Justin Javorek, a fixture in the Dalhousie University entrepreneurship community for the past few years, has been named to the 2016 cohort of The Next 36.

The program aims to select the best university entrepreneurs from across Canada, who develop businesses over eight months and receive instruction from leading academics and business people. This year, The Next 36 accepted 38 participants, 80 percent of whom have started at least one business.

Javorek, a native of Bratislava, Slovakia, is the only Atlantic Canadian representative in the cohort.

"For me, coming from a post-Communist country, we were not raised in an environment conducive to high expectations for our personal potential and ‘big thinking,’" Javorek said Wednesday night. “As an international student and soon-to-be immigrant, I believe that programs like Next 36 are a tremendous opportunity to not only grow as an aspiring entrepreneur but to foster deeper connections with like-minded individuals in Canada."

Javorek has worked on a couple of startups as he went through the Starting Lean course at Dalhousie. The Next 36 cohort is now in the process of dividing into teams to work on businesses, and he doesn’t know yet what his team’s project will be.  

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Javorek, was selected from 1,100 students applying to the program. They represented 44 institutions across Canada and the U.S., including Harvard, Wharton, Cornell and University of North Carolina.

He is a mainstay of the Dalhousie Entrepreneurship Society, which recently piloted the first ever student-led hackathon for oceanography and marine programs. Hackamarine 2015 produced five winning teams having access to a total of $10,000 of seed funding to pursue their ideas.

Javorek is also one of the University Innovation Fellows at Dal, the first group from outside the U.S. in the program run by Stanford University and Venture Well. 

A world junior hockey player, Javorek came to Nova Scotia five years ago on a Dalhousie University athletics scholarship to play hockey. 

Following a series of injuries, Javorek was inspired to pursue entrepreneurship by his roommate Shea Kewin, co-founder of Spring Loaded Technology and UHWK, and his friend Daniel Bartek, co-founder of Sage Mixology.

The N36 entrepreneurs will spend the next eight months building their companies with the support of their mentors, a unique academic program, a pool of business advisers and access to up to $50,000 in seed capital.

The Next 36 mentors have an impressive entrepreneurial and venture capital track record and include, Kirk Simpson – co-founder of Wave, Janet Bannister - general partner at Real Ventures and former head of Kijiji Canada, and Andy Yang – CEO of 500px.  The ventures receive seed capital from a fund that includes Relay Ventures as an investment partner.

 “Each year the finalist pool seems to gets stronger," said The Next 36 Managing Director Peter Carrescia in a statement.  "For our 2016 cohort, we sought applications from individuals who were already working on ideas and the response from the start-up community blew us away.  We now allow all 38 of our successful finalists to choose their own co-founders and this additional flexibility has helped us attract more applicants with an existing track record of entrepreneurship than ever before."