GSEA 20th Anniversary Spotlight: How One Entrepreneur Went from the Music Industry’s Most Sought-After Web Designer to a Tech Company CEO

Built to Inspire: To celebrate the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) 20th anniversary, marking two decades of mentorship and empowerment in motion, Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) is catching up with past competitors to learn how their GSEA experience shaped their trajectory and impacted their lives.

Every weekday afternoon, 12-year-old Brendan Ciecko climbed onto his school bus in Western Massachusetts and asked his mother, who drove the route, "Did any envelopes arrive today from Los Angeles or New York City?" If the answer was yes, it usually meant that another check for thousands of dollars from a record label or music management company had come in. "That felt like Christmas every day," he says.

The money, however, was secondary to his passion: early-2000s punk, emo, and indie rock bands. He had gotten his start designing for one of these bands at 12 when he won a design contest sponsored by his favorite group, Slick Shoes, a punk band out of Southern California. He parlayed the win into convincing the band, their management, and their label to let him build their website. 

He built the site on a used Mac computer his dad had bartered for when Brendan was 10. At the bottom of every page, he inserted the words, “Designed by Brendan Ciecko," with a link to his email. Inquiries started flooding in. Suddenly, the son of a plumber and a school bus driver had a business while still in middle school. “I preferred doing business by email,” he explains, “Because no one knew I was just a kid.” 

In his teens, Brendan regularly worked with major record labels.

His business thrived, creating websites, digital marketing, branding, and online strategy. However, the only entrepreneur he knew growing up was his father's friend, who owned a Subway franchise and alpaca farm. He had no local startup ecosystem and no family connections to provide business guidance. 

By the time he was 13, Brendan landed work with Vagrant Records, one of the largest independent labels in the country, home to artists including Dashboard Confessional and The Get Up Kids. He founded Ten Minute Media, the name inspired in part by his fast turnaround times and in part by “Ten Minutes,” one of his favorite songs by The Get Up Kids. 

His client list quickly expanded to virtually every major label, including Capitol, Warner, Sony, Interscope, EMI, and Virgin. Rich Egan, the co-founder of Vagrant Records, soon gave him the nickname "Wonderboy," after realizing that he was fielding his calls from his high school principal’s office. He was entirely self-taught, learning from online forums, reverse-engineering other people's projects, and making mistakes. Fearless, he took on projects he was not ready for, such as building the entire interactive web presence for HBO's "Rome” when he was 16. It was a massive project that pushed him to work for days without sleep. "It taught me a lot about my own limits," he says, and it pushed him to expand them. 

Brendan, seen here with Maroon 5, often rubbed shoulders with music industry luminaries. 

But Brendan had no mentors, no peers, and no framework for thinking about what he was doing or what was next. He tried college but had to drop out after a year to grow his business, which was blowing up. It was hard to stay in class when he was constantly being called to New York for meetings with rock stars like Mick Jagger and major-label executives. 

Luckily, just before he left, he decided to enter another contest… 

GSEA as Turning Point

When Brendan entered GSEA at 18, it was the first time he had to formally describe his business and articulate who he was as an entrepreneur. 

At the regional competition in 2007 in Boston, he was an anomaly among the slew of Harvard MBAs. Still, two of the EO members who served as judges, Frederick Marckini and Tom Rosedale, took an interest in him. Frederick had founded iProspect, one of the first SEO firms, which he had recently sold for US$50 million. Tom was a tech-focused attorney and serial entrepreneur who eventually became Brendan's first lawyer. "I learned that there was a community, a whole support system," Brendan says. 

Tom, Frederick, and other EO members invited Brendan to dinners and meetings. "I have vivid memories of being this 18-year-old getting picked up on Newbury Street in Boston in a luxurious convertible by successful entrepreneurs and just having my mind blown," he says. 

"I learned that there was a community, a whole support system." 

- Brendan Ciecko, 2007 GSEA Finalist

He advanced to the GSEA Global Finals in Chicago. There, he competed alongside student entrepreneurs from around the world, including 19-year-old Fraser Doherty, the founder of SuperJam, who had built a multi-million-dollar jam business. The two became friends and remain in touch. 

Entering EO's Ecosystem

The GSEA experience opened a new door. Soon after, Brendan joined EO's Accelerator program (EOA). Through EOA, Ciecko gained access to structured learning and a peer group operating at a similar stage. Instead of solving problems in isolation, he could draw on operators who had already faced them, whether building a sales team, entering new markets, or repositioning a brand.

 "The quality of the workshops, the companies, and the people involved were world-class," he says. "Many were building globally ambitious businesses." 

For someone who had spent his entire career working alone, access to a community of entrepreneurs changed how he operated. For the first time, he saw how experienced founders structured their decisions and approached hiring, pricing, and growth. It was the start of reframing his business from a series of projects into a true company.

Tom continued to guide him through legal and strategic decisions. Having an ecosystem made him realize how much he had been leaving on the table by going it alone. “There are people to bounce big ideas around with,” he says. "There is access to all different ways of thinking about growing your business.” 

The Pivot to Cuseum

In his early 20s, after moving to Boston, Brendan developed a surprise passion for arts and culture. "I was a punk rock kid," he says. "I did not grow up going to museums or traveling." But with his new economic freedom, he started exploring the city's cultural institutions and was captivated.

When the Neue Galerie, a museum devoted to early 20th-century Austrian and German art and design in New York, reached out to his agency, Brendan took the project despite having built Ten Minute Media's reputation exclusively in music and entertainment. He was surprised to find that the museum's technology stack was underperforming, broken, or entirely outdated. It opened his eyes to similar problems throughout the cultural sector.

That observation became the seed of Cuseum, a software platform designed, through mobile technology, to help museums, nonprofits, universities, and cultural institutions with visitor, member, and donor engagement. Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak, became his first investor.

Unlike the self-taught teenager who had built Ten Minute Media on passion, grit, and talent, Brendan now had a community behind him of mentors and peers and a framework for building and scaling. “I am a product of the mentorship that I have received over my life,” he says. And much of that mentorship, he notes, traces back directly to that first GSEA application in 2007.

Brendan was featured in Inc. in 2008. 

Full Circle

Cuseum grew into a profitable tech company serving over 700 customers, from the British Museum to the White House to the University of Michigan. The company raised US$1.4 million in seed funding and went through Techstar, a top accelerator program with an application process more competitive than getting accepted into elite schools like Harvard. 

In 2025, Ciecko achieved a successful exit – Cuseum was acquired by the European private equity firm BID Equity. Tom Rosedale helped manage the legal aspects of the sale, the same GSEA judge who had taken an interest in an 18-year-old punk-rock kid from Western Massachusetts nearly two decades earlier. 

Brendan remains CEO and is focused on global expansion and potential acquisitions of other companies in the cultural technology and member engagement space. “The end is not here yet,” he says. “We are still building!”

After those successes, what advice he would give his 10-year-old self who was taking his first steps into entrepreneurship? Brendan doesn’t hesitate: “Find mentors and supporters as early as possible." 

Brendan Ciecko is the founder and CEO of Cuseum, a platform that helps cultural attractions, nonprofits, and museums drive visitor, member, and donor engagement. 

Interested in competing? Learn more about GSEA and apply here.