Charlottesville, VA- University of Virginia student entrepreneurship leaders invited students from across Virginia to celebrate the success of entrepreneurship in their own backyard of Charlottesville, as well as discuss how to replicate the success elsewhere.
The Entrepreneurship Group (EG) at the University of Virginia has been hosting annual startup trips for the past two years, where they expose students to the “offices of the most dynamic and innovative workplaces on the East Coast,” with the goal of giving “students interested in entrepreneurship a chance to explore the working culture of today’s hottest startups.”
Many of the trips are held in partnership with other universities’ entrepreneurship organizations and clubs. For example, for their two past startup trips to New York City, EG worked with Uncubed, an extremely well-connected organization that helped EG connect to companies in NYC. During their 2-day startup trip, students toured 5-6 companies the first day and attended the NYC Uncubed Conference & hiring fair the next day.
While many trips to other cities have been carried out, this trip on September 26-27 was the first startup trip to Charlottesville, as well as the first collaboration between all three hosting organizations:
Entrepreneurship Group at U.Va., a student organization at the University of Virginia that exposes students to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial careers.
Tom Tom Founders Festival, a music, art, and innovation festival in Charlottesville, Virginia.
HackCville, a clubhouse and community for student entrepreneurship education at the University of Virginia, run jointly by student leaders and alumni of UVA.
Daniel Willson (UVA Computer Science 2016), was the main mind behind this weekend event. Having been involved in all three hosting organizations since his first year, he now holds a position on the leadership teams of each of them. He describes his passion as “building communities within technology,” and he wants to help people discover and experiment and explore what they’re really passionate about.
One purpose of the Charlottesville Startup Trip was to convey to bright and talented students, both from UVA and visiting from elsewhere, the extent of Charlottesville’s local thriving startup scene, entrepreneurship at UVA, and a general appreciation of what makes the city great. A second purpose was to gather these student leaders together to work together in moving student entrepreneurship programs forward within the state of Virginia.
“I already know we are on such a great path here at UVA,” Willson says. “When you look at student-led initiatives here, that is where all the action is and where all the things are being accomplished. How can we take what we’ve learned at UVA and share that with others? We have the opportunity to not just help the students here, but also across Virginia and DC. We can do that. I think the power of events are underestimated in their ability to effect change and form communities and collaborations that wouldn’t happen otherwise.”
The weekend was divided up into three distinct parts: on Friday morning and afternoon, EG led a tour of five of Charlottesville’s best startups; Friday evening’s highlight was the Fall Block party was hosted by the Tom Tom Founders Festival; on Saturday morning, HackCville hosted Virginia’s first annual University Entrepreneurship Summit. 40 students from five universities were represented: Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Virginia Tech (VT), James Madison University (JMU), George Mason University (GMU), and the University of Virginia (UVA).
Celebrating Charlottesville’s Innovation
On Friday morning, students gathered on the historic Downtown Mall. Over the course of the day, they visited five Charlottesville startups that spanned the spectra of industries and company sizes:
Borrowed and Blue, the editorial wedding website that helps brides imagine, plan, and share their dream locally-inspired wedding, all in one place.
WillowTree Apps, an impressive mobile strategy, design, and development company.
Mudhouse Coffee, an award-winning coffee shop founded in 1993 as a coffee cart, that has once again lit their entrepreneurial fires by recently expanding to roasting their own coffee and selling online.
Apex Clean Energy is an independent renewable energy company focused on facilitating the building of renewable energy generation facilities.
Vibethink, a local technology-driven creative agency that helps businesses thrive in the digital age by combining digital experiences, storytelling, and strategy to create powerful solutions.
Brian Mitchell (UVA 2018) from HackCville Media wrote a comprehensive photo essay account of the tour, reporting that the students “experienced the realities of the startup lifestyle, listened to impressive founders share their stories, and networked themselves to expand their entrepreneurial reach. In addition, the Startup Trip succeeded in its goal to strengthen connections between student-led entrepreneurship groups at these various regional universities.”
