I’m passionate about entrepreneurship and its intersection with where people can discover their personal career journey. I’ve studied entrepreneurship programs in some of the most selective business schools like Wharton, UVA Darden, and Toronto Rotman. In that study, my colleague and I found that academic programs were beginning to break free from a narrowly defined approach to entrepreneurship. Our research showed that even in the classroom students could learn mold-breaking entrepreneurial methods, that tapped into more of our minds than simply scientific management.
I’m passionate about entrepreneurship and its intersection with where people can discover their personal career journey. I’ve studied entrepreneurship programs in some of the most selective business schools like Wharton, UVA Darden, and Toronto Rotman. In that study, my colleague and I found that academic programs were beginning to break free from a narrowly defined approach to entrepreneurship. Our research showed that even in the classroom students could learn mold-breaking entrepreneurial methods, that tapped into more of our minds than simply scientific management.
How we built the...
Founder Challenge
The entrepreneurial process, illustrated
The best part of building the Founder Challenge has been rediscovering and putting into action all of the principles that I was teaching in the new Business, Technology, and Entrepreneurship program. In creating the Founder Challenge, the FC team utilized an iterative creation process captured by the messy line below. We didn't know exactly what we were building and it was definitely not a linear process to get where we are today. So here's the story...
The story of the Founder Challenge
At the end of the inaugural class year of the Business, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (BTE) program, I was trying to figure out a way to support students to take more action. My students were headed for their summer breaks, and I wanted to motivate them to take action on all of their ideas while school was out. We had a town hall and I decided I would challenge them to become founders. I introduced the same three basic ideas that underscore the Founder Challenge: become a founder, by September, but be modest.
The students reacted pretty well to the challenge, I got lots of positive feedback. More than anything else, my students wanted a community of fellow student entrepreneurs and they could bond with, share their ideas, and get regular feedback. What they really needed were people to hold them accountable to their ideas and to the actions they wanted to take. So I set out to make that a reality.
Like in design thinking, I started backwards from the problem I was trying to solve: entrepreneurship students weren't taking their ideas outside of the classroom. I worked backwards by talking directly to the people it was affecting: my students.
May, 2022
Delivering the message to other classes
Given the success of the message with my BTE cohort, I realized there was no reason I couldn't deliver this message to my other students. So I passed it along and not only did it stick, three students became eager to work with me on it and we very quickly had a small team that was passionate about building the Founder Challenge. In the early days of the Founder Challenge, we quilted together a team with unique ideas, motivations, and skills that helped push the project forward in new and exciting ways. We were all united in our passion for helping students build on their ideas and creating a community of entrepreneurs at NYU and beyond.
Preetham Prince
Jerry Chen
Evan Crosby
In the early days of the Founder Challenge, we quilted together a with unique ideas, motivations, and skills that helped push the project forward in new and exciting ways. Wee were all united in our passion for helping students build on their ideas and for creating a community of entrepreneurs at NYU and beyond.
Before there was the Founder Challenge...
I thought for a long while about the name. I entertained Purposeful Entrepreneurship and EMindset quite a bit. These names spoke to key ideas that related my teaching and approach.
While these we convincing options, they represented more about what I was teaching and less about what student's needed. The problem students face is not their mindset, nor their purpose. The problem is overcoming the challenge of taking the first step
It was really important that we designed a logo that fully captured the spirit of the Founder Challenge. Insert what we were looking for in the logo.
Insert why we liked this logo and what it represents to us.
Building the website
Our new team set out to build a website that captured my vision and approach to teaching entrepreneurship and also helped students with the headwinds of student entrepreneurship I discovered in my research.
My initial mock up on the left is not far from where we are today. I thought there are three key ideas I'm trying to get across: Mindset, Action, Purpose. On the right, Jerry gave a crack of one of many initial iterations of the website that we would continue to modify, scrap, and redo over the summer.
