From Side Hustle to Scale: How YSpace Helps Founders Build

I want this to be more free-flowing and conversational where I can answer some of the questions that you have, maybe about entrepreneurship, maybe your own business, or maybe just if you have an idea in your head, how do you kind of go about it, or what are the resources available? So this presentation is really talking through some of the stuff we do at YSpace, but then also some of the pieces around entrepreneurship and innovation that we're seeing that that, you know, are key.

Um, and then some success stories at the end are just stories as well that are impactful in a way where it shows you different scopes of entrepreneurship.

Um, and it's not always about the technology based companies, um, because there's a lot more to that than entrepreneurship.

Um, So as mentioned a little bit, my name is David.

I'm the Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation where I work at York University to build what we call YSpace.

It's our Penn University Entrepreneurship and Innovation program and we're unique in a way where we are heavily funded by various levels of government, private sponsors, corporates, so our work spreads widely into the community.

We support York and our students and alumni and our faculty but we also support anyone in the community so we work with anyone coast to coast across the country um and you can be really in any any shape or field our main focus areas are technology food and beverage on the consumer packaged goods side women led black led and then most recently soft landing where we have um mlus with different countries to support their companies who are looking to expand to Canada.

And how do we support them with their market expansion plans? So that's a little bit of what we do.

And we do that through a couple of different ways.

Really, our role is to play a couple of different things as you'll see here, incubator accelerator, where we're really focused on helping the businesses grow and helping people take that next steps of the business life cycle to go from ideation to validation, validation to launch, launch to scale.

And we do that through expertise, mentorship, So they mentioned we're kind of, she's one of our mentors.

We have a roster of about 50 to 60 mentors on our roster where we're tapping them for different things.

Everyone's got a different expertise.

So we try to lean into those expertise and assign the mentorship based off what the companies need, what the individual needs are.

Everyone's got a different need.

So we try to curate that experience as much as we can.

We also have a network of resources.

So we've gone out and worked to kind of curate a pool of what we say are perks, which is essentially kind of unique discounts and offerings from different folks like Google, AWS, QuickBooks, Owner.

So it ranges from anywhere from cloud credits to HR software, invoicing software to legal and operational setup.

And the idea is that when you're starting a business, there's already so much you're trying to figure out.

You do not need to scour the Internet to understand what are the best resources for you or tools for you.

We kind of built that into our perk portal, we say, where you have access to over 100 30 to 40 different companies over $100,000 worth of perks.

And this gets you a head start with trusted ecosystem of partners that can support you along those way as well.

And then we do educational workshops where we're providing educational toolage to anyone on how to start a business one-on-one or how to rethink about your business.

And I'll talk about one of the sessions later, but we have a pretty active YouTube channel where there's over 100 videos.

I want this to be more free-flowing and conversational where I can answer some of the questions that you have, maybe about entrepreneurship, maybe your own business, or maybe just if you have an idea in your head, how do you kind of go about it, or what are the resources available? So this presentation is really talking through some of the stuff we do at YSpace, but then also some of the pieces around entrepreneurship and innovation that we're seeing that that, you know, are key.

Um, and then some success stories at the end are just stories as well that are impactful in a way where it shows you different scopes of entrepreneurship.

Um, and it's not always about the technology based companies, um, because there's a lot more to that than entrepreneurship.

Um, So as mentioned a little bit, my name is David.

I'm the Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation where I work at York University to build what we call YSpace.

It's our Penn University Entrepreneurship and Innovation program and we're unique in a way where we are heavily funded by various levels of government, private sponsors, corporates, so our work spreads widely into the community.

We support York and our students and alumni and our faculty but we also support anyone in the community so we work with anyone coast to coast across the country um and you can be really in any any shape or field our main focus areas are technology food and beverage on the consumer packaged goods side women led black led and then most recently soft landing where we have um mlus with different countries to support their companies who are looking to expand to Canada.

And how do we support them with their market expansion plans? So that's a little bit of what we do.

And we do that through a couple of different ways.

Really, our role is to play a couple of different things as you'll see here, incubator accelerator, where we're really focused on helping the businesses grow and helping people take that next steps of the business life cycle to go from ideation to validation, validation to launch, launch to scale.

And we do that through expertise, mentorship, So they mentioned we're kind of, she's one of our mentors.

We have a roster of about 50 to 60 mentors on our roster where we're tapping them for different things.

Everyone's got a different expertise.

So we try to lean into those expertise and assign the mentorship based off what the companies need, what the individual needs are.

Everyone's got a different need.

So we try to curate that experience as much as we can.

We also have a network of resources.

So we've gone out and worked to kind of curate a pool of what we say are perks, which is essentially kind of unique discounts and offerings from different folks like Google, AWS, QuickBooks, Owner.

So it ranges from anywhere from cloud credits to HR software, invoicing software to legal and operational setup.

And the idea is that when you're starting a business, there's already so much you're trying to figure out.

You do not need to scour the Internet to understand what are the best resources for you or tools for you.

We kind of built that into our perk portal, we say, where you have access to over 100 30 to 40 different companies over $100,000 worth of perks.

And this gets you a head start with trusted ecosystem of partners that can support you along those way as well.

And then we do educational workshops where we're providing educational toolage to anyone on how to start a business one-on-one or how to rethink about your business.

And I'll talk about one of the sessions later, but we have a pretty active YouTube channel where there's over 100 videos.