The award did not exist before this year

The award did not exist before this year.

The Henry Bernick Awards have run at Georgian College for years, hosted by the Henry Bernick Entrepreneurship Centre, and most of the categories go to people who have already built something. A business with revenue. A community initiative that worked. Proof.

In 2026 HBEC added a new one. The Emerging Entrepreneur Award, for students still at the start of it. People who have shown potential and stubbornness but have not arrived anywhere yet.

The first one went to Aasees Sethi and Lakshit Sharma, for ImpulsTrip.

It is worth being honest about where the company was that night. ImpulsTrip was live on iOS and Android with 110 early community members and 105 downloads, none of it paid for. Georgian put those numbers in the release, which was the right call, because they are exactly the size you would expect and hiding them would have missed the point.

That is what the category is for. Not results. The part before results.

Being handed an award for potential is a strange experience. A win for something finished is simple. You did the thing, here is the thing. An award for potential is somebody saying out loud that they think you will manage it, in a room full of people who might remember if you do not. It is encouraging and slightly uncomfortable at the same time, which is probably the correct feeling to walk out of that room with.

Teja was not named on the award. He built most of what the award was pointing at. That is how these things go sometimes, and none of the three of them have ever treated the company as split into parts with names on them.

The centre itself is the part that stayed with them afterwards.

Henry Bernick came to Canada without access to anything like HBEC. There was no centre, no programs, no mentorship, no room full of people whose job it is to take a student's half-formed idea seriously. He built his own way through. When he and his family set up the centre at Georgian, the point was that the next people would not have to.

ImpulsTrip was incorporated through Georgian's eCo-op, which exists for the same reason. Three students with an idea and no qualifications got handed a structure instead of being told to come back when they were ready.

So the award is not really a trophy. It is a bet, made early, by people who did not have to make it.

The rest of this page is what the bet has turned into so far.