Jumpstarting Entrepreneurship at a Non-Target School
Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Penn, Berkley, Columbia and Cornell have all made their name in the VC game. What can you do to help get your school’s ecosystem off the ground?
By Shri Kolanukuduru
Introduction
Having been raised in the Silicon Valley, I’m no stranger to startup culture. Startup culture is a product of the consistent success enjoyed by entrepreneurs out of Stanford, Harvard, and other top-notch schools. When I chose to attend UNC over MIT and got to campus, I found that I miss the hustle-heavy and admittedly competitive atmosphere prevalent on the campuses of our Ivy League Counterparts.
Now, as a second-year Carolina Scholar at UNC, I’m looking for the “why?”. What is it that truly contributes to the success of student founders at other schools, and what can I—and any self-starter at a non-target school—do to get the ball rolling on entrepreneurship?
In this piece I’ll attempt to detail:
- The Question At Hand
- My Thesis
- What I’m Doing @ UNC
- Things YOU Can Do/Applicable Lessons I’ve Learned (so far!)
The bulk of the information lies in the first, second and fourth bullet points, but if you would like to read about the foundation for the lessons I’ve learned, please do refer to what I’m doing at UNC!
The Question At Hand
When searching for an explanation for the discrepancy between the entrepreneurial success at Ivy League schools and many state schools, an easy conclusion that one might arrive at is the intellect of the average student. After all, it is fair to say that a student body more densely populated with the country’s smartest students will more likely produce successful products.
Interestingly, many of the top students at state schools like UNC, UVA, and UMich and more, might have oftentimes selected their school over an Ivy League competitor due to affordability or proximity to family. So why is it that student bodies that are home to incredibly sharp students fail to produce entrepreneurs at the same rate?
My Thesis and Observations
There is no single answer to the above question. In fact, there are several answers I’ll elaborate on.
In my experience, however, the largest factor contributing to the lack of any significant entrepreneurial success at state schools is the lack of the student body’s willingness to experiment with a career as a first-time founder or a career in tech. The reason for this—which I’ve since confirmed by speaking to several students—is quite simple. It involves name brand and “recruitability.” Allow me to explain.
Factor 1: Name Brand
While high-ROI state schools like the ones I mentioned above have all been steadily climbing the rating ladder in terms of prestige, they still fall short in terms of how the average person perceives degrees they confer — i.e. the average person might value a Harvard degree higher than one from UNC. Due to this perception, it will be a while before students at state schools will be afforded the same, most exclusive recruiting opportunities that their Ivy League counterparts have. This leads the average non-target student to pursue the “beaten path,” which, in the case of a school like UNC, happens to be the trifecta of investment banking, consulting, and software. In order to remedy this problem, we need to find a way to galvanize the student body to pursue non-traditional paths into entrepreneurship or tech. Remember this, we’ll come back to it.
In addition to this, student founders at non-targets are ill-afforded the same attention from VC funds and investors that students at target schools are offered. The reason for this is primarily due to proximity to industry.
Factor 2: Proximity to Industry
Additionally, as students, we will likely pursue riskier opportunities if they are familiar to us. In this case, many students would be more comfortable founding or operating a startup if they have had some previous experience working in that environment. This is another area where many non-target schools are disadvantaged—this time—geographically. Paired with the lack of a strong mentoring infrastructure, it’s no wonder that the entrepreneurial potential at non-targets is suffocated to some extent. Let me illustrate this with some Google Maps screenshots (fancy, I know).
This is Sequoia Capital (as we all know), who, in 2020, set a Silicon Valley record with a $8bn fund. An extreme example of geographic proximity, Stanford, Sequoia, and FAANG giant Facebook are all within a 3.5 mile radius of one another.
Here’s Greycroft, who in 2020, closed over $678M across two new funds; $2B in total capital raised. Another example of geographic proximity, Greycroft and Dataminr—a bleeding-edge tech company that recently raised $475MM to reach a $4.1B dollar valuation—are just 7.3 miles away from Columbia’s campus.
Geography lessons aside, this is a significant benefit that the prospective student-founders at schools like Stanford and Columbia are lucky enough to enjoy. Industry experts in not only VC, but also hugely successful founders—many of whom are actually alumni of the schools mentioned—are always on hand to give presentations, teach classes and attend fireside chats with inquisitive students. As I mentioned in the introduction to this section, students are more likely to pursue opportunities that are familiar to them, and what could be more familiar than successful alumni coming back to lead by example?
What I’m Doing At UNC
The “problems” that I’ve outlined above are ones that we face at UNC as well. Many of our successful alumni are situated in consulting and investment banking, the closest “technology hub” is the Research Triangle Park, which is growing rapidly but is far from being NYC or San Francisco, and the school—particularly the Kenan-Flagler Business School—has only recently ramped up entrepreneurial efforts. This means that there is significant scope for growth in our entrepreneurship ecosystem—something that I’ve been trying to capitalize on.
Addressing “Name Brand”
In the above section (under Factor 1), I outlined how students at schools like UNC are sometimes hesitant to pursue non-traditional career paths for fear of not having the “safety net” that their Ivy League counterparts are afforded by their degrees. There is no way that I could independently raise the recruiting stock of the school, so the solution must be found elsewhere. In more narrow terms, the solution to this problem is to find a way to galvanize student-founders to see their entrepreneurial ideas through to fruition.
