fishing rental. So there's a house there, a little two-bedroom house, and it's on the water, and just had to figure it all out. And I'd never hunted. I've never... And I've fished, but it's kind of gross for me. But I had to learn all that stuff. Hunters have very expensive dogs. I had to make sure we took care of them. I had to figure out, they need a place to clean their fish that runs into... All these different things. And so it didn't go very well in the beginning, but after a while, it paid for itself. The house got completely remodeled, new windows, new roof, the whole thing. And I went, "Wow. Okay. Okay. This is cool. I can do this." So then after I'd gone through all of it, I think I did it like, 11 years, 11 years. And I finally just said, "You know what? I don't really want to do this anymore." So for Christmas of 2020, I took the house and the property out of my LLC, and I started a new LLC. And I gave each one of my adult children, they're all adult children now, or all adults, I gave them each 15%. Now, if you quickly do the math, that's 45%. I still have 55%. So the final decision is mine still . But I said, "What are we gonna do with it next? This is gonna be your family legacy. This is my legacy to you, that generational wealth at my level as a teacher." I said, "What is it that you want to do with it?" And we kicked it around, we kicked it around. And they would like to do solar energy and selling it back to the co-op in town, 'cause it's a very small town. Talk about small towns. I think there's 1500 people there. So yeah, so we're clearing out the land. And it's a very, very slow process 'cause we can only work on it in the summers, really, clearing out the land, putting in a new tree claim. We're gonna put in the solar, sell it back to the co-op in town. And we understand we can sell it directly back to the farmers also. So that's the next thing. They're all scientists. I don't know where they got their science background from. But yeah, so it's theirs now, kind of. It's the transition. But it paid for itself. It took really good care of the family. Now it's their turn to kind of do something with it. And I'm hoping they get the entrepreneurial bug.
- It's great to work with family when it works, and that's great lessons for them. And their scientific skills, but also your entrepreneurial spirit as well probably is a great marriage. I love what you're doing. I love that our students are getting an opportunity to get their hands dirty.
- Dirty.
- And because I really do believe there's learning by listening and watching and reading, but the best learning is learning by doing, which is why I always think about internships being so important. And so thank you, Quinn, for what you do to make those opportunities ready for our students. And thank you, Donavan, for sharing your story and for making the world around us better when these drones finally go on the market and bad stuff happens, and bad stuff always happens, that we'll be able to use technology to maybe save lives from someone who's stuck somewhere that we couldn't get a helicopter over to 'em, the drone may be able get in places they can't get into and identify where they are. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for sharing that with us, and thank you for joining us here at "The Current" where we learn about what's happening at Texas State, how Texas State is making the world better, one student, one faculty member, one life at a time. All right, until next time, States Up everyone.