When Daniel Cohen was 12 years old, he gained the affectionate nickname ‘Mr. Side Hustle’. From shoveling snow in his neighborhood to expanding his newspaper route, a young Cohen seized every opportunity to make money. One year, his mother’s garden yielded an excess tomato crop. Like any good entrepreneur, he identified an opportunity and sold the surplus tomatoes in his neighborhood.
“I sold every last one in the neighborhood for 5 bucks a pop,” Cohen said. “I understood that I had a real talent for sales, and selling is an integral part of entrepreneurship.”
As he moved through his educational and professional life, Cohen discovered his inherent entrepreneurial abilities. After founding his own company at the age of 24 and selling it to private equity 15 years later, Cohen experienced the “happy accident” that was his entry into entrepreneurial education. Armed with zero teaching experience, he was recruited to teach a course on entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
“By the end of the semester, I knew I was going to be pursuing entrepreneurial education full-time,” Cohen said.
Cohen spent the next two years at the University of Iowa and eight years at Cornell University, where he founded the eLab program that helps students launch businesses. As of 2025, the program has raised over $440 million of venture capital, mostly by undergraduate students.
Since he arrived at Reynolda Campus in 2015, Cohen has taken the Wake Forest Center for Entrepreneurship to new heights as the Whitaker Executive Director. The program, which oversees 439 students taking the Entrepreneurship minor, has won five national awards and just recently raised the largest gift from a private donor in Wake Forest history. However, according to Cohen, the true testament to the Center for Entrepreneurship’s success is the students who are turning their ideas into thriving businesses.
“Our students are the proof in the pudding,” Cohen said. “We are producing some rock star entrepreneurs that are raising capital, building companies and making it onto flagship lists like Oprah’s Favorite Products and Forbes 30 under 30.”
When Cohen and his colleagues began the process of establishing the Startup Lab program at Wake Forest, they could not have foreseen the magnitude of its success. In Startup Lab, students learn the fundamentals of building an early-stage company, such as building brand loyalty, making early sales and leading a team. The program is a cornerstone of the entrepreneurial curriculum, inspiring students to turn classroom ideas into real-world ventures.
When asked about memorable students, Cohen spoke with pride about Courtney Toll (‘18) and Annabel Love (‘18), who began their entrepreneurial journeys in Startup Lab. They had already signed onto full-time jobs in New York City when they developed the Nori press in Cohen’s class. What started as the casual exchange of ironing hacks in a sophomore dorm turned into a thriving business that has sold thousands of units and garnered national media attention.
“To watch [Toll and Love] forge their own path and make it to where they are has been incredibly inspiring to watch,” Cohen said.
Cohen also mentioned the co-founders of Storage Scholars, Sam Chason (‘20) and Jake Ramberg (‘20), who also launched their idea in Startup Lab before negotiating a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank in 2022.
According to Cohen, entrepreneurship is all about the pursuit and execution of opportunity. Of the students Cohen coaches through the startup process, those who have ambition but do not let it overpower their work are among the most successful.
“The entrepreneurs I’ve coached, who have had uncommon success, have a combination of humility and confidence,” Cohen said. “They’ve been humbled because entrepreneurship is difficult, but they also have an unshakable belief in themselves.”
To help students in the early stages of building a business, Cohen and his colleagues Greg Pool and Heidi Neck developed the IDEATE teaching method. The phrase is an acronym for: identify, discover, enhance, anticipate, target and evaluate. It is intended to help young entrepreneurs identify high-potential ideas. The IDEATE method won the National Innovation Award in 2023.
“The IDEATE method makes up for an experiential gap,” Cohen said. “It helps them figure out where these great ideas are hiding in plain sight.”
The first and fourth steps of the IDEATE model, identify and anticipate, are the most crucial, according to Cohen. The identification stage is where most entrepreneurial ideas either fall flat or gain traction. To properly identify an entrepreneurial opportunity under the IDEATE method, the students must master pattern recognition.
This process enables an entrepreneur to identify subtle trends in a data set that is typically omitted by others. Anticipation encapsulates the idea of market forecasting, where entrepreneurs predict future needs based on compounding factors. Cohen cited the shift toward Electrical Vehicles and the aging population of the United States as examples.
“It’s been said that entrepreneurs live comfortably three to five years in the future,” Cohen said. “I think the ‘anticipate’ section really summarizes that idea.”
Cohen’s motivation to expand the Center for Entrepreneurship is the students. When scheduling time on his calendar, he ensures that he is prioritizing students before anything else.
“The number one reason I am at Wake Forest is for the students,” Cohen said. “A lot of my drive and motivation as a professor is to help smooth the path for the next generation of student entrepreneurs.”