Startup Exchange: A Year in Review
A reflection of all changes, successes, and challenges we’ve had
In April 2016, I was sitting at a table in Starbucks across from a friend.
More specifically, this friend was Chris Altonji, third year Computer Science student at Tech and, at the time, the Co-Director of Startup Exchange, the student entrepreneur community at Georgia Tech. I had joined the organizing team around October 2015, so it had been right around half a year since I had worked with Chris and the rest of the team. It was nearing the end of the semester, so Startup Exchange was winding down with it.
It was at that rickety table in Starbucks on that sunny afternoon in April that Chris looked at me and said, “Well, you and Wesley (friend, co-founder, and partner-in-crime) are going to be the Co-Directors of Startup Exchange next year.”
My response: “Sure. Let’s get to work.”
Little did I know where that simple affirmation would take us.
Startup Exchange, or at least the concept, was created over five years ago by some passionate yet ambitious students at Georgia Tech: Aswin Na, Chintan Parikh, Will King, and others. The idea was this: there were students at Georgia Tech that were interested in starting their own companies and doing something a little different than most other students going into industry and research, and there weren’t that many resources for these different students. What if these like-minded students could get together and help each other to make things happen? These original founders received some affirmation on the idea, and together they managed to find some helpful mentors like Harold Solomon and a tiny space within the library that this new group would be able to call home.
Thus, the first vestiges of the existing student entrepreneur community at Georgia Tech was born.
Since then, Startup Exchange has gone through many different iterations and phases in its messaging and programming. For the longest time, it was tied to a student-run accelerator program (that the founders of Startup Exchange had also started before) called Startup Semester to help students start their companies. Near the beginning, it was a book club of sorts, a place where Aswin and friends would gather a group of bright-eyed students every Friday at 4PM and read/discuss a chapter of The Lean Startup. Now, it’s defined as a community of student entrepreneurs, connected by the organizing team that puts on events and gatherings every Friday at our new home in the Garage.
And, like many student organizations, it has had its ups and downs. When Wesley and I took lead in April 2016, there were many organizational issues that were, honestly, threatening to collapse the entire movement. Money was always, always tight. There was a tendency for some students to come to Startup Exchange and do absolutely nothing, simply using the brand and the community as a way for them to pretend to be entrepreneurs without actually doing the work. Older student entrepreneurs didn’t find that much value in most of the meetings we held. The organizing team was plagued with lack of commitment from many people and wasn’t structured to handle the work it set out to do. And it tried to do many, too many, things.
As the main student entrepreneur organization on campus, Startup Exchange represented a movement that called for students to do something different than everyone else. For the longest time, it was more or less the only force on campus trying to change things. And now it was standing on a precarious cliff edge, close to falling off and damaging all of the progress that had been made in the past years.
With all of that in mind, we set out to change everything.
Everything was on the table when we reorganized SX that summer.
We thought about halting the tradition of our weekly Friday meetings. We thought about separating the organizing team from the community. We thought about restarting the accelerator. We thought about changing the very mission of the organization. Nothing was spared scrutiny, because everything was on the line.
From this almost blank slate, we recreated the organization. We established (or at least tried to) design guidelines for our branding and visual identity. We redefined our mission statement and values. We created a plan for event programming and scheduling. We created a new organizing team structure, made up of four teams: Design, Marketing, Community, and Programming. We worked on creating a way to securing funding to run our operations. We worked to reestablish connections with different organizations across campus at Georgia Tech that could add value to our community (HackGT, TEDxGeorgiaTech, Design Bloc, Alpha Kappa Psi) and reached out to new ones (General Assembly, Sequoia Capital, Dorm Room Fund). We started new initiatives like Founders Collection, which sought to document student startups currently at Georgia Tech.
Once we finished with that, we moved forward into the school year with fresh eyes and a newfound vigor. In order to accomplish our ambitious plans and create a foundation for Startup Exchange to ensure nothing like this would ever have to happen again, we recruited some incredibly bright, insightful, and slightly humorous people to join the organizing team. At the time, there were 17 people in the organizing team, up from the original 5 people that were left over from last year.
Things were certainly tenuous at first. Neither me or Wesley had any real leadership experience, and Chris and Stephen (original team) were getting ready to graduate that year, so they were quickly reducing their workloads within the organization. The entire organization was still squeaking when the new members were recruited. Almost every question that was asked along the lines of “how did we do this before” was met an answer like “we haven’t done it before”. The vision was still rough around the edges, and we still had community issues to deal with.
Despite it all, the team persevered.
Now, a moment of reflection and review.
Successes
We created an organizing team structure built to scale. We successfully raised funding for Startup Exchange from a great partner: Sequoia Capital. We reestablished connections with other student organizations and even companies around Atlanta. We put on mostly good meetings and speaker events almost every Friday. We got a handle on the startup ecosystem of Georgia Tech. We put on Round One, receiving more applications than ever before and helped 4 great student startups connect with investors from around Atlanta. We blasted Startup Exchange across campus and created a memorable brand that thousands of people across Tech and beyond now know about. Most importantly, we brought together a dedicated team that still continue to surprise me with their insight and creativity to this day.
Challenges
There were certainly a lot. Leadership was rickety from the start, and we made some bad decisions that affected our productivity and effectiveness. The vision for each team, especially Community, wasn’t defined well enough from the start. We still ran into logistical issues with planning weekly meetings. We wrestled with our mission of helping student entrepreneurs and underwent quite a few existential crises. One of our most ambitious and most well organized initiatives, 1000 Pitches, unfortunately fell far beneath its goal despite our efforts. The structure of having Co-Directors instead of a single Director made things rather inefficient, especially the decision making process. Most importantly, while we were in the process of reconstructing Startup Exchange and building a fantastic team, we forgot to focus on the thing that makes us who we are: the community.
Looking Forward
This past year was full of growing pains and soul-searching as Startup Exchange tried to find its place in the community and grow into the beacon of entrepreneurship on campus it was meant to be. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve all learned from them. We realized that our focus should be on a core of community of entrepreneurs, students who have taken on the challenge of starting their own companies and are ready to discard the trappings of mundane school life for the adventure of entrepreneurship. Student entrepreneurs are a different breed of person. They all share similar trials and tripulations, and they can benefit from working together. Through bringing this core community together, Startup Exchange will help them grow and ultimately foster student entrepreneurship on campus.
When I first wrote How We Will Change Georgia Tech in the summer of 2016, I couldn’t have foreseen all of the leadership issues, paradigm shifts, and work that would come with building up an organization like Startup Exchange. That being said, I’m glad that we did it. Certainly, there’s still progress to be made, but Georgia Tech has made strides in encouraging entrepreneurship within its student body and providing necessary resources for its students. We’ve put in a lot of work, and we’re glad that organizations like Create-X, ATDC, Tech Square Labs, Sandbox ATL, and VentureLab are on the mission with us to help continue changing Georgia Tech for the better.
Now, we pass the torch. Wesley and I did our part as Co-Directors this year and created a great foundation for future leaders. Now, it’s time for some fresh ideas and new people to take charge. We’re excited to announce that Wesley will be the next President of Startup Exchange for the 2017–2018 school year, followed by our new Vice President, Jonathan. They’ll be joined by most of the great team that we’ve built.
Certainly, there will be challenges. There will be new problems and needs to focus on for the next group of leaders, and they’ll likely won’t expect half of them. But we’re confident that they’ll be able to overcome those obstacles and make Startup Exchange into the bustling community of student entrepreneurs it was always meant to be.
It’s been a hectic year.
But I can’t wait to see how far we’ll go.
-Indra
Atlanta, 2017
