Erich Meissner
Year: 2018
Hometown: Barnesville, MD
Major: Electrical Engineering and Finance
Relationship Status: Single
What extracurriculars are you involved in?
Student Government Association (SGA) – ENGR Representative
Consult Your Community (CYC) – Business Analyst
Describe yourself in three words.
Don’t care about rules
What is something most people don’t know about you?
Eats homegrown pigs off family farm
What planet best matches your personality?
Pluto, cause pluto’s cold and I get cold ears easily because I have bad ear circulation because my mom also has bad ear circ. and it’s genetic.
Celebrity Crush?
Rebecca Black
What’s your best pickup line?
I was dared to go up to a girl at 251 and try to get her number.
I said, “You know, it’d be a lot easier for me to sweep you off your feet if you stood up…”
She stood up; I had no idea what to do.
What’s the sweetest think you’ve ever done for a girl?
I went to Hershey Park, and there was really concentrated sugar in the chocolate. It was so sweet that my stomach twisted like the motion of wringing a towel dry.
What’s your workout routine?
If you eat really fast without taking breaths, it can be a really good cardio workout!
Tell me about your business?
uBoard is the sole provider of personalized headboards, and uBoard’s functionalities surpass our competitors’. Being college students ourselves, we understand that students are constantly on a budget, and we kept this in mind when designing our product.
uBoard has sold over 50 headboards to over 10 colleges and universities across the country! Our success has been driven primarily by our popular social media pages on Facebook and Instagram, which together aggregate over 2,500 followers.
What got you interested in business?
When I was 10 years old, my sister and I went out into the rich part of our neighborhood and offered to shovel snow from driveways. It went well; people wanted to give some cute kids with shovels a few bucks. HAHA! But we didn’t charge just a few bucks! We would finish the entire driveway and walkway, and then we would place our charge! My sister and I ran around with our money-grubbing hands asking for $160 bucks for an hour job! You should’ve seen the look on the faces of all these home-owners when a pre-teen asked them to empty their pockets! Never underestimate a 4th grader with a shovel!
What inspired you to start this particular business?
The uBoard team was cofounded by Natalie Urban, Lina Bauer, and me at the PwC Freshmen Leaders Event in March 2015 hosted by the Smith School. Our team was excited all day, and at the end, we were tasked to come up with the “best dorm room startup” we could think of. That’s when Natalie thought, “Oh! What about the headboard I made for my dorm bed?!” Long story short, we won the entire pitch competition, and we became a team after that. A bunch of PwC partners and senior consultants came up to us and said, “You guys should totally make this a business!” And when PwC partners say you’ve got a good idea, you run with it.
Are you working on any other business ventures?
There is an awesome competition at UMD called the Hult Prize. The task is to build a sustainable, scalable, and fast-growing social enterprise that will double the income of 10 million people residing in crowded urban spaces! There are billions of people trapped in poverty, and we have an idea in the works for the world’s largest slum, Dharavi. Imagine a huge project for slum upgrading this area where clean water and basic sanitation is not available. We just pitched our idea last Sunday, and we placed 3rd out of 11 team. We expect to follow through with the idea for UMD’s DoGoodChallenge.
Where do you see yourself in 20 years?
I really don’t want to be bald.