This year, SXSWedu held its first ever Student Startup competition at the Austin Convention Center. The Student Startup competition is an opportunity for high school students to present business ideas to a panel of judges, who then vote to see which project is the most complete and best scoring overall.

The first ever winner of the SXSWedu Student Startup competition was WHS senior Victor Schwartz.

“[My idea] is called YoursMineandHours,” Victor said. “It’s a pun. It’s an app for small businesses with part-time employees, and it manages their dynamic scheduling.”

Victor received a $1000 check for winning the grand prize. He was also interviewed by NPR and LanchGen.

“[When I found out I won] I was very happy,” Victor said. “I was a bit surprised. The other competitors, especially this one other [competitor] — Rachel Gardner — was very well done. She presented Chap Research. Its like a club at Westlake where they teach engineering concepts and entrepreneurship concepts to students here. It was a good idea, it was a good presentation, so I was pretty much resigned to defeat, but I was ecstatic when I found out because it was a culmination of all the hours of work I put into my presentation. The judges talked to me after and said the reason that I beat her was because I had more of a marketable plan and I had laid out better ways to expand.”

Victor still continuous to work on his app and plans to further study business in college.

“I’m actually going to develop the app with a cofounder when I go to college,” Victor said. “Ive been doing a lot of market research the past few weeks and meeting with local companies and working on the business plan and looking at developing websites. This has made me want to be an entrepreneur even more.”