The Origins of The Takeoff
Hi — I’m Michael. I’m a junior at WashU and the Founder of The Takeoff, alongside my incredible co-founders Roshan and Lukas.
The Takeoff is a new, student-run publication focused on inspiring the next generation of startup and technology leaders. We interview leading founders, operators, and investors, asking questions designed to help college students + recent grads who are interested in careers in startups, tech, venture capital, etc. We then release these interviews via our Substack publication so that all of our subscribers (and the public) can learn from our guests.
The Takeoff wants to become the go-to resource for students looking to learn more about startup-related careers and for founders, operators, and investors looking to give back and inspire the next generation.
Now that you have a better understanding of what The Takeoff is and what our mission is, I figured it would make sense to share a bit about the origins of The Takeoff
How It All Began
When I think about the journey of actually starting The Takeoff, I think it really originated over the summer between my freshman year and sophomore year at WashU.
At the time, I found myself reaching out via cold email and LinkedIn Messaging to tons of WashU alumni in the startup world — wanting to learn more about their career paths and gain advice. I probably sent between 200-300 cold emails over the course of a few months.
I think I actually have a spreadsheet with everyone who I reached out to and whether or not they got back to me. The response rate varied; it honestly wasn’t great, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that at that point, I wasn’t too great at sending cold emails. I would send a long, three or four-paragraph email, expecting the incredibly busy people I was reaching out to to read it and get back to me. As I know now, that’s a horrible approach.
While the response rate was not great, the few people who luckily did respond taught me so much in a quick 15 or 20-minute phone call. I learned a ton but quickly realized that the information and advice these people were sharing with me was stuck to me. I really wanted to give access to these individuals’ stories and advice to way more people. This desire prompted me to start an entrepreneurship club on my college campus that fall, the WashU Entrepreneur Society.
WashU Entrepreneur Society
The club was (and still is) focused on bringing in guest speakers, mainly people who graduated from WashU and / or work in the St. Louis area, but also individuals who we have mutual connections with, such as Ryan Choi over at Y Combinator. Starting and running the WashU Entrepreneur Society was an amazing experience and allowed a lot of WashU students to learn from our awesome our guest speakers, whether in-person or over Zoom.
The WashU Entrepreneur Society also allowed me to really start building out my network among successful WashU alumni, individuals in the St. Louis area, and many others in the startup and venture capital communities.
Growing the WashU Entrepreneur Society to where it is today was an amazing journey, and I am excited to see the club help WashU students for many years to come. However, there are a few aspects of the club that I wish could be improved — things that I think are intrinsic to entrepreneurship clubs at any school.
- When students have tests and other commitments, they can’t show up to club meetings. In my tenure as President of the Entrepreneur Society, we would have meetings and guest speaker events with 50 club members in attendance, but then the next week, we might only have 5 or 6 because it was midterm week. When this happens, the advice and insights that our guest speakers give, unfortunately, can’t really have a large reach and impact. I have spoken with a bunch of students involved with entrepreneurship clubs at other schools and they all face similar issues
- By focusing solely on WashU, the Entrepreneur Society limits its potential reach and impact. The club is able to help students at WashU, which is great, and share the stories of WashU alumni, which is also great, but it is difficult for the club to have an impact on students at other schools. Now, that is totally fine because that is not the mission of the WashU Entrepreneur Society, or other university-specific entrepreneurship clubs, but there is potential for a centralized player to have a larger impact
I actually wrote a blog on my experience starting the WashU Entrepreneur Society. If you are thinking about starting a similar club at your school or want to learn more about the experience / journey, check it out, here: https://blog.usejournal.com/starting-an-entrepreneurship-club-on-your-college-campus-f3ccaf7846e7
ExecU Weekly
After seeing some of the limits of running an entrepreneurship club tied to a single school, I launched a newsletter on my own late last fall, called ExecU Weekly. I initially kept ExecU Weekly tied to the WashU community, with plans to later expand to other schools, but I soon realized that I needed to rethink my growth / expansion plans.
I had a lot of fun with ExecU Weekly, but I knew that to really blow up my idea to create a centralized platform / resource that could have a maximum potential impact on as many students, recent grads, and young professionals as possible, I needed to expand the team and rebrand.
The Takeoff
I decided to get a few buddies and classmates of mine at WashU involved. We decided to focus solely on startups and venture capital (whereas ExecU Weekly did not really have a focus) and rebrand. In a nutshell, that’s kind of how we got to where we are today.
We took it slowly in the fall, just because of a few underlying circumstances and really wanting to figure out how to get the best interview guests and how to go about growing The Takeoff. We also experienced, first hand, how difficult it is to manage academics, athletics, social life, and running something on the side. Academics have always come first for me, so it was often difficult for me to really focus on The Takeoff in the midst of classes and exams.
