Starting an Entrepreneurship Club on Your College Campus

A Heads Up: This is my first Medium post

As a freshman on WashU’s campus last spring, I was eager to get more involved with entrepreneurship. I just didn’t quite know how.

I attended startup related events on campus and checked out different entrepreneurial related clubs, but I just couldn’t find something that truly fit my desires. I was already majoring in entrepreneurship and really wanted some out of the classroom experience to complement my studies, enabling me to explore entrepreneurship in a non-academic setting because it is something I am immensely passionate about. I wanted somewhere where I could learn about startups, meet people who worked for/with startups, and be around like-minded individuals on a regular basis.

I decided to start my own entrepreneurship club: the Washington University (WU) Entrepreneur Society. It’s been nearly 9 months since conceptualizing the idea for the Washington University Entrepreneur Society and the experience has been incredible. I’ve learned a ton, met many incredible individuals (both students and professionals), and gained valuable experience starting, growing, and running something (Yes, I treat the club almost like a startup!).

Why I’m writing this?

I decided to write this post to reflect on my experience starting the WU Entrepreneur Society and to help other college students who are interested in starting an entrepreneurship club on their college campuses too. By no means will my experience starting the WU Entrepreneur Society be the same as your experience starting an entrepreneurship club, and by no means is the advice I offer here a comprehensive guide of everything that must be done to successfully start an entrepreneurship club, but I do believe that a lot can be learned from my experience and that the advice offered hereafter can be incredibly helpful.

Before getting into starting a new entrepreneurship club, I’ll discuss a bit about how to get more involved with entrepreneurship on your campus WITHOUT actually starting a club:

• Join an existing entrepreneurial related club at your school
• Take entrepreneurship courses (Maybe even major or minor in this area if you’re interested and your school offers this as a possibility)
• Reach out to professors who have experience working with/advising startups
• Attend startup events on and around campus (Many schools have guest speakers come in to discuss a variety of different topics. Check out some of these events as they can be a great way to learn and meet people)
• Explore the startup community around your school (There are startups everywhere. You don’t need to go to school in SF, NYC, or Boston to be able to get more involved in the startup ecosystem around your school. Get out there and find some cool startups + founders)
• Set up a group with a few friends or classmates to discuss startups, ideas you’ve had, or whatever else you want to talk about. Be creative and think of solutions to different problems that exist
• Subscribe to startup related newsletters and listen to podcasts. Here are a few of my favorites:

StrictlyVC (newsletter)

Accelerated (newsletter)

Pitchbook (newsletter)

CBInsights (newsletter)

a16z (podcast)

The Twenty Minute VC (podcast)

Venture Stories (podcast)

Y-Combinator Podcast (podcast)

The rest of this post acts as advice on how to actually START an entrepreneurship club on your college campus. I’ll discuss a bit about my experience starting the Washington University Entrepreneur Society and offer advice on how you can do WAY, WAY better than I did. Hopefully this advice is helpful and please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any additional questions (spirom@wustl.edu).

Step 1: Check the landscape

The first thing you should do, before starting a new club, is to see what other student organizations and clubs already exist on your college campus. If there is currently a club doing X, Y, and Z, and you want a club that will also do X, Y, and Z, you probably should not start a new club. Rather, I recommend joining the existing club and getting as involved as possible, potentially taking on exec board positions in future semesters. If, however, there is not already a club that matches your criteria (as was the case for me), then you can begin thinking about venturing out and starting a new club.

My experience here: When I decided to start the WU Entrepreneur Society, several entrepreneurial related clubs already existed on my college campus. However, each of these clubs did something niche, on their own, without a larger, overarching understanding of what all the other entrepreneurship clubs on campus were doing (at least from my understanding). I saw a lot of potential to create a more educational based club that could also one day help bridge the several existing clubs on campus into a larger, more structured format

Step 2: Getting it off the ground

Here, I outline my advice for how to get your club off the ground and running. Actually turning your idea into a club, getting members to join, and successfully running the club is a grueling but incredibly rewarding experience. Here is some of my advice for how to best launch your club:

