On any given college campus in Boston, students are working on intriguing and potentially world-altering ventures - but in many respects, these entrepreneurial efforts can be siloed. Yes, there are some cases where people have looked beyond the bubble of their own schools and teamed up with students elsewhere in the city. However, that’s all in spite of the fact that there aren’t too many organic opportunities for our college populations to cross paths and bounce their startup ideas off each other.
Amaan Udhas, a student at Northeastern who has launched his own startup Orbit Marketplace, realized that intercampus mingling is lacking and often done in the wrong settings when it does happen. According to him, there weren’t any zero-stakes events that allowed students to come and casually chat with people who were pursuing ventures just like them. So Student Startup Night — a laid-back, school-agnostic event focused on bringing college entrepreneurs together — was born.
As the event page states:
Boston is one of the best cities in the world to go to school and start a company. There are so many young people building great products and working on incredible concepts, so it's about time we all got together for a beer or two. This is a no pressure and no agenda event for you to meet other interesting people you may not get a chance to meet in any other setting.
This is not to say that colleges haven’t tried to opened its doors to students from all over the Greater Boston Area when it comes to hosting different startup-flavored events. But, as Udhas pointed out, any situation tied to one particular school may still not be the most inviting proposition to people from other institutions. Even with the early conception of Student Startup Night, Northeastern had a hand in it until Udhas decided it might be better to keep it separate from any school.
Now, the event series is to be held on neutral territory and will be its own, independent entity. For example, the last shindig occurred at WeWork in Fort Point. This way, no one feels like it’s catered to students from a certain school and not others.
Maybe it’s because of this neutral stance, but for the last SSN gathering, students from all over did come. I was surprised to walk around the room and hear from people studying at Suffolk, BC, Lesley and MIT — a cocktail of institutions I have yet to encounter anywhere else. The premise was also simple: pizza and beer — the customary meal of startup champions — was laid out on a table and people just talked to one another. There were no pitch contests, there was no sizing each other up, and there were no judges or investors whose attention and approval students had to compete for. Everyone was able to chat, share what they were going through as student entrepreneurs and relate.
Moving forward, Udhas said SSN will be a regular occurrence with the next one going down in April. In general, the events are meant to serve as a place where students coming from different academic backgrounds but are all pursuing entrepreneurship can encounter one another. And having these people, who wouldn’t otherwise meet, could create a student startup support system among campuses in Boston.
Image via U.S. Department of Education, CC BY 2.0.
