There are some people that you only need one name for. Think Madonna, Beyoncé or Shakira.
In Baltimore’s innovation ecosystem, we have Pava.
She was more of a verb — seemingly always in motion. And that motion ripples through the Baltimore innovation ecosystem to this day.
This past spring, I returned to Johns Hopkins as a contractor to run Fuel — one of the accelerator programs Pava LaPere and I helped to launch back in 2019 when I worked as a fulltime employee of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures.
During my first week back, I spoke with a first-year grad student who casually mentioned how grateful she was to have received all the mentorship “from Pava.”
“Wait, you actually met Pava?” I asked, confused.
She returned my confusion. “Met Pava? I mean … yeah, I’ve met a handful of staff members at the Pava Center so far and they’ve been incredibly helpful.”
To many current student founders, “Pava” isn’t the name of a person they lost. It’s a word, the word, that encompasses entrepreneurship at Johns Hopkins. They use the word casually to mean the center, programming or grants that share her name.
The word Pava represents their opportunity to take a shot at solving a problem they care about by building a venture around it.
For those of us who were fortunate enough to know Pava personally, her loss will forever leave a void in our lives.
Today, September 25, marks the somber third anniversary since we discovered that Pava LaPere was no longer with us. It will always dredge up painful memories of systems that failed her and a bright light snuffed out by one of humanity’s darkest possible acts.
Her core belief that she championed through all of her ventures was that the world needed more entrepreneurs dedicated to solving the world’s myriad problems.
The founders with the fewest connections, the least funding and the longest odds are often the ones attempting to solve the most pressing problems, because they’ve personally lived them. She spent her all-too-short life trying to improve those odds.
That’s the true legacy she left behind.
Pava’s name lives on in the things she set in motion
Pava came to Johns Hopkins as a freshman in 2015 and immediately fell in love with both the university and Baltimore, although that didn’t mean she was satisfied with the status quo.
Upon realizing there wasn’t a formal student entrepreneurship center, she started a nonprofit called TCO Labs (standing for The Crazy Ones) to coalesce a community of undergrad entrepreneurs. And when she saw no connective tissue between the various university entrepreneurship centers across Baltimore, she built that too.
Then she set her sights on the world.
She started EcoMap Technologies during her senior year with the ambitious goal of making “every ecosystem accessible to everyone” by mapping out the resources, organizations, events and opportunities within them. Whereas most of her friends secured six-figure jobs as software engineers or consultants and fled to San Francisco or New York City, Pava planted her roots in Baltimore.
She worked relentlessly to raise over $7.5 million to support the mission and grow the team to over 30 people. She proudly and intentionally built it all in Baltimore. It was a privilege of a lifetime to work alongside her on that journey.
Pava loved the city the way you love something you’ve chosen, not something you’re stuck with, but she defended it fiercely like family. She didn’t talk about Baltimore’s potential, like it might one day be worthy of praise, though not yet. Pava believed that Baltimore, in the present tense, is beautiful. And she dedicated her life to helping entrepreneurs overcome obstacles to build more beauty within it.
You can see it in the work that continues on the foundation she built. The curriculum she developed for the Spark accelerator — Fuel’s earlier-stage companion — is largely untouched nearly a decade later. The center, formally known as FastForward U when we worked together, now bears her name: the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship. EcoMap is still standing, carried on by her cofounder Sherrod Davis.
And then there’s the legacy of innovation she never knew she’d leave.
In 2024, Maryland passed two bills in her memory — one of them being the Pava LaPere Legacy of Innovation Act — which provides nine student founders in the Baltimore region with a non-dilutive grant of $50,000 to continue building in the vicinity of the city. The next set of winners will be announced next month at the TEDCO Entrepreneurial Expo.
As the years pass by, more of Baltimore’s founders, like the grad student I mentioned earlier, will build here without having actually met her. To them, she’ll be the name on the center or a grant they can apply for.
But “Pava” shouldn’t be taken as a passive noun. She was more of a verb — seemingly always in motion. And that motion ripples through the Baltimore innovation ecosystem to this day.
Her truest legacy is one of a proclivity toward action in the face of a problem to be solved.