Over the past few weeks, however, having a little bit more free time and, obviously, being at home, Roshan, Lukas, and I have been able to really focus on The Takeoff. We released eight interviews via The Takeoff’s Substack in April, and we have a bunch more set to be released in the next month or so.
Some of our stats from April: https://twitter.com/mspiro3/status/1255901004547137547?s=20
We are also releasing the first Edition of What We’ve Been Following tomorrow— a new, bi-weekly newsletter highlighting some of the newsletters, articles, podcasts, etc. that we (The Takeoff) have found interesting over the past two weeks. We are currently testing out What We’ve Been Following, but we hope it can become a staple of The Takeoff moving forward.
It’s been an awesome experience interviewing incredible founders, operators, and investors for The Takeoff, allowing them to share a bit about their backgrounds and also offer advice and insights for our subscribers and for anyone else who wants to read The Takeoff. Each interview we record and release gets sent to our subscribers’ email inboxes. The interviews can also be accessed (by the public) via our Substack page and Medium Publication.
I learn so much from our interview guests, and I hope that our followers do too. For instance, I recently interviewed Ashley Brasier (Partner at Lightspeed). In the interview, Ashley shared her story of going from Duke undergrad, where she didn’t study business and didn’t study Econ, to working at Bain to then going over to Thumbtack, transitioning over to Stanford GSB, and then eventually becoming a Partner at Lightspeed. In addition to sharing her story, Ashley also offered advice on how students can go about their ways of breaking into venture capital and how students can actually add value to Partners and other Investors at venture firms (check out Ashley’s interview, here).
After we released Ashley’s interview, a lot of our subscribers reached out to me saying how impressed they were with all of her incredible advice and insights.
Another interview we just released, with Domm Holland (Co-founder & CEO at Fast), had a similar effect. Fast raised a $20 million Series A a week or two before I spoke with Domm. The company is growing rapidly, and the market they are after is so massive and so important. To have someone like Domm offer advice and insights to students through The Takeoff is amazing, and I really enjoyed having subscribers reach out to me after reading Domm’s interview to let me know how helpful some of his advice was.
When subscribers reach out to me to let me know how helpful a certain interview or piece of advice was, I feel that The Takeoff is slowly achieving its mission. It is a great feeling!
Interviewing people like Ashley and Domm is amazing, but it is also amazing to interview individuals who have have been in my network, in Roshan’s network, and in Lukas’s network for the past few months or past few years. Andy Cloyd, who we interviewed for Edition # 6, is a Principal over at Cultivation Capital, St. Louis’s leading venture firm.
Andy recently moved out to LA to focus on seed-stage deals for the firm, but he has been a huge help in my development and progression down the venture capital and startup path. Allowing Andy to share his story and offer advice and insights through The Takeoff is incredibly rewarding, on a number of fronts.
It’s rewarding for me, it’s rewarding for Andy because he can give back and inspire the next generation, and, obviously, it is rewarding for our subscribers and other people who read the interview.
Looking Forward
Roshan, Lukas, and I are obviously super excited to grow The Takeoff. There really aren’t so many centralized resources for students who are interested in startups and venture capital, as I kind of touched on earlier. A lot of different schools have their own entrepreneurship clubs, similar to how WashU now has the WashU Entrepreneur Society, and each of these clubs has its own way of promoting entrepreneurship among its club members, whether that’s through guest speaker events, running newsletters or podcasts, etc.
While these initiatives are amazing and I greatly applaud each individual club for their efforts, we believe that there is also a massive opportunity for a more centralized platform to come in and offer a lot of value add: Helping as many students as possible learn more about startups and venture capital AND helping as many incredible individuals in the startup world and in the venture capital community give back, offer advice, and hopefully inspire the next wave of incredible companies / individuals.
That’s where The Takeoff comes in.
Expanding the Team
Contributors: We recently added our first Contributor to the team. Similar to how Forbes has contributors who periodically write articles on their platform, The Takeoff’s Contributors will be standout students at top schools throughout the country and will have the opportunity to interview select individuals and release these interviews through The Takeoff. We believe that our Contributors will help The Takeoff achieve its mission of having the greatest impact on as many students as possible, while also allowing as many awesome founders, operators, and investors to share their stories and give back.
We are super excited to announce our first Contributor in the coming weeks and for her to release her first interview via The Takeoff!
Interns: We are hiring interns for Summer 2020. The Takeoff recently decided to onboard a few interns for this summer — in an effort to (1) keep The Takeoff rolling and (2) help students who have had their summer plans impacted by COVID-19. Each week, interns will be assigned a few tasks and will also have a lot of autonomy to choose certain projects / tasks on their own. Commitment: ~9 weeks; 5–10 hours/week
Application: https://forms.gle/RXCcC1VuVFHvxceB6
Descriptions (descriptions of the two roles we are hiring for): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gyydgj0SjMnFd0z4K-in4IL4-dGb-SY7/view?usp=sharing
Applications are live until 2 pm ET on May 9!
I’m on Twitter @mspiro3 👋
