President’s Notes, December 2022

Dear TiE DC Friends

Wishing you all a very happy holiday season. Hope 2022 has been a good year for everyone and wishing you all an awesome 2023!

As the year closes, I want to express how honored and humbled I have felt to serve as TIE DC President in 2022. I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to the entire Board for putting your faith in me and granting me the opportunity to further develop our TiE DC Chapter. A special thanks also to our Executive Director Andrea Souza and Administrator Luz Blanco for their support.

I started the year with a popular adage “many hands make light work" as I requested your help to grow the chapter and I made a promise to you (quoting from my first newsletter) "to make 2022 an even better year than the earlier years continuing our journey to be ranked among the best of the best in the TiE Global echo system". The promise was kept! And help you did! And the chapter grew to amazing heights! So much so that for the first time since its inception, TIE DC was recognized as the best large chapter globally! I feel so honored and humbled that this award came in my term, but the credit truly goes to our entire team of Board Members and volunteers for the years of work they put in to get the chapter to where it is now.

Below I highlight some of our key accomplishments this year:

• GovCon 2022 our flagship event, for the first time, had global attendees! It truly has become a noteworthy event with 23 sponsors (and some sponsors turned away due to slots not being available), and 51 top-notch speakers from the government and private sector.
• I visited several TiE Chapters worldwide to promote our chapter and have a cross-pollination of best practices.
• TiE DC's University pitch fest team Vitalize LLC won the global Pitch Fest Competition. Having achieved so much visibility on the global front, we directed our focus to our by-laws to be ready for the next stage of growth that is inevitable.
• We continued our journey to establish strategic partnerships with other institutions in our ecosystem to examine/leverage synergies.
• We added support for Early Intervention Program students (first-generation college-going students) to train them in entrepreneurship.
• We started the process to institutionalize the TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) program to make it more professionally run.

Keep scrolling down to see all our updates.

As I end my tenure as the TiE DC President, my heartfelt thanks to the TiE DC Board of 2022- for all their support and friendship. Even though this is a working board and demanded endless hours of work you all made it seem like so much fun!