1. Create an agenda for the club: What do you want the club to do? How is it different from other clubs on campus? What are your short-term and long-term goals for the club? How large do you want the club to become in the next semester, year, two years, etc.?
2. Find co-founders: Starting a club (and making it actually good) is hard. It requires a lot of time, hard work, and determination to turn your vision and goals for the club into a reality. I recommend not going through this process alone. Instead, find a few other classmates who are also interested in entrepreneurship, startups, venture capital, design, or business and see if they’d be interested in helping out as co-founders. Discuss with these people the agenda that you created (see above) and ask if they have any other ideas to incorporate when starting the club (I have 3 co-founders!)
3. Sit down with your new team: Once you have configured a group of co-founders for your new club, sit down as a group and discuss your plan. Make sure that everybody knows their role in the club and set up deadlines for when different goals, milestones, and projects should be met. Set hard deadlines early on so that the club starts off with as few obstacles as possible
4. Get advice from outside sources: Reach out to as many individuals as possible for advice and help. There is no right or wrong way to do this, but here is some advice based on my experience: Meet with entrepreneurship professors on campus; Meet with individuals in the startup ecosystem around your campus (Once again, just because your school is not in a big city does not mean that there are not startups near your school. Go on Google, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase to find startups near your campus, then reach out to the founders of these companies and ask for advice on how to grow your new entrepreneurship club); Reach out to alumni (Many alumni love giving back to their schools. I recommend going on LinkedIn, Google, and Crunchbase to find startup founders and venture capitalists who graduated from your school. You can often find these individuals’ email addresses by doing a few Google searches, but if you can’t find it just shoot them a LinkedIn message asking for advice — Cold emailing/messaging is an important skill and there is no better time to get past the initial scare of cold emailing than as a college undergrad. Sending cold emails to alumni asking for help and advice for a new entrepreneurship club is a great way to get past this fear)
5. Shoot for the fences: Now that you’ve gotten a fair share of advice, it’s time to shoot for the fences. This is where your cold emailing skills will be incredibly helpful. I recommend reaching out to practically anyone you think may be helpful. Whether that is the founder of a $10B startup, a top venture capitalist, or a random startup founder you came across on LinkedIn, reach out to them for advice! If they respond, you not only gain great advice, but they can also become a mentor or advisor for the club moving forward

Step 3: Actually starting the club

My co-founders and I started working on our club over the summer. This gave us enough time to create a framework for the club and then get it off the ground and running once the fall semester began. We decided to create an application for new members to apply to the club so that we could see which potential members were the most passionate about joining the WU Entrepreneur Society. While many clubs allow any interested students to join, we believed that having an application and only taking students who were truly passionate about entrepreneurship and joining our club would be best for the club early on.

What route you go here (application or not), is totally up to you and will likely depend on your early goals for the club, how large your school’s student body is, and various other factors playing a role.

For the WU Entrepreneur Society’s first semester (Fall 2018), we received nearly 50 applications via Google Forms. We asked the following questions: Name; Email Address; Graduation Year; Major(s); Why are you interested in joining the Washington University Entrepreneur Society?; Do you have any experience with entrepreneurship, startups, VC, or private equity? If so, please discuss below; Additional Info; Resume attachment*

From here, we interviewed the top applicants and ended up with a founding team of 19 members. One important thing to note here is that we went into this process without a clear goal of how many members we wanted to add to the club. I RECOMMEND DOING THIS TOO. Instead, we wanted to add everyone who we felt would (1) benefit from the club, (2) help the club grow, (3) come to our meetings and events on a regular basis, (4) act as a voice for our club moving forward, and (5) demonstrate continued interest in startups and entrepreneurship moving forward.

The one thing we did want in our initial group was diversity. Diversity is crucial for entrepreneurial success. Being able to discuss topics with individuals with vastly different viewpoints, backgrounds, and mindsets is incredibly valuable, which is why we strived to gain a diverse group of students — whether that be by background, area of study, experience with startups, interests, etc. (I recommend also looking for diversity in your club’s early members)

Step 4: Keeping it going

As the founder of a new club, it is important to make sure your club continues after you graduate. This means that you will likely need to create a formal structure and executive board for the club that will help keep the club intact after you pass it on to other students. In order to do this, I recommend attracting younger students (freshman + sophomores) to join the club early on so that there is a core group of students who are with the club for several years. This can help attract future students to join the club and keep the club running (hopefully) well into the future.