One of the visiting students from Richmond, Sophia Delmar (VCU Accounting 2017), was very impressed by the Mudhouse. “I thought they had a really incredible business. The owners are the type of people that are always looking for the next thing to improve their business. It’s inspiring, and I think an absolutely necessary attitude to have as a business owner. On top of all that, their coffee is really great, and homebrewed!”
In choosing which of the many startups in Charlottesville to visit, Willson says that the organizers “tried to provide a diverse set of companies, so students could see a wide range of what small business looks like. We’ve done these trips to New York, Richmond, DC, and the thing we found consistently in all companies is the passion from the founders. I think it’s powerful to go to five different companies—as different as those—and see the passion consistent throughout all of them.” For this event specifically, one of the major constraints was proximity, “With folks coming in from out of town, the companies needed to be within walking distance of each other.” Instead of being a limitation, this actually helped stir up the conversations between the students as they walked from location to location.
After the startup tours, the groups headed up the hill to the Tom Tom Fall Block Party at the nearby McGuffey Art Center. While the party featured a mixer with thirty local technology firms, local music & food, open artist studios, startup socials, dance performances, and family activities, one of the key points of the 2014 Fall Block Party was celebrating the launch of Founding Cville, “a project that honors local artists, business leaders, and public servants who are the ‘Thomas Jeffersons of today,’” according to the press release. This event ended up being a who’s who of all of the entrepreneurial and innovative minds within Charlottesville, a veritable mixing pot of fun between the academy, the industry, and the community. With over 6,000 attendees, the Tom Tom Fall Block Party was more successful than it had ever been before in its 3 years of existence. Daniel Willson feels like Tom Tom is “at a turning point in terms of student awareness and involvement.”
First annual University Entrepreneurship Summit
On Saturday, HackCville hosted the first annual University Entrepreneurship Summit. This was an exclusive summit, a leadership conference for the region’s University entrepreneurship groups. All invited were either “leaders or rising leaders at their respective entrepreneurship clubs at different Universities.” Something of this magnitude had never been done before, and the goal of the event was to “connect everyone and discuss best practices for developing University entrepreneurship programs, organizations, and initiatives,” says Willson.
The day was broken into four different areas of focus, with the goal that everyone would come out with new ideas and initiatives, as described by the brochure:
Simply Awesome Events and Startups – “How to run a startup trip. We’ll also share some of our best, most unique events with each other so we can take back new ideas to our own schools.”
Media + Marketing – “How to tell the stories of your success through rich, digital media. Also, how to market your organizations’ events.”
Working with Alumni – “How to meaningfully engage with your school’s entrepreneurial alumni.”
Membership Growth – “How we handle student membership and how we advertise and grow our membership each year.
In each focus area, UVA groups spoke for 5-10 minutes on a topic, after which everyone broke into roundtables to discuss. Towards the end of each 45-minute block, they came back as a large group to share key discussion points and move to the next topic.
Willson explains that the overall goal of the day was to identify “simple, doable things that everyone could bring back to their universities to help grow their respective communities.” When UVA spoke at the beginning of each topic, they focused their message around how much of what they have at UVA now happened by trying small steps first; these “simple, doable things” are the key to growing an entrepreneurship community. UVA just recently established an alumni network of entrepreneurs across the country (Wahoowa Entrepreneurs) by first holding a couple happy hours and inviting some alumni in a few cities over the summer. “We didn’t set out to build a network, we set out to connect a couple students with a couple of alumni and things grew from there,” says Willson, “If you focus on the doable things (what you can do in the next week or month), you’ll be surprised where it take you very quickly. That was the broader theme of the day, and what we wanted people to walk away with.”
Just before lunch, in the middle of the day, they held the Marshmallow Challenge, which Willson describes as a “design thinking challenge that forces team members to work together immediately to see who can build the tallest structure under a time constraint. It was a great way to start the day and had some great lessons built in.” Later in the day, the discussion naturally evolved into “How do we work more together across the region?,” a question that was not part of the planned day. Many ideas emerged, such as, “Can we get bigger name speakers if we can book them a regional tour? Do you simply start a Facebook group?”
