College Students: Our Nation Badly Needs You To Be Entrepreneurs

A group of 16 U.Va. McIntire School of Commerce students (my alma mater) came to San Francisco for a week during their spring break to learn about life as an entrepreneur in the mecca of geekdom.  I had to be in Cincinnati giving a mobile conference keynote, so my co-founder Sean kindly spent 90 minutes with them, talking about life as a tech entrepreneur and bringing other startups from our SOMAcentral space in to speak with the students.  After meeting with us, they also met with a slew of other startups, including my brother Sam's company, FreshPlum (read about how Sam and I ended up in SF from our DC roots).

Here's my message to the 16 students who spent their spring break in SF:  Our nation needs you to be entrepreneurs, and badly.  I don't mean this in a fluffy, "you can be anything you want" type of way.  Rather I mean it in a "our nation is facing threats from ascendant countries, and the only way for us to maintain a dominant global position is to capitalize on what we do best" way.  And what we do best is leverage our unique melting pot culture and freedoms to create value through creativity and capitalism.  Entrepreneurism -- and tech entrepreneurism in particular -- is the most direct and value-adding way to leverage the unique strengths of our nation.  It's the winners that write history and we are in jeopardy of losing that privilege.

It's easy to go work for someone upon graduation, and sadly, most universities are geared towards supplying employers with copious numbers of educated young people to act as proxies, creating value for corporate bank accounts.  The entire machine is structured to foster just enough fear that most graduates are reluctant to strike out on their own to realize the full potential of what they're capable of.

I do see glimmers of hope, though.  When I was a student at U.Va., I was highly discouraged from being an entrepreneur.  I had no choice though -- I had to pay for college myself, so I did crazy things like selling U.Va. branded Frisbees at the area bookstores like Mincers.  I pitched a Hoos Savings Club Card (think: analog Groupon) to students in front of Kroger for $20.  The university was so unfriendly to me as an entrepreneur, though, they tried to kick me out, saying that the grounds of a public institution funded with taxpayer dollars was not an appropriate place to be running a business.

The fact that students from U.Va. are now being encouraged to visit entrepreneurs for a week (albeit on their spring breaks -- 'not yet quite a part of the curriculum, dear students -- you'll have to do it on your own time!') is a start.  Other schools like Duke have gone even farther, setting up programs like the Duke Global Entrepreneurship Network where students spend summer breaks working at tech startups.

And the category leader is Stanford, which has long been progressive in seeding and encouraging tech entrepreneurism and producing heavyweights like Google, Yahoo and countless others.  I hold Stanford up as the model to which all other universities should race, with a strong emphasis on value creation through entrepreneurship, and specific examples like its "How to Change the World" week, labeled as a 'practical guide for impractical people' -- love it, classes on entrepreneurship with guest lectures from the best tech thinkers in the world (photo above is of Reid Hoffman speaking at one of Heidi's classes), challenges like this one from Tina Seelig, and countless other resources for entrepreneurs.  To put it simply, being a student at Stanford means the world is at your doorstep as an entrepreneur.  Being at any other university means you're the doormat, with everyone else stepping on you as they race to join the corporate ladder.

By and large, universities and students need to wake up to the immense and urgent need to inoculate our student culture with the values of entrepreneurism.  It's not just a "nice to have" elective-style course.  It needs to be a foundational element of any business school, it needs to be offered in non-business curriculum like computer science, engineering and medicine, and it needs to be taught in a very hands-on, non-ivory tower academic manner.  As I argue in a presentation to these MBA students at Georgetown University, being an entrepreneur means facing your fears head-on.  Since most students would fail this litmus test to being an entrepreneur, universities have an opportunity -- dare I say an obligation to our nation -- to step in and help young students get past their fears.

If you're a student and you want to take control of your future and do something for our nation, I encourage you to get involved in tech startups in whatever way you can.  Spend a summer in Silicon Valley.  Read, then re-read, all these essays by Paul Graham.  Learn about best-in-class tech practices like A/B testing and Scrum agile development, how to play a computer like an instrument and generally how to be  massively efficient with technology.  Start applying those principles in your life now -- don't wait until you graduate.  Take my GeekSpeed challenge if you think you're up to it, to see how well you're doing.

I'll make this commitment to you: If you want a summer internship in silicon valley, AND you can post 2 minutes or less on the GeekSpeed challenge, leave a comment on this blog below (put the URL of your GeekSpeed challenge result in the comment).  Describe your skillsets (specifically tell me if you're technical in any way -- even just hacking javascript or general HTML makes a ton of difference) and I'll do my best to find you a place where you can spend the summer here or in another tech hub like Austin or Boston.

Here's the video of the McIntire students with Sean Shadmand of Socialize, as well as appearances from SocialBakers and Sumazi: