Actions to consider for successfully launching a startup after graduation

While not everyone agrees on the value of a college or professional degree for those interested in starting their own ventures, it could be argued that in fact, the college experience is the best time to test your entrepreneurial chops. Pursuing your entrepreneurial vision alongside your degree program affords you the ability to try and fail with limited consequences—after all, you are building knowledge and competencies that will afford you options should this venture not succeed.

Though it varies by institution, the access student-entrepreneurs have to resources and expertise to support them in launching a venture is unprecedented. Consider the following resources that student-founders have access to simply for being enrolled in an educational institution:

• non-dilutive startup funding through pitch and venture competitions only open to students;
• a network of alumni with deep connections and experiences that are eager to support student-founders enrolled at their alma mater;
• professors and other researchers who have deep expertise in areas ranging from computer science to customer behavior to global health, all of which want to see you succeed and enjoy engaging with students eager to apply cutting edge research into practice;
• facilities for prototyping, studios for media production, etc.; and
• smart, talented peers who may become co-founders or early team members.

However, unlike choosing a “traditional” career in consulting, investment banking, or medicine, the pathway to launching a startup venture post-graduation is less defined. We created this note to serve as a playbook for the steps students can take during their course of study to best utilize the resources available to them in order to position themselves to pursue their venture full-time post-graduation.

Step 1: Self-educate.

Read voraciously

There is an overabundance of information available for entrepreneurs. If you are passionate about entrepreneurship as a career path, then begin reading voraciously in order to learn from others. Look for bodies of work that are based on research and/or represent the foundational and widely accepted approaches of successful entrepreneurship. While there’s no single path to guarantee your success as an entrepreneur, more than a decade of academic research has resulted in an accepted approach for reducing your odds of failure.

Foundational readings we recommend are

Form a peer circle