Willson said this collaboration is important, as “each of our organizations doesn’t get as much support from the universities as we would like, so we are forced to work together across schools—in a way I’ve never heard of before—in order to accomplish and achieve our goals. We talk about entrepreneurship as being across disciplines and departments and across these silos, but I think it’s also across universities. It requires that kind of collaboration for things to grow.” These sentiments were echoed by VCU student Elliot Roth in the event’s press release, “Good things happen when you put students at multiple schools together. The more cross-collaboration that occurs for schools, the better for the surrounding community and the students themselves.”
Impact
This summit spurred excitement among the student leaders. Specifically, Willson says that leaders from JMU reported staying up until 1am the next day restructuring and planning the organization for the next year, as a result of the things they had learned at the summit. “Just hearing that is tremendously rewarding for us. We go day-to-day and don’t think of what we do as incredible or awesome— but to be able to talk about that and help other student-run communities grow is incredibly rewarding for us.” Willson says.
Tara DeCamp (VT Economics & International Business 2015), was surprised by just how active the UVA entrepreneurial scene is, “I didn’t know students were so engaged.” While Sophia Delmar (VCU Accounting 2017) did not know before visiting that UVA was entrepreneurial at all, she remarked that “I can say with confidence that they really have their stuff together.”
While Blacksburg has a Startup Weekend, workshops on entrepreneurship at NuSpark, and weekly viewings of entrepreneurship video series, Tara DeCamp says that as a result of the University Entrepreneurship Summit, her team from VT are now implementing “Entrepreneur Club community building, planning [their] own New York City startup trip, and reaching out to different majors.” Sophia Delmar and her VCU group plans to add to VCU’s common entrepreneurial workspaces and groups by improving their branding and making new goals for StartupVCU regarding recruitment and alumni relations.
From the Summit, Tara DeCamp gained some critical insights, especially that “it’s important to form strong connections with your community, not only through events relevant to your interests, but in other teambuilding and social activities as well.” Sophia Delmar came away from the weekend having realized “the amount of time and dedication required to achieve a great business and club. [The Summit] really put things into perspective for me and gave me an incredible amount of inspiration.”
Regarding the event, Tara DeCamp remarked that “everyone involved was prepared, events were planned well, and the startup visits were great.” DeCamp and Delmar both affirmed that UVA is a leader among Virginia schools in entrepreneurship. Tara DeCamp added that “HackCville is an incredibly cool resource for budding entrepreneurs, and most schools don’t have anything like it. The UVA New York City startup trip and its events are extremely valuable for students in the entrepreneurship community. Additionally, there are a lot of highly involved and motivated individuals in the UVA community working together to create a great entrepreneurship scene.” Sophia Delmar commented that UVA has “a solid base, people supporting them, and great networking. Most schools are still in the baby stages of development. UVA is what to model after for the future.” She believes that UVA has “the most established entrepreneur club out of the Virginia universities.”
Behind the Scenes
Willson describes the series of events that led to the natural formation of this Charlottesville Startup Trip. “The Tom Tom Festival had always been held in the Fall and Spring, and we kept talking about getting regional attendance and involvement to festival. Over the course of the last year, we’ve had some informal conversations over the phone, through HackCville and EG, and we’ve worked with student entrepreneurship leaders from other universities on our startup trips (VCU in richmond, Georgetown & American in DC). Being a part of each of these three organizations, I was starting to see how all of these pieces could fit together. Given the Block Party on that Friday night, we could do a startup trip that Friday morning and a summit on Saturday morning. This has been a big endeavor with moving pieces but it all fit together and turned out to be an impactful weekend.”
The three organizations had begun planning the weekend in April 2014. At that time, they reached out to other universities at end of the last academic year. Because the event would be relatively early in the fall semester, they knew they had to get word out as soon as possible. Over the summer, they continued talking with other schools, asking questions like, “What would you be interested in getting out of the event?” and, “If you held this event, what would you do? What do you want to learn?” Much of the final logistical planning came through in previous two months. The organizing team had to be able to find housing for all visitors, reimburse some travel costs, get lunch covered, and to finalize the tour schedule.
What’s Next?
The next steps for UVA student entrepreneurship’s leadership are taking UVA students on the road for the third annual New York City startup trip in November. In the future, they are planning to build out industry-specific tours as well as location-based tours. The stage has clearly been set for future student leaders in Virginia to make an impact.
