Build It, Hand It Over: How the Cone Center Got Its Own Website
BDAIC built and launched belmontetp.com for Belmont's Center for Entrepreneurship, stood up their AWS hosting, and set up an AI workplace for their team — then handed the whole thing over. No standing dependency.
The Thomas F. Cone Sr. Center for Entrepreneurship is one of Belmont’s genuinely outsized programs. Ranked #1 in Tennessee and #26 worldwide, it has put more than 900 alumni businesses into 135 cities across 8 countries. Its tagline is a promise it keeps: where Belmont students learn to build things that matter.
What it did not have was a website it controlled.
The engagement
The Cone Center — ETP, internally — came to BDAIC needing three things that usually get bundled into one long, expensive relationship: a site, somewhere to run it, and enough capability in-house that they wouldn’t need to come back for every edit.
We took all three, and treated the third as the actual deliverable.
The site. belmontetp.com is live. It carries the programs that make the Center what it is — the Entrepreneur Pipeline, Founders Club, the pitch competitions, the Entrepreneurs in Residence, and the Learning Lab storefronts (House Of and Bruin Bodega) that students actually run.
The infrastructure. We stood up their AWS hosting for the site and their other services, so the Center has a real cloud footprint rather than a page trapped inside somebody else’s CMS.
The AI workplace. Their two-person team is now set up with Claude Code and the supporting AI infrastructure to work directly on their own site — not “AI-assisted someday,” but configured, on their machines, in use.
Why the handoff is the point
Here is the part we care about most: BDAIC does not own belmontetp.com.
The Center edits it, updates it, and redesigns it themselves. There is no ticket queue pointed at us, no dependency on a student worker’s semester, no BDAIC bottleneck between the Center and its own front door. If they want to change the homepage the week before a pitch competition, they change the homepage.
A lab our size cannot support twenty services with twenty permanent owners. Build it, hand it over, get out of the way.
That model matters beyond this one engagement. The failure mode for an internal service group is accumulating permanent obligations — every project you ship becomes a project you maintain forever, until you have no capacity left to ship anything new. Handing over real ownership, with the tooling to exercise it, is how the work stays finished.
What this says about BDAIC
We usually describe ourselves through data pipelines and analysis — the clinical work, the civic datasets, the mapping. This engagement is a different shape of the same mission: BDAIC makes other parts of Belmont more capable.
The Center for Entrepreneurship teaches students to build things and own them. It seemed like the wrong partner to make dependent on us.
Interested in working with BDAIC — as a Belmont unit or an outside organization? Reach us at hello@bdaic.ai.