The Unfair Advantage Every Startup Founder Needs | Joined by Peter Rowan

One of the most exciting things from an outsider point of view is in the entrepreneurship program is you have the business competition, the startup initiatives, maybe you can elaborate on these programs a little bit and how they've been invested.

Yeah, sure.

So I think of it as a continuous, a platform for continuous entrepreneurial engagement.

So we want you involved before you even realize that you're an entrepreneur.

We want you involved when you have an idea on a napkin and that's it.

You know, we want you involved when you have a well-established team and traction and are thinking about raising capital.

So our programs are designed to support you at each of those stages.

So for example, we run a regular speaker series where we bring alumni entrepreneurs from Seattle U back to talk about their entrepreneurial journey, to help student entrepreneurs build social capital by interacting with other people that are further down the path that they want to be on.

we've also, you know, we also run a series of competitions starting with fairly low effort, you know, low barrier to entry types of competitions just to get, you know, students and entrepreneurs comfortable with communicating their ideas and, and communicating them persuasively.

And because I think probably, you know, if 80% of your success is just showing up and putting in the work to probably the other 20% is being able to use your words and communicate it well.

So we want to make sure they're good there.

And then you kind of move down to each program until you get to say the Harriet Stevenson business plan competition we're in.

The businesses that win these competitions, generally speaking, are the ones that have the most traction.

You pointed out this year, sometimes that doesn't happen.

But of the four teams that made the finals this year, three of them had substantial traction in the marketplace, I would say.

And so that's typically what happens.

And then...

Those teams and all of the many teams that enter these competitions have the opportunity to apply for our summer accelerator, which is called Red Hawk Venture Labs.

It's kicking off in August.

We just had a big pool of applicants for it that we're screening down to the six teams that we're going to take.

And then, you know, folks will graduate and they'll keep going and they'll come back and do the Jones Progress Awards, which is our alumni accelerator.

And

yeah,

so the programs are laid out to fill all the resource support gaps that exist, you know, for the first couple of years of an entrepreneur's life up until they get to something more self-sustaining.

Right.