Kyle Robertson entered the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school to learn about startups and to build a network.
This year, he’s already about to graduate, and his dream of joining a startup community has been achieved. He can boast a network consisting of people from such top universities as Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. Kyle and his team have founded a startup called StartU, which helps find the best new companies in development right on campus and promote them.
Their job is not to invest in young startups, but assessing their potential for investors. StartU is the closest thing to a news website where you can read all about campus startups in very early stages of development. Kyle Robertson had this idea when he was having his internship at Morgan Stanley, where his job was assessing new emerging companies. Hence, his goal became to develop new ecosystems for young entrepreneurs.
For new companies, it’s very important to have advertisement and media coverage. If they don’t have it, it becomes very difficult to find investors and employees, Poets&Quants reports.
Most StartU Users Are Investors
Every Monday, Kyle Robertson tells about a new startup on his website, StartU. During the semester, Kyle found out that more and more readers were signing up to StartU, and most of them were investors and prospective employees. Furthermore, his readers started asking him to introduce them to startup founders and for consultations about companies.
So, Kyle decided to connect with other universities to increase his startup pool and bring even more entrepreneurs, investors and talent together. That’s why now his web site features startups from Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Berkeley. Kyle got the MIT connection through his sister, who is a student at the university’s Sloan School of Management. She introduced her brother to Jake Guglin who now works for SmartU as MIT Lead.
Through MIT, Kyle Robertson connected to other universities, gathering information about campus startups both at the master’s and college levels. Now, every featured business school has two leads on campus, who look out for new startups. There are also five scouts in every university. Their goal is to do the reporting work. Most of these “leads” and “scouts” are MBA-level students, and some 40% are college students.
The Art Of Spotting Promising Startups
Among the StartU companies, one of the most interesting is Gainful, which manufactures protein powder. Its founders are students from Berkeley. For every featured school, StartU has a resume, where investors can find out who else invested, how much and how recently. For instance, Ganful has raised $225,000 from different investors. There are more than 1,000 subscriptions for this startup.
One more example of a successful StartU startup is Anomalie, a company of wedding dress makers founded in 2017 on the Harvard campus. It has already raised $4.5 million.
With experience, Kyle Robertson found out about the things that make startups successful and promising. He’s looking for good teams who can give a great presentation of their company, but can also execute inside their own company.
StartU spends some time getting to know the new startups, which allows them to make sure they are promoting the right people. If a company has good executors and promising founders, Kyle and his team will know it in a few months’ terms, and will feature the startup on their website.
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