Please let me reiterate: Each situation is different and for this reason there is no one right way to start an entrepreneurship club (or any type of club) on your college campus. However, having gone through the experience and starting the Washington University Entrepreneur Society, I believe that the advice in this post can be helpful for students looking to start a club at their respective schools.

By bringing together college students who share a passion for entrepreneurship and startups, we (students) can help promote innovation and develop the next generation of great startups. Whether your club grows to 500 students or remains something as small as 5–6 members, creating a space for students to discuss entrepreneurial-related topics, learn about startups, bounce ideas off one another, and meet with actual entrepreneurs is a great way to get more involved with entrepreneurship during your college years.

Closing remarks

Starting, growing, and running an entrepreneurship club is hard. I recommend only starting a new club if there is TRULY no other club on your campus that meets your desired criteria.

Starting a club, however difficult it may be, has the potential to be an incredibly rewarding experience. Starting an entrepreneurship club is also great experience if you want to one day start your own company or work for a startup — you get to be around other students who are interested in entrepreneurship, learn from the many incredible people you meet, and gain experience starting and running something.

Here are links to a few really cool entrepreneurship clubs from schools around the country:

• Harvard Ventures: https://www.harvardventures.org/
• Princeton Entrepreneurship Club: https://www.princetoneclub.com/ (Feel free to reach out to Sean Edling at the Princeton E-Club for some awesome advice on how to start an e-club! Email: sedling@princeton.edu)
• Founders Illinois: http://founders.illinois.edu/
• NU Entrepreneurs Club: http://www.northeastern.edu/entrepreneurs/
• Startup Exchange (Georgia Tech): http://www.startup.exchange/
• Entrepreneurship Club at the University of South Carolina: http://www.eclubsc.com/
• Yale Entrepreneurial Society: http://yesatyale.org/

The Washington University Entrepreneur Society

Washington University Entrepreneur Society logo

The WU Entrepreneur Society is an entrepreneurship club on WashU’s campus (founded summer 2018) seeking to improve entrepreneurial spirit on WashU’s campus through workshops educating members about entrepreneurship, guest speaker events with individuals who work in the startup and venture capital communities, and participation in collegiate startup competitions. The WU Entrepreneur Society also offers support to student startups on WashU’s campus by offering advice and access to potential seed funding.

• Founded: Summer 2018
• Current size: 29 members
• Member breakdown:

School: 50% Olin Business School; 29% McKelvey School of Engineering; 17% College of Arts & Sciences; 4% Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Experience working with a startup: Yes: 58%; No: 42%

Coding skills: Yes: 54%; No: 46%

• Sample semester schedule:

Weeks 1–2: Recruiting

Weeks 3–5: Education on startups, venture capital, and entrepreneurship. Our goal here is to make sure all of our members know the basic terminology and ideas of startups and venture capital. For example, making sure everyone knows the answers to the following questions (and many more): What is the lean startup?; What is venture capital?; What does it mean for company X to raise a Series A round?

Weeks 5–11: Guest speaker events

• Throughout the semester:

Small group projects that our members can participate in

Postings in our club GroupMe about startup events in St. Louis and cool internship opportunities for our members

• Past guest speakers:

David Dreyfus (Uber); Craig Nehamen (Fair); John Viviano (WashU & Foundation Medicine); Andrew Glantz (GiftAMeal); Lori Coulter (Summersalt); Adam Hoffman (CheckTheQ); Barak Kaufman (Intello); Andy Cloyd (Cultivation Capital — coming up); Markus Baer (WashU — coming up)

What we create?

A group of entrepreneurial-minded students on WashU’s campus who are interested in learning more about entrepreneurship, meeting other like-minded individuals, and helping to promote entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity on campus and in the surrounding St. Louis area.

“After joining the WU Entrepreneur Society, I have begun to see societal problems through a different lens. I am now thinking with an entrepreneurial mindset and envisioning how a startup could solve these problems. This creativity has also helped me in a number of my classes and in searching for jobs as well” — Luke Leon (WashU BSBA ‘21)

WEBSITE: https://www.wuentrepreneurs.org/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/11803035/admin/

Hopefully this is helpful. Once again, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions (spirom@wustl.edu).

As this is my first post, I would also love some feedback. Feel free to message with with feedback and/or advice.

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