Jedidiah Weller had a big success with his first startup, but it was rough going. Today OpenForge is a leading mobile app development firm, “but in the first two years I couldn’t afford both rent and food,” he recalls. To get his workers paid and keep ahead of the bills, he’d Airbnb his house and sleep in the office basement with his dogs. He realized that other would-be entrepreneurs were in the same boat: They had great ideas, but were thin on the business know-how. Thus was born his current venture, Startup Wars, which offers simulations and online courses to equip young would-be entrepreneurs with practical skills. “I don’t want them to have to go through what I went through when I was first starting my first company,” he says. Plus, entrepreneurs are fun to be around. Weller said he gets special satisfaction out of helping them turn passionate visions into practical realities.

Outside of his business, he’s a frequent global speaker and mentor, sharing insights at major technology and entrepreneurship events including Developer Week, SXSW, Web Summit, Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania. His Drexel experience helped him to get here. There were the co-ops at tech firms, where he learned some business basics — he actually got his first patent while on co-op — and where he also discovered that corporate life held little appeal. Co-op put him in an entrepreneurial mindset out of the gate. And then there was the coursework. “I was taught to think like an engineer,” he says. That means learning how to take complex problems and break them down into smaller, more manageable chunks. That understanding has served him well as he’s built his businesses, and taught others to do the same.