Motivating college students is a tall ask, and definitely not one I could tackle alone. Early last year, I had the good fortune of meeting and working with some of UNC’s sharpest entrepreneurial students—Nathan Ho, Sanjeev Musuvathy, and more—on launching UNC’s first non-dilutive, student run VC fund. Student-founders need to be continually encouraged to keep building and scaling their products, and we hope to do that through Lux Libertas Ventures (more on this in my next few pieces).
Democratizing Opportunity
As I touched on earlier, student-founders at non-targets don’t receive the same attention from VC funds and investors. This is a systematic problem and is rooted in the lack of development of non-target schools’ entrepreneurial ecosystems. That being said, when I got to UNC, I began looking for a solution to this problem. Enter, Open Scout. Since Fall 2020, I’ve been working to help build and integrate Open Scout on UNC’s campus.
The startup fundraising process is holding us back. We don’t think you should have to know a guy who knows a guy to meet the right investors and we’re building systems to make that possible. We believe that if we can make fundraising more accessible and straightforward we can speed up the mechanism by which innovation happens and get the future built faster.
Open Scout is on a mission is to displace the need for warm introductions within the early-stage financing process. With that mission in mind we’ve set out to take tangible steps forward. More specifically, we have launched a non-exclusive scout program on campuses across the country (and on a few campuses internationally) that reports back to a growing network of investors. At the time of writing, this scout program is active on some 50 campuses and the investor network has grown to reach over 500 investors ranging from professional investors at firms like General Catalyst, First Round, and Sequoia to active individual Angel investors within groups like AirAngels, Havard Business School Angels, and New York City Angels.
Again, more on OS later. Until then, you can learn more about it from Adam Hardej, the founder of the program. Here’s a link to a longer piece on OS.
Leading By Example
I would like to preface this section by saying that I am by no means an expert on VC or networking, nor have we at UNC completely built out our entrepreneurial pipelines and ecosystem. This piece is simply a reflection and hopefully I can add some value to the journeys of the self-starters at non-targets reading this. That being said, I cannot emphasize enough the effect that leading by example has.
As I said earlier, UNC is fortunate to have a large number of highly successful alumni, but only a few of them are in the entrepreneurial space. Thus, the onus falls on the drivers of entrepreneurial initiatives on campus to practice what we preach in terms of networking and recruiting. Leading by example is (obviously) about showing people how it’s done. Once you’ve done that, it is equally as important to pass the opportunity down to them to learn by doing. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have peers like Nathan and Sanjeev push forward in recruiting into YC-backed startups and then passing the opportunity down to me. It was instrumental in helping me build a skillset I’ve now parleyed into VC roles of my own.
Since the late spring, I’ve been working at Cofounders Capital, an active North Carolina based tech VC. Working in VC and being able to meet portfolio C-suites has helped me learn what it takes to make a school desirable from a recruiting standpoint, and what it takes to be a valuable asset to an organization in their earliest stages of development. These are all lessons that, paired with my role at Open Scout, I plan to leverage as a foundation to pass information to students and founders alike at UNC.
Lessons Learned/My Early Advice To Students Like Myself (so far!)
The following is a list of takeaways I’ve arrived at after my first year building here at UNC. Many of these skills are transferable, and might be concepts you’re already familiar with. In that case, use this section as a confirmation of the same!
Your Network Is Your Net Worth
My mom’s favorite professional proverb holds true outside the context of jumpstarting entrepreneurship as well. When you’re a founder or entrepreneurship enthusiast at a non-target, you’re fighting an uphill battle against the distance from industry, lack of exclusive opportunities and lack of startup-focused infrastructure. The best way to combat this? Network, network, network. Seriously, network.
There are other students at your school who are equally as invested as you are in seeing entrepreneurship flourish on your campus. Find your Nathan Ho and your Sanjeev Musuvathy and pick their brain, knowledge is everything when you’re solving challenging problems. Even before I got to UNC, conversations with incredibly smart industry leaders, like Kevin Zhang—who I owe an eternal debt for the knowledge he’s shared—were an incredibly helpful tool in identifying issues within the ecosystem and solutions to those same problems.
Get Involved
With everything. The best—and honestly only reliable—way to make a difference is through numbers. Plug yourself into everything entrepreneurial on campus. Drive every initiative you can. It’s important that students on campus see you doing what you’re promoting (remember leading by example?). Host recruiting events, leverage your network and build what you think your campus is missing.
When opportunities on campus start getting stale, inject new blood into them. Open Scout is always looking for new Venture Scouts. Recently, we partnered with Amazon Web Services to offer AWS credits to student-founders building cool things (galvanizing students through capital!)
Be Brave
It’s admittedly very scary to be amongst the first to do something, especially when you’re leading the charge. Failing in front of a large group of people is not easy, but I’ve come to accept that it’s part of the journey. After all, a part of my thesis was that non-target students don’t have many people to show them how it’s done. Stepping out of your comfort zone is hard, but a great chance to reflect and do something enjoyable (much like I’m doing with this Medium piece).
Remain Open-Minded and Optimistic
As I mentioned earlier, jumpstarting entrepreneurship at a non-target school is an uphill battle. I’ve found that being open-minded when it comes to ideas about events, products or even people you talk to is a surefire way to have more instructive moments as you progress. Remaining optimistic is also important. As the saying goes “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Stay the course.
These are my reflections from the last year, and I will surely amend them as time goes on and I accrue more expereience. If you, the reader, are more experienced in these regards, have something fun you’d like to talk about, or have critical feedback, please send it my way.
Thanks for reading,
Shri