To help us organize the content of the website, we used a digital whiteboard. This space became the headquarters for all our brainstorming and communication.
We worked on this board May through July, almost the whole summer!
To help us organize the content of the website, we used a digital whiteboard. This space became the headquarters for all our brainstorming and communication. Evan and I concentrated on constructing the architecture and content of our site, while Jerry put his efforts into the style and look of the Founder Challenge.
We went through many ideas and iterations of the design, but we always knew we wanted the Founder Challenge to look like an entrepreneur's notebook, like a constant work in progress. As Evan and I filled in the content, Jerry drew designs of the website that matched it. Below you can see various stages of the doodles that would eventually become the images that now fill our website.
Our first attempt at building community
Having learned about the loneliness of student entrepreneurship through my research and hearing from my own students about the need for a community of student founders, I wanted to bring together a group of eager and ambition students over the summer. Evan reached out to some of my students and put together a small group that began meeting every few weeks over Zoom.
At these meetings, the students discussed their entrepreneurial ideas and bonded over the difficulty of trying to take action on their passionate ideas while trying to balance their social lives and internships or jobs.
June 8
Insert some important lessons we learned from summer community that bled over into fall FC cohort.....
Building the Pledge
The Founder Challenge website was moving along well and we were learning so much about how to motivate student entrepreneurs and keep them accountable to taking actions on their ideas. It was really important for us to embed the psychological commitment of starting a venture into FC.
While Evan was reviewing my research on entrepreneurship and other academic theories about entrepreneurship in the classroom, he thought of an intriguing way to combine the idea of "undertaking" a venture with the action of 'accepting' the Founder Challenge, which he called the pledge. Taking the Founder Challenge Pledge was our way to putting a spin on the traditional 'plunge' idea in the world of startups, and too put the idea in the minds of our community that starting a venture is far more than committing to an idea; rather, it is the commitment to entrepreneurial action that we want to foster in the Founder Challenge community.
The Pledge has become one of the central ideas behind the Founder Challenge.
The Plunge
The Pledge
Launching the Founder Challenge
On September 19, we launched the Founder Challenge on campus at NYU. We were really encouraged by the huge turnout to our first meeting, ranging from first year students to seniors on the edge of graduation. What they all had in common were growing drives and inspiration to take their ideas and turn them into founder experience. We knew we had a great community of students to build the Founder Challenge around.
September 19
At our launch meeting, we reintroduced many of the ideas that first spawned FC, as well as the concepts we had ideated over the summer, including the Pledge. We wanted to tell the story of two Sterns.
There was the Stern that everyone knows: dominated by clubs and recruitment to big name-brand firms (which we certainly are lucky to have!).
But there is also the NYU Stern full of creative young business leaders seeking to capitalize on their entrepreneurial ideas, solve problems that real people are facing, start new and exciting companies, and build their creative confidence.
At our launch, we encouraged our new community to reflect on their most ambitious dreams and aspirations and to begin taking action.
We were trying to tell this group a very grand story and mootivate them to take part in this exciting thing we had built. At the end of the day, the message was very clear:
We delivered this message to over 50 students!
Judging from the size and enthusiasm of this new group, I knew that we had found some unresolved need among the NYU community: there are many students that have the ideas and passions necessary to start brilliant new companies, they just need something to help push along their creative paths.
Keeping the Fire Burning
After our successful launch, we now had a great community of eager students to continue to build the Founder Challenge around and to test the core principles which we had formalized over the summer. It was our job to keep all of these young entrepreneurs hungry to make progress on their ideas and to hold them accountable week-to-week on taking action.
Learning from our students
What does success mean for us?
What worked to keep students taking action, what didn't work and why
Struggles to keep attendance up, other difficulties
What did we learn
Meet the FC '22 Cohort
Looking toward the future
Future plans for Founder Challenge
Changes next semester
Why its important for us too continue the Founder Challenge
Founder Challenge outside of NYU
