Students to Startups: A great kick-off event at McGill
ConnectMcGill, the inaugural tech entrepreneurship event at McGill was a huge success. Two computer science students, Nicolae Rusan and Ladan Mahabadi, had the idea of organizing an on-campus meetup for students interested in entrepreneurship. I was immediately interested in getting involved, especially to try to help bring people from the startup scene to mingle with students. We had over 80 participants and a lot of enthusiasm for making this a regular event.
James Duncan (from Joyent) and I gave brief presentations on getting started in entrepreneurship but the real highlight of the event was seeing students mingling with Montreal startup folks. I believe that one of the most important things you can do to encourage students to become entrepreneurs is to give them access to people who are actually doing it. Half an hour spent chatting with a startup CEO is worth 40 hours plugging away at a business plan, in my opinion.
We’ll be organizing our next event with the involvement of students from the other Montreal universities as well. If you are a student, a startup, an investor or a mentor, contact me and we’ll get you involved.
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Mark MacLeod says:
March 30th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Sounds like a very cool event!
Dave says:
March 30th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Fun, fun - I remember that room.
Hey is that Elbert in the bottom pic?
raymond says:
March 30th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Good catch Dave, that is indeed Elbert. Don’t ask me how I managed to drag him back to McGill…
Students Invent the Future at Young Inventors Conference : : FLOW Ventures says:
April 13th, 2009 at 8:34 am
[...] me that we see so few students at startup events. There are some but just not very many. At ConnectMcGill, a recent student event in Montreal, most students had never heard of the meetups, mixers and [...]