UIUC Entrepreneurship Meetup — Recap

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Illini Blockchain

4 min readDec 2, 2023

This Thursday I had the privilege of hosting an entrepreneurship meetup at the University of Illinois. The turnout was great, after 2 hours’ worth of talks, I was happy to see almost the entire audience stay for another 1.5 hours for the mixer to meet other founders & our speakers.

The meetup, hosted by Illini Blockchain, consisted of an intro to the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at UIUC by Stephanie Feraci.

We then jumped into a fireside chat with Nick Harness, founder of CollegeDAO & current VP of Partnerships at Illini Blockchain. Alongside Nick was Toni & Andrew, who represent the Genesis entrepreneurship community in Chicago. Completing the fireside panel was me, who asked questions and really tried to learn about the Chicago startup ecosystem.

After the fireside chat, some of the presidents of various tech & entrepreneurship clubs on campus gave 1 min pitches to show what they do. I then quickly got the crowd off their feet to do a group stretch (not quite but I tried). And the final talk was with Joe Ratliff from Google for Startups. He focused on how Google’s programs support early-stage and VC-backed startups. I loved all the questions that came about during all of these segments which tells me we did something right!

I have a lot of takeaways from this event, so let’s jump right in.

Genesis Fireside Chat

Leverage all the free resources at the University like free lawyers, marketing, connections
Utilize LinkedIn for cold DMs over email
Know the type of person you are reaching out to. If they are older then maybe email is the best option, you can even get creative and mail them a letter
When your friends are all getting fixed salary corporate jobs the anxiety you feel typically comes from wanting to make a few important people in your life happy. Once you pinpoint who these people are, you can be more confident in sticking to the path of entrepreneurship as a college grad
If you want to research, find a person to learn directly from and have them give the resources they learned from you
Create a network of mentors that are able to cheer you on as you grow in your career
Abuse the student card, and tell everyone you call you are looking to learn. Then listen, bring energy, and you’ll be surprised how many people want to help you as a student.
When cold DMing, mention big names like UIUC or that you’re a student. We all have so much spam and bots in our DM’s, you want to make it clear to the person that you are real.
Find a community of people. Don’t do any of this alone.

Google For Startups Talk

Be ready to let go of jobs, there are many opportunities waiting for you
Go outside your comfort zone. In Joe’s case, it was being the single person to ask a question at a speaker event. This act eventually led to a job offer.

General Event Takeaways

UIUC has a very strong and growing entrepreneurship community, and tons of resources to support it. In just this event we had representatives from Illini Blockchain, TEC, Illini Builders, Zero2One, iVenture Accelerator, and Women in Entrepreneurship. And that’s not even the half of what’s on campus!
Events like this on campus can go over 2 hours, as long as there is variation in what is being presented. I was worried that a 4-hour event would bore people, and thus cause them to leave early. What worked really well was that every minute was useful, we had a talk with the Chicago entrepreneurship community giving advice to founders. After we pivoted to more about how our UIUC founders can be funded through Google Startups, finally we opened the doors for intermingling. So, because there was always something different, we were able to keep the attention of the crowd.