Goodman BBA student Johnathan Holland is no stranger to delivering a solid business pitch.

Holland, who previously won the Brock Innovation Group’s Monster Pitch competition and won first place at JDC Central in the finance category, has gotten used to selling business recommendations with impact in high-pressure situations.

Two years ago, Holland was the first recipient of the Deborah E. Rosati Co-op Entrepreneurship Scholarship which allowed him to spend two co-op work terms on his start-up company, where he has been working on his idea to build an online marketplace for convenient and non-traditional methods of currency exchange.

As an entrepreneur, he understands the need to actively seek opportunities that will put his business skills and acumen to the test and develop them further.

He recently got this chance when he traveled to Montreal with a team of Brock computer science students and alumni to participate in MasterCard’s Masters of Code hackathon.

The team, comprised of Holland, Brock computer science students Matt Peskett and Peter Wilson and computer science alumni Ryan Spring and Karim Hamasni, placed third in the hackathon.

The team had several combined years’ experience with developing code, and with Holland’s penchant for selling business ideas, they built and pitched a fully-functioning product that would help popular Instagram users monetize their accounts following a commission-based sales model through MasterCard’s Simplify payment API. The team had only 24 hours to accomplish this mission but they managed to overcome the tight deadline and impress the judges.

For Holland, this is exactly the type of opportunity that student entrepreneurs need to pursue.

“As a student entrepreneur, I need to constantly find opportunities to put my skills to the test. I learned a lot from my computer science colleagues – there’s so much value in cross disciplinary collaborations.”