Your University Doesn’t Really Care About Your Startup
It’s a great place to try things. Rarely will your safety net be so high or free time so abundant. But because of unaligned incentives, “student-founder” infrastructures end up being hostile to entrepreneurship and innovation.
I learned this the hard way.
I co-founded Teech at 18, just before going to Oxford. The idea was pretty straightforward: let university students monetise their knowledge by helping younger students with their homework.
The timing felt right. I had a lot of free time, I was surrounded by smart students who could become Teechers or early employees. More importantly, trying it out had no significant costs, opportunity or otherwise.
So we moved quickly to validate both ends of our marketplace. We joined tons of Facebook groups, asking university students whether they wanted to earn cash from their bedrooms helping with simple maths. That was the easy bit; unsurprisingly, loads signed up.
Demand was trickier to check, but Facebook was useful there, too. We built a landing page, pointed a few ads towards it and saw how conversion went; the results made us confident enough to move on.
Given our limited technical skills, we quickly reached bottlenecks and decided to raise some money to go forward. €300K went into the account the week before I went to university, so induction week ended up being a bit more intense than expected.
Yet it all went wrong…why?
University tends to be the social event of our young adult lives. We’re living, studying, partying with new people and forming new bonds. But when the people around you don’t have many responsibilities other than classwork, it can feel harder to take on tough problems coming from outside of that world. Lots of times you’ll feel like you’re missing out. Lots of times you’ll feel like you’re doing everything poorly.
As things start growing, you’ll face situations that people around you will struggle to understand. At Teech, we had multiple employees, people in the middle of their careers. Two of them had kids. If we didn’t perform well as founders, they were out of a job. That’s really heavy when your friends go down to the pub at 4pm on Wednesday.
Being a founder takes precedence — school will wait.
Lecturers give homework. Professors set essay deadlines. Exams are scheduled.
But the market never stops. When you have a critical problem in your business, your users are pissed off…what do you do? As a founder, it’s not really a question — the #1 priority is your users. You don’t get to tell them, “I’ll fix that bug next week, I’ve got finals.” The phone number on Teech’s website was my personal number, and we served as Teechers of last resort: whatever the hour, if questions hadn’t been answered, we dealt with them.
That means you’re risking making people at university quite angry, maybe even failing a class if things get really complicated. If you’re a person who has to have all A’s, who can’t stand it when a teacher’s mad at you, it’s going to be really hard to manage those competing responsibilities.
And managing them is critical, because when it comes to setting your priorities, indecision quickly becomes very costly: the most likely outcome is building a shit company and getting poor grades.
Unis want fees, not equity
Universities are happy to be a sandbox for startups. They have fab labs and incubators, they sponsor hackathons and provide 3D printers. They do everything possible to market themselves to students, and today that means being open to entrepreneurship.
But as soon as they have a student whose business is growing, they get pretty agitated.
For Teech, it happened when we received a term sheet for €1M, conditional on us founders taking a year out of school to focus on the business. I went to talk with my academic advisor, explaining what we did and showing them the term sheet. The response?
“I’m sure Manchester University will be happy to accept a second-year transfer student.”
Sure, maybe that advisor was particularly condescending. Maybe we should have been braver and dropped out. But the problem is fundamental. Though universities are making some progress on providing relevant support, offering mentorship, some workshops and often free office space, incentives are still fundamentally misaligned.
So… don’t do it?
The university incubator Teech joined was useful in some regards, but no one there had any skin in the game. Employees’ jobs depended on student tuition fees, not the success of the businesses they were helping build: so they just weren’t hungry enough.
That’s a shame, because universities tend to be great pools of talent and ideas. But the environment just happens to be very toxic for entrepreneurs.
Starting a business is hard enough. Being advised by people whose interests aren’t truly aligned with yours just brings things one step closer to failure. And failure, though you might learn from it, really sucks.
As student founders, the hurdles are 10x higher; that’s why Charlotte, Lou and Pietro spend so much time organising and attending student events.
That commitment is also part of why I joined The Family: to help build infrastructure that will make it ever easier for people, regardless of where they start from, to build empires. Our jobs depend on the value we create. No value, no startups. No startups, no equity. No equity, no €€€.
So maybe we’re the place for you, maybe we’re not (apply here to find out!), but please, please don’t let that grimly lit university co-working space make you give up on what you’re building.
Send me an email (mathias@thefamily.co) before they depress you to the point of thinking those grad schemes are the only way… ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
Special thanks to Kyle, Erika and the rest of the team for edits.
