I had planned to wait until Saturday to begin this blog, but I attended an entrepreneurship focus group at Columbia today and just felt the need to start.  We’ll just call this a warm up post.

The aim of the focus group was to gauge alumni perspectives regarding the entrepreneurship climate on campus.  The group was made up of both non- and for-profit entrepreneurs, a venture capitalist, and a startup lawyer.  While I have not started a business before, I am extremely interested in entrepreneurship and as a recent graduate who was fairly involved in Columbia’s Organization for Rising Entrepreneurs (CORE), I thought I might have something to say.

Fledgling.  That’s how I described the entrepreneurship climate.  (Another focus group member said “fragmented”).  A turnout of fewer than 10 people reinforced this sentiment.

My experience with entrepreneurship on campus was mixed.  The two summer months I spent in Scotland  as part of the Encouraging Dynamic Global Entrepreneurs (EDGE) program was phenomenal.  The lack of continuity and infrequent presentations from CORE were not.  There was no real driving force for entrepreneurship, no success stories to emulate.

The rest of the group identified a variety of other barriers on campus: the competition from high paying corporate jobs in NYC, the lack of communication among schools at the university, the lack of funding access, and the lack of opportunities to be a part of other startups.

The suggestions for improvement, however, were fresh and inspiring.  The group talked about creating startup career fairs to combat the dominance of corporate fairs on campus, building on existing resources to make to create a more robust support network, bringing teams from the various schools together (gasp!  inter-school communication?!), and really just showing students how cool entrepreneurship can be.

My personal idea is for Columbia to seek partnership with existing NYC entrepreneur / startup groups by hosting some of their events on campus.  Groups like the New York Tech Meetup and NY Web Entrepreneurs Meetup are always looking for developers.  Hosting their events would solve their space problem, people problem and reveal to students the entrepreneurial / startup landscape outside Alma Mater’s gates.

Overall, I applaud Columbia for its efforts to increase the spirit of entrepreneurship on campus.  Efforts like the newly created engineering minor in entrepreneurship and today’s focus group offer hope that the climate will improve.  We just need to expose students to the opportunities beyond Goldman Sachs, or as one participant said,

“There once was an actual guy named Goldman; there once was an actual guy named Sachs.”

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