Apr 21
The Carleton Liberal Arts Education Meets Entrepreneurship
The Carleton Liberal Arts Education Meets Entrepreneurship
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
7:00 p.m. Central Time
Via Zoom
Please join us for an informative and thought-provoking panel discussion on how Carleton's foundational liberal arts education led to successful entrepreneurial endeavors. From careers ranging from artisan bagels to Broadway and everything in between, our distinguished alumni (along with Professor Nathan Grawe and a member of this year's winning Impact Challenge student competition), share their entrepreneurship journeys from ideation to reality.
Register by Friday, April 17, 2026.
The panel will be moderated by Kurt Waltenbaugh '91, with panelists Morgan Jones ’13, Josh Small ’20, and Jeremy White ’87. Each panelist will share a brief summary of their own entrepreneurial experiences. The discussion will then turn to how current Carleton students are being challenged to come up with their own entrepreneurial business ideas as part of the Center for Leadership in Innovation & Change (CLIC) Impact Challenge started by Nathan D. Grawe, the Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences and a professor of economics at Carleton. Finally, we will hear from John Hurtubise ’26, one of the members of the winning 2026 Impact Challenge team.
Co-sponsored by Carleton Business Alumni and the Carleton Twin Cities Business Alumni Network.
About the participants:
Nathan Grawe has taught in the economics department since 1999. In 2015, he inaugurated Carleton's Impact Challenge. Each year the startup competition engages around 25 to 40 students as teams compete for a fellowship of $10,000 plus Career Center experiential learning grants. In 2025, Nathan created the Center for Innovation in Leadership & Change to coordinate the growing number of programs Carleton uses to support entrepreneurial students. The Center opened as a physical space in fall 2025.
Morgan Jones '13 is a Tony Award-Nominated Producer and Co-Founder of Burkhardt Jones Productions. She is the Senior Director of Engineering at Webflow, and has also worked for Slack, Vecna Robotics, The Flex Co., Granicus, and Target. Morgan earned her Master of Science in Software Engineering from the University of Minnesota and her Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Carleton.
Josh Small '20 graduated from Carleton in 2020 with a bachelor’s in history and received a master’s in international relations from the University of Chicago. While in grad school, Josh became interested in the startup space and competed in the New Venture Challenge, where he helped develop a legal drafting technology. After working as an associate for an edtech venture capital fund analyzing early stage investments, he launched DoughCo Bagels in late 2021 and started focusing on it full-time in 2022. He is currently the CEO/Managing Director, where he leads a growing team of over 10 employees.
Kurt Waltenbaugh '91 is a serial entrepreneur with a career spent building solutions to understand, predict, and influence consumer behavior. Kurt has built successful analytic solutions, products, and companies in the healthcare, retail, and education/credentialing industries. The common thread of his work is capturing large amounts of data from disparate sources to produce novel insights into the behavior of individuals and groups. With enough data on prior behavior, we can predict future actions, creating opportunities to influence decision making. Currently offering strategic advisory and consulting through Kestrel Rising, Kurt continues to explore the world, helping companies understand data and prediction, to make the world a better place.
Jeremy White '87 is a technologist who has worked with open source software and operating system level technology for the past 30 years. He is the founder of CodeWeavers, Inc., the corporate sponsor of the open source Wine Project. The Wine project provides the ability to use Windows applications on UNIX like systems, including macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS. The Wine project is directly responsible for the success of Valve's SteamDeck and is the technology powering Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. Jeremy served as CEO of CodeWeavers for 27 years and exited CodeWeavers by establishing an employee ownership trust, providing for the long term health of the staff, customers, and community surrounding the company.