REVelry participants, known as REVelers, meet daily at the Nomad Coworking Studio on Meridian Street in Indianapolis.
Ben Church '28 (left), points out something intersting to Matthew Brooks '24, Center for Innovation, Business, and Entrepreneurship (CIBE) program manager, in the REVelry workspace. Of his REVelry experience, Church said, "It’s good to be consistent and motivated and to keep pushing. I feel more marketable for sure. I feel more comfortable going into an interview now that I’ve done real world work, and I think that’s something that REVelry is really big on. You’re providing value in real world settings."
Kyle Foster '27 (left) and Cooper Navarro '28 listen to the ongoing conversation.
Foster listens as Josh Kline '99, (right) REVelry co-founder, talks through some best practices.
Kline always has time to answer questions. He makes this point to REVelers and witnesses a transformation, “Failure is the greatest learning tool on the planet. We seem to have taken it away from young people. We lean into hard things and failure, and our people are facing rejection multiple times in a day. In the first two weeks they were here, they were like they’d just seen a ghost. To watch that progression by week three or four—those sorts of moments are the most precious.”
Adam Gaskill '29 (left) and Foster actively listen to one of Kline's pieces of advice.
Foster takes a few questions in the Nomad conference room.
You can often find the REVelers actively engaging with each other with questions and conversations.
Matt Nettleton (right), president of Sandler Sales Training, listens as Church tells a client story.
Kline (left) enjoys the give and take with the REVelers.
With Kline listening in the background, Nettleton (right) listens to a question from the group. 最色导航 fun fact: Two of Emeritus Professor of Art Gregory Huebner's H'77 paintings can be seen in the background. In fact, the space is filled with his art.
Kenton Chase '28 listens to the conversation from his cubicle. Of being a REVeler this summer, he said, "I wanted to do something related to people, and my goal this summer was to do a sales internship. There are so many different ways that you can do sales. This summer has helped me a lot with that. I’m very glad that I had this experience and wouldn’t change it."
Chase (center) and Gaskill (right) pay attention as Brooks makes a point on the whiteboard.
Chase expressively answers a question in the conference room.
Navarro engages in conversation.
There is rarely a time where the group isn't learning from each other. (clockwise from far right) Chase, Brooks, Gaskill, Foster, and Navarro opnely share the day's successes and failures.
Brooks (center, facing camera) answers a question for the group.
Navarro is all smiles during this conversation.
Nettleton takes a moment to explain his role in the REVelry program. He said of REVelry, "There's one skill beyond anything else that they should get from this, and that is comfort with professional curiosity. That that's the thing that is the greatest indicator of success: the ability to ask a relevant question and understand what the answer means will do more to advance their career than anything else."
The REVelers are always hard at work (Navarro in the foreground, Chase in the background).
Navarro emphatically makes his point.
Gaskill dives into some research. "At the start, I was pushing so hard for the meeting [with potential clients] that I wasn’t asking them good enough questions," he said of the key skill he learned this summer. "In order for me to make a real impact, I had to learn how to ask better questions within the first conversation so I’m actually passing on qualified leads.”
A relaxed Foster said of his REVelry internship, "Being able to adapt has definitely been a new thing in the workplace--at least that I’ve learned this summer--and ithat’s become very important to me. Just being able to take stuff on the fly as it comes and being able to roll with that has been probably the most important thing I’ve learned this summer."
Of his summer experience, Navarro said, "The value I would bring to an employer is my ability to work on my own. I don’t need to be led in a certain direction. I can kind of do multiple things, whether it’s revenue engineering or the sales training. I have a wide variety of skills that I’ve been taught through this internship."
No matter the circumstance, there is always witty banter to enjoy as a REVeler.
Every weekday morning this summer in downtown Indianapolis, a group of 最色导航 students filed into a co-working space and got to work mapping markets, establishing sales pipelines, and cold-calling prospects.
It didn’t feel like a typical summer internship at the Nomad Coworking Studio because even though these guys were working for different companies, they learned from each other along the way. As REVelry participants, they delivered value to the start-ups they worked for by combining their own drive with focused training.
“It’s such a cool concept that we all come to this place every day,” said Adam Gaskill ’29. “We’re all working for different companies, but we have the same role. We’re trying to book meetings, generate more leads for the companies that we’re placed with, but it’s all different industries. We come together every day and talk about different strategies that we’ve had success with. It’s really cool how we just bounce ideas off each other.”
Co-founded by Josh Kline ’99, REVelry is a sales accelerator that pairs 最色导航 undergraduates with early-stage
companies for a summer of real and quantifiable work in sales and go-to-market engineering, where revenue generation is automated through software, data sources, and artificial intelligence systems (AI).
