Mike Rinkunas ’02 ’08G and Canaan Kimball ’26 on Lehigh Ventures Lab

In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, host Stephanie Veto talks with Michael Rinkunas ’02 ’08G and Canaan Kimball ’26 about the Lehigh Ventures Lab and their experiences as entrepreneurs.

Rinkunas is the director of the lab and is passionate about empowering emerging and established entrepreneurs to transform their ideas into successful ventures.

Kimball is in the Integrated Business and Engineering program, majoring in mechanical engineering and business. He is the co-founder of Screenwise Eating LLC,a digital platform designed to help children facing feeding challenges, and has been mentored by Rinkunas and the Lehigh Ventures Lab throughout the process.

Listen to the podcast here and subscribe and download Lehigh Business on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Below is an edited excerpt from the conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF].

Veto: Describe what the Ventures Lab is. 

Rinkunas: So the Ventures Lab is actually a really cool program. It's an outshoot of the Office of Entrepreneurship's Baker Institute, and we are the university's startup incubator and accelerator. So we are here to help current students, alumni and faculty build their ventures and position them for success. 

Veto: How does the lab support students through the entrepreneurial process? 

Rinkunas: When we think about students and venture building, we're looking for folks that have more than just an idea. The idea is the Baker Institute. That's a whole separate podcast as you've already done. But when students have an idea that they've thoroughly de-risked, we have two different ways to support them.

So first is the Founders Program, and that is to help a student who's got an idea enough to say there's something here and I want to build a venture. Now we start working with them to actually look through all the elements of that. How do you form a company? How do you look at building a business model? What does initial traction look like in terms of finding customers or letters of intent? So our goal with the Founders Program is to help the individual to start building towards launching a company.

Once they actually have the startup in place and build a company, we'll switch them over to the Milestone Accelerator, which is exactly as the name says. We pick a milestone and we aim them in that direction for their post-Lehigh experience. 

Veto: Talk about the mentorship that it provides. 

Rinkunas: The way I like to think about it is that there are three tiers of folks we work with. When a team is looking to get more mentorship, first off, we have more or less what we would call our coach or an entrepreneur in residence. Folks that have been there, done that, built their own companies, and can talk about helping a student in that coaching capacity. You can go from the best day of your life to the worst day of your life back to the best day in the span of a 30 minute phone call. I've been there. And so part of that EIR role is to be both coach and drill sergeant. They keep people on task and be a little bit of the therapist for the founder roller coaster. We have several folks, some alumni, some industry professionals who help with that because they want to give back.

The next tier is our subject matter experts. And that's where we actually leverage a lot of Lehigh alumni where, depending upon what they're working on, they need connections. There are Lehigh alums everywhere. That mentorship is a much limited duration because it's generally around something tactical.

And the last one is service providers where there are alums who are doing marketing work, legal work. So those are the three buckets we look at again, the coaches, industry experts, and then service providers.

Veto: Canaan, you are the co-founder of Screenwise Eating LLC. Please describe what that is. 

Kimball: Screenwise Eating is a digital platform designed to help children facing feeding challenges and to also support feeding therapists who work with them. So basically, we built a mobile app that's grounded in behavioral therapy principles that actually gamifies mealtime. The idea is that kids earn structured-based screen time rewards for taking bites and chewing at the correct pacing so that they can progress towards healthier eating habits over time.

Now, on the therapist side of things, we developed a therapist portal web app where therapists can adjust settings on the mobile app for their clients. And they can personalize each of their clients' progression plans and view dashboards filled with data and charts to show their clients progress over time. And this tracks important eating metrics like bite counts, disruptive behaviors, meal duration, and long-term progress over time, like body weight.

So Screenwise isn't just an app, but it's a tool that connects kids, families, therapists, all in one ecosystem to make mealtimes more structured and really drive more positive progress for kids with eating challenges. 

Veto: What attracted you to working with the Ventures Lab? 

Kimball: First of all, I absolutely love the Ventures Lab, and I'm super thankful to be a part of it. Mike is awesome, and it's truly been a blessing in my Lehigh career. I was drawn to it because it's one of the few places where student founders are treated like real founders. When I approached Mike and had that first meeting with him, he didn't just say cool idea when I brought up Screenwise Eating. He helped me understand that execution is everything. He immediately pushed us to test assumptions and talk to users face-to-face and really validate the problem and understand customer need. 

The Ventures Lab gives you access to incredible mentors. Mike connects me with incredible people every week. That's truly been the biggest advantage that the Ventures Lab has brought me. And, as a student athlete juggling football classes and startups, having a structured place to do all this and execute at a high level is just such a competitive advantage.