What Happened After 2 months of Establishing a Non-Profit Startup Community
Late this year, we established a startup community called USTartup. USTartup is derived from UST — University of Santo Tomas — where our goal is to empower the students of University of Santo Tomas to chase their passion and dreams through running a startup.
“In all places why UST?”, you ask. Its simply because its where I came from. “He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.” as the Philippines’ national hero Jose Rizal mentioned. For me the quote is a calling why I feel the need to give back from where I came from. We were called upon to be the saviors of the next generation. No obligations, just passion.
Pain Point — Start of a New Beginning
Ever since I was a junior student, I got huge interests over startups and seeing a lot of its stories got me inspired to start my own. As a tech guy, I easily get inclined over the news about startups and most of what they’re made of are running on tech. However startups weren’t really a thing on our school. On every 50 people, only 1 person can define what a startup is. Every time I pitch my crazy ideas to my friends, they’d normally tease me for being a dreamer. They say I was too ambitious with all these ideas that I might as well quit and move on. Well, it eventually made me feel discouraged due to more pressure adding up and left the motivation hanging.
There was a huge lack of community support for startup enthusiasts that there’s no group of people you could talk to inside the campus to share your dreams and global ambition. Even with that kind of culture, I still tried yet discontinued because I didn’t felt prepared. Having that said, I worked for some couple of years in the industry to rev up my skills — some of which at a big company and at several startups — before I became a startup co-founder myself. It took me a few years before I pursued my dream.
In the academe, we are taught to become employees, not entrepreneurs. Its that culture that disrupts us from sparking innovative ideas and create possibilities that would lead our direction. In the end, we let go of our game-changing plans and just go to a typical route. To tell you guys, I’m not a straight-A student nor someone who gets their names listed on the Dean’s list however I have a vision, a vision to change the world. I’m probably one of you guys who just flunked exams and devoted more time to the bigger picture. Your vision is what makes you stand out than your paper-made grades.
The truth is we are trained to get high grades instead of experiencing the importance of real learning however, the ones that become successful are really the ones who made mistakes (and failed a lot). More so, one of these people could actually be just sitting around the corner of your classroom watching anime, a person you just bullied on being a geek, or a person that failed in life. So these were some of the pain points back then that we want to alleviate and we wanted to tap into these people who really have the potential to change the world.
The Birth of USTartup
The idea started when me and JM (Juan Miguel Alvarez) met at a tech event. I was surprised that he was also a startup co-founder coming from the same alma matter and likewise a long lost batch mate. How come with my 4-years of stay we never met each other (pretty much a validation how the startup scene was lying low back then)? So we exchanged our stories and the highlight was our pain points back in college. Questions like “Why can’t we find startup founders from our school?”, “Why can’t we open doors to creativity?”, “Why is everyone afraid to take the risk and instead go for a corporate route?” (and the list goes on). Having that said, we’ve thought of creating a startup community in UST. A community not just for startups but a community where your ideas are treated with value no matter how crazy it can get!
We then gathered some alumni friends who also entered the startup route to help us out on building the community. Our first objective was to gather more alumni startup founders which would serve as a collaborator so that the group would gain more credibility and more pool of mentors to be provided for students. Also we wanted this community to be run by alumni’s because other than credibility, we wouldn’t need to undergo school politics. It would serve more of a non-profit umbrella org so we can move freely on our own pace.
After a few weeks of brainstorming and developing our action plan, we finally launched the community September 10, 2016. Results were great and we didn’t expect we’d get a lot of support from the alumni. We then figured even some alumni’s and students shared some of our same pain points and its good to know that they acknowledged us for finally starting out a community like this. It feels heart-warming and at the same time its good to know we’re giving value to the community. Its a start of something new and its finally the time for UST to make some noise in the startup scene.
Building the Momentum — Pizza Night
From our launch, we still held weekly meetups along with our new collaborators. Now that things were getting better, we then thought of an open-event to all Thomasians to start hitting the ground running. We’ve thought of having an informal pizza night to share our stories and to spread the word about the USTartup community.
We’ve met a lot of friends and further expanded our networks to more groups of students. It was fortunate that they were interested with the idea that they decided to collaborate with us for our future events. The story goes on with more planning and surprises prepared for students.
First Event — You Start Up!
This was our biggest-held event. Part of our planning was making our first grand event that provides a series of talks to the students about inspirations of running a startup and pretty much our big move to let the university know that there’s a group that welcomes crazy ideas turned to startups.
We tried to prepare ahead of time and made sure students would want to go for the event. We tried tapping into different colleges, pitched to student orgs and high-ranking school officials. Surprisingly we didn’t expect to get so much support and what they’re offering us was way beyond charts. We had a dean to require 8 sections to attend, got a lot of funding from the Alumni Relations, high-rank officials got happy about the initiative that they tried inviting international delegates, people cheering behind our backs and established a lot of partnerships from student organizations for partnerships, promotions and features (we got more than 10 afaik).
Overall we had more than 600 participants ranging from students, faculty and alumni’s. The event was streamed live and had some mixer activities along the way. Food was sponsored by one of our USTartup collaborators who happens to be a founder of a food startup — Healthy Belly owned by Monica A. — (The pasta was awesome! I‘ll insert the picture if I can find a copy lol) and had a mentoring session with all of the participants to share their ideas and have the mentors guide them with their plans. That was the wrap-up part of the event to have students left hanging with their ideas.
At the end of the day the results were tremendous. We got more connections, the community is spreading like wildfire in the campus, students had their ideas validated by mentors, gave a clearer picture about startups and more importantly the startup hype has emerged in the campus. I was able to talk to several students and around 20 of them got interested to start their own startup. I’m pretty sure there’s more on the other groups. I had a glimpse of their ideas as part of the mentoring session but I won’t disclose them as you guys might steal the idea lol.
I have to say their ideas were amazing! You see that, the event made us realize there are so many untapped students having awesome ideas (points back to the pain point part). They just need a community like us to make them feel they’re welcome and to provide guidance along the way.
Lastly I have to give credit to Ms. Cherry. She was the reason behind the successful event for giving us a huge amount of support and the authority to push through with all our work despite we’re alumni’s not having anymore powers to spearhead in-house school events. Credits also to UST-TAG (shoutout to AL and the team!) and to all the USTartup collaborators for a successful run of the community!
So there you have it folks. 2 months of establishing a community lead us to places and opened doors to student creativity. Its amazing that it started with a chat, down to meetups, down to events and now helping students create their startups. A lot of things happened and students get more excited whenever they see our community making a move. This is just the beginning and its pretty exciting on what lies ahead. Cheers!
Get connected with our community!
Website: http://uststartup.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/USTartupCommunity/
