MBA candidate lands spot in Pay Pal competition

After years of hard work in the web development field, DeGroote School of Business MBA candidate Lorne Lantz will travel to San Francisco next week as a finalist in the Pay Pal X Innovate competition.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Lantz began creating online programs by developing video games for his home computer. His passion for creating online products and tools eventually took him to the University of Manitoba, where he earned a degree in computer engineering.

Upon graduation in 2003 Lantz moved to Ontario to work in Toronto. After starting several different website ventures, he recognized the need to gain some business experience and enrolled in the MBA co-op program at McMaster.

“I just wanted to wake up every morning and look forward to work, but I was never happy working for other people. I was going to do whatever I could to make sure the next web venture I launched was going to be successful, and the MBA program gave me the tools to do that,” said Lantz.

It was at McMaster that Lantz was faced with one of his biggest challenges. After failing to win a McMaster Business Plan competition, he worked even harder to develop his new initiative. His dedication paid off and in November 2009 “groupstore” was launched.

“Every event I went to was run by different groups, and they'd invite me through Facebook and promote it through Twitter,” said Lantz. “I noticed that the events that failed were only because the group was so unorganized, sometimes cash went missing, other times no one could register for the event because the website guy was too busy to update their webpage. That's when I knew I had found an opportunity.”

Developed as an innovative way to organize events, groupstore can keep track of finances and sell to a large group all connected through one Facebook application, setting it apart from competing applications.

In three steps, an event organizer can sell tickets through a secure PayPal account and have the event posted on their Facebook page, an external website and groupstore's website. Since its inception, groupstore has successfully helped sell more than $60,000 in event tickets.

After launching groupstore, Lantz set his eyes on the Innovate competition with the hopes of finding the right partners to expand his business and the opportunity to collaborate with the top web developers in the world. Innovate is meant to show developers and companies how they can use the online tool PayPal to increase sales, promote events, products and services and stay ahead of trends.

Lantz is now one of two finalists for the PayPal Student X award and will exhibit during the two-day Innovate 2010 Conference this Tuesday, Oct. 26 and Wednesday, Oct. 27 in California, hoping to win $10,000.

Lantz's ambition, however, doesn't stop there. Last night he won the Marauder's Den entrepreneurship competition organized by the Student Success Centre, and by the time Lantz graduates from DeGroote in June, he hopes to have scaled up his business to pay off his student loans and has his eyes set on new market segments to potentially grow groupstore into a multi-million dollar company.