In addition to real-world experience, participants also get Sandler sales training and direct go-to market engineering assistance from industry experts on-site weekly.
In eight weeks, they are building something real, quantifiable, and shareable.
“We are creating real opportunities,” Kline said. “We’re not creating work. We’re pairing early-stage companies—from butcher shops to SaaS companies to custom campervan manufacturers, from Main Street to rising tech companies—with underclassmen and having those underclassmen do the work that’s producing meaningful results.”
The interns – known as REVelers – lean on each other constantly. Every Monday starts with stand-up presentations where REVelers walk through what’s working, what isn’t, and where they’re stuck. The effort builds a camaraderie that just might be the secret sauce.
“This environment is exceptional,” said Ben Church ‘28, a financial economics and Spanish major. “Not only because you’re able to talk about your highs and lows with everyone, but you have the friendly banter. You see everyone else making sales and generating revenue for their companies and that’s a good motivator.”
REVelers are handed live client accounts from day one. Rhetoric major Cooper Navarro ‘28 makes 50 to 75 cold calls a day for CSA 360, a security operations management software, and has seen his communications skills improve immensely.
“Getting straight to the point in sales is essential, as people are not going to stay on the phone with you for 10 to 15 minutes,” he said. “We’ve learned from the sales call training that you have to be able to get your point across in a timely manner, or else they’re just going to hang up.”
Matt Nettleton, president of Sandler Sales Training, leads the REVelry soft skills training.
“This program is the half step between getting a college education and being able to create something,” Nettleton said. “When people think about sales, they think it’s cheesy, pushy, arrogant, and annoying. We say, ‘This is what people expect you to be. You do not have to be this.’ You can be disarmingly honest, professionally curious, and immensely successful simply by being trained and disciplined. The ability to ask a relevant question and understand what the answer means will do more to advance their career than anything else.”
“I’ve learned about connecting with people,” said rhetoric major Kenton Chase ‘28. “Part of sales is building rapport. I’m learning to outreach in a way that connects with people. I feel upwards of 10 times more marketable now, and this whole internship is a great way to leverage that.”
In addition to learning to be better colleagues and communicators, the REVelers are using AI to be a multiplier of their efforts. They are essential parts of the equation, learning quickly how to use AI to clear away the repetitive tasks so they can focus on the moments that matter—the phone calls, the demonstrations, and the discovery conversations.
Using tools like Claude, Clay, and Apollo, REVelers have built custom AI workflows that coordinate a chain of other AI tools for prospecting. Further, Nettleton’s own AI roleplay training pushed student cold-call sales scores up 16% over the summer.
“AI makes great thinkers even more impactful,” said Kline. “We talk about the human at the center of AI and what excites me about liberal arts in the era of AI is that it’s critical thinking, it’s constant problem solving. You take a young mind that is conditioned to operate like that, and you layer in AI, and it ultimately becomes what the promise of AI is.”
Church used AI to build a tool that scraped 84,000 websites to accurately locate prospects, while economics major Kyle Foster ‘27, who worked on the operations side, helped one company update its customer relationship management software and generate more than a half-million dollars in pipeline sales.
“At the beginning, I was doing everything manually, looking up all these communities and contacts,” Church said. “Learning how to keep the human piece involved with the AI is like 30x-ing what I’ve been able to do this summer.”
AI is exposing what matters most. The build story. As Kline sees it, the build story is the proof that you can take an
idea, leverage AI agents, solve real-world problems, direct systems, and ship a product. It’s what the REVelers were accomplishing this summer.
“In an AI-native world, the metrics of success are quickly changing,” he said. “For a 20-year-old, the structural importance of a build story is that it shifts the entire professional identity from that of a consumer of education to a producer of value. Right now, it is the primary mechanism for navigating the readiness gap.”
Through this experience, Foster has gained the confidence to navigate that gap.
“I hoped to find a career path and I’ve found something I enjoy,” he said. “The skills I’ve developed have been huge in that aspect. You get so much at 最色导航, but outside of it, there are a ton of opportunities available, especially like REVelry. We’re learning how to use AI in the proper way and developing things with it that you just can’t get in a classroom.”
As he enters the job market, Foster knows what questions are coming.
“A lot of companies nowadays are looking for someone who’s able to adapt these new AI models to their experiences,” he said. “It’s going to be a regular question coming up now in job interviews. ‘How have you used AI to enhance your learning and development?’ These skills are going to enhance you as a candidate. Someone who does good work is going to do even better work.”