Have you ever had a crazy idea but didn’t know where to go with it? Seen other people creating startups and been unsure of what that actually means? Elaine Chen, director of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center and Cummings family professor of the practice in entrepreneurship, wants students to know that anyone can be an innovator, no matter how outlandish their idea might seem at first.
Junior Brawner Quan's startup, Gen Ai, uses generative artificial intelligence text-to-3D models to assist in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. The idea behind the startup came from a research paper Quan read last year. His larger vision is to eventually develop a fully generative video game using this AI text-to-3D technology.
Quan talked to a computer science professor he had done research with who suggested he connect with the Derby Entrepreneurship Center to work on the business side of his idea. Through the Entrepreneurship Center, Quan was able to connect with Chen.
“I get on a call with her and I'm like I have a crazy idea. … I know that I shouldn't be able to do this as a sophomore,” Quan said. “I was some random kid at a random college as a sophomore. I'm not in the position to create this crazy startup, but I want to do it. I just want to try.”
Chen gave him three tasks: find a cofounder, pick a target market and join the venture accelerator program.
Quan quickly went on a search for a cofounder and worked on researching a market for his product.
“I can say ‘Oh, I want a text-to-3D model,’ but who are we going to sell it to, like who's actually going to pay for that? How are we going to get it good enough to where someone will actually pay for it?” Quan said.
At first, Quan joined the self-guided venture accelerator program before a team dropped the full-time program during the first week and he was offered a spot there.
“I was that kid working really closely with them, really clearly obsessed with my idea and it was clear that I was thirsting for opportunity,” Quan said. “They offered me the spot in the full-time [program].”
The self-guided summer venture accelerator program was launched last summer as a “light touch” experience with weekly updates and online educational experiences. According to Chen, the full-time 11-week program consists of biweekly roundtables with all of the teams in the accelerator, one-on-one meetings with Chen and Tina Weber, the program lead and entrepreneurial lead, as well as workshops throughout the summer.
Chen explained the framework of the program. Each week had a theme around which workshops and speaker events were planned. The first month focused on the market and the customer, the second on the business model and the third on company building.
Outside of these thematic events, the weekly roundtables provided a setting for the startup teams to work together and help one another.
“Mondays and Thursdays we meet with the whole cohort," Chen said. "We go around, we share status and a lot of what’s happening there is then the teams help each other. The check-in format is ‘What did we do last week? What are going to do this week? Do we need help anywhere?’ And typically, that’s when the really interesting conversations happen. People trade pro tips, people trade people. It’s a very collaborative crowd."
Outside of the summer venture accelerator program, the Derby Entrepreneurship Center hosts events all year round to help students get involved in entrepreneurship and innovation.
September was innovation month, which focused on helping students get acclimatized to the innovation ecosystem, according to Chen. During that month, Chen ran a workshop on finding problems worth solving, as well as a maker’s space workshop. The Tufts Ideas Competition is another one of the center's events; it's held annually in October and November, and this year's theme is “Innovating with Impact.”
“What we want students to do is think about what area of interest they really care about," Chen said. "It might be environmental sustainability or racial justice or food systems or whatever it is they care about. Then narrow it down to some problem statement that they can then come up with a solution that’s differentiated and a way of getting that out into the field so it can have an impact."
The Derby Entrepreneurship Center also offers a series of workshops called “Jumbo Cafes” that help students define a problem statement, do primary market research, customer discovery and more. This fall, the center ran a pitch to match events through which students could pitch ideas to find team members, as well as a number of speaker events. The center hosts live pitching workshops to help students prepare to pitch their ideas to a real audience.
In the spring, the center's main event is the $100k New Ventures Competition, coupled with a number of workshops to help students organize their ideas, prepare to apply and learn how to pitch with passion. For some students, the $100k New Ventures Competition is a pathway into the summer accelerator program, according to Chen.
As part of the MS in Innovation and Management (MSIM) program, students are randomly grouped together into teams at the beginning of the semester and tasked with coming up with a business idea. Ben Webb, an MSIM candidate, and his team worked with the Tech Transfer and Industry Collaboration office to look at technologies that have been invented at Tufts that they could develop a business case for. A few successful startups have come out of the MSIM program using technologies that were invented at Tufts, according to Webb.
Cerobex Pharmaceuticals, the business Webb and his team have been working on, includes a drug delivery technology that can get medications across the blood brain barrier. The question was whether the business would remain a class activity, or if it was actually feasible.
“We were really intimidated approaching that problem and thinking: Do we have enough expertise to do this? Is it just going to be an interesting sort of academic exercise? Or is this something that we could actually develop a real business plan for and potentially turn into a business?” Webb said.
Webb and his team applied and were accepted to a number of startup competitions, including the Tufts $100k competition. During the other competitions, Webb and his team received feedback on their business and totally redid their pitch before the finals for the Tufts $100k competition.
“Over the three weeks or four weeks between the semi finals for the $100k and the actual finals, we pitched 10 times, got completely torn apart about eight times and redid the whole thing. We probably made 15 presentations between that time,” Webb said. “But then we went to $100k. We felt really prepared; we felt like we really knew what we were doing. And we had a fantastic pitch.”
Webb was able to forward his Tufts $100k application directly to the summer venture accelerator program, which he thought would provide a good opportunity to continue the work his team had been doing during the year, as well as accountability over the summer.
Similar to Quan’s experience, Chen and Weber helped provide structure to Webb and his team, including actionable goal setting throughout the program. Webb said the goals for Cerobex changed multiple times over the summer, but that that process was crucial.
“When you're trying to build a startup, you can't have long term goals that you aren't making progress on, you need to break that down into goals that are achievable in the short term, or at least progressively in the short term, or you need to reframe what those long term goals are, because you're never going to get there if you don't start making that progress," Webb said. "So we did a lot of work on that."
Both Webb and Quan greatly appreciated the summer venture accelerator as an important part of where their startups are now. The accelerator provided tangible skills like networking, connections with other entrepreneurs and accountability throughout the summer to push their startups forward. But the work of the summer accelerator is not the end for these two, or for other startups.
Throughout the year, anyone who is interested in anything innovation-themed can get involved through the Derby Entrepreneurship Center and can set up meetings with the staff or browse their online resources.
“We just want everybody to have a little bit of exposure to innovation and entrepreneurship, because it’s not just about startups — it's about a mindset and a skill set,” Chen said.
