If there’s one thing Cate Costa loves as much as helping entrepreneurs, it’s being on the move.
Now, in her own words, “fully mobile,” Costa mentors startups from her website, CateCosta.com, as she travels the world through Latin America and beyond, exploring entrepreneurial ecosystems or traveling just for pleasure.
“Both of my parents are business owners and growing up seeing the autonomy they had compared to that of a typical employee, I always knew I would end up in entrepreneurship somehow,” Costa says of her inspiration.
She started in a somewhat less nomadic way, of course, first working for herself and then for a VC-backed startup.
But her interest in learning more about how startups work led her back to school for an MBA and to a position heading the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Howard University School of Business in Washington, D.C.
There Costa’s tasks included supervising the Institute’s entrepreneurship education workshop series, entrepreneur incubator, special events including a business pitch competition and the Google Digital Empowerment Event, the Institute’s one-on-one startup counseling sessions, and the Annual Faculty Conference on Entrepreneurship.
Working in the Institute’s entrepreneurship programs Costa learned the importance of working with entrepreneurs who had a vision but lacked the knowledge and experience to get started.
“So, I became a consultant with clients of my own as well as through a non-profit organization in DC,” Costa says.
However, Costa would eventually leave the non-profit to focus only on her private clients, allowing her to indulge her passion for travel while working.
Costa’s own experiences as an entrepreneur can serve to inspire her clients too. She’s the founder of Venture Catalyst Consulting, a small startup consultant firm; President of Only Honest, a video sharing website focusing on political discourse; formerly a business consultant with the Minority Business Development Agency’s Business Center in Washington, D.C. and also the former sole-proprietor of a major contractor in the cruise ship industry.
Costa is also, of course, a BizSugar user:
“I spend a lot of time online reading the latest tips and news related to startups and small business, and I stumbled across BizSugar in an article I was reading and decided to check it out,” Costa says.
“Most of the things I test drive after reading about them don’t actually remain a part of my daily routine for long because they’re not effective, but BizSugar has been an awesome resource for me both in terms of providing me with great content to share with my followers and in helping me share what I’m doing with a community that’s interested in what I focus on,” she adds.
She says,”The BizSugar community really seems to be one where everyone is there to collaborate and learn as opposed to some of the others where people just SPAM each other.”
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