RLCIE Sponsored Co-Curricular Workshops and Seminars
A minimum of 5 co-curricular workshops will be offered each academic year. The workshops will have a limited number of participants and be open to the entire 5C community, however, priority will be given to members of the Fellows Program. Each workshop will be led by a practicing entrepreneur and/or investor and each session will include a networking opportunity between the students and guest expert(s). Workshop content will focus on the following categories:
- Product Ideation, Design and Development
- Customer Validation Methods
- Business Model Creation
- Sales and Marketing Go-To-Market Strategies
- Data Collection, Use and Security
- Financial Planning and Management
- Management and Leadership
- Fundraising
RLCIE Sponsored Professional Development Sessions
Co-curricular Professional Development Sessions will be offered throughout the academic year. These events will provide supplemental information and insight in three categories:
- Entry Level Jobs
- Sessions will examine roles available for recent graduates, common responsibilities, required skills, etc.
- Toolkit Items
- CRM (Salesforce.com)
- Project Management (JIRA)
- Collaboration (Smartsheets)
- Baseline Technologies
- Blockchain
- Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Interested in attending a workshop or event? See our upcoming event schedule HERE.
Opportunities
The opportunities below include various competitive programs for entrepreneurial funding. Some award hundreds-of-thousands of dollars and potentially require you to take a gap-year.
HMC INQ
HMC is an eight-week incubator for all students and alums of the Claremont Colleges. It is modeled after the famous YC Startup School, and carries prizes up to $50k in investment.
Techstars Accelerators
Techstars is a successful organization with numerous 3-month accelerator programs. The locations for their past accelerators include Amsterdam, Boston (with the Air Force), and Singapore. CMC alumni are known to have worked with them.
YCombinator
This is very much the gold standard for accelerator programs that help propel startups. Its top companies include Stripe, AirBnb, Coinbase, Doordash, Reddit, and Dropbox. YC is not traditionally a ‘college accelerator’; its companies range from teams that have completed entire careers to young college students. At the very least, it is worth checking out their resources.
Plug and Play
Plug and Play provides a unique network for connecting startups with talent and investors.
AngelPad
Consistently receiving high marks from MIT’s seed accelerator benchmark, this ultra-competitive accelerator lasts 12-weeks. While its acceptance rate is less than 1%, all of its graduated-companies are worth at least $14m.
NYU Tandon Future Labs
This institution has various programs to support ventures based in New York City.
I Am SoGal Black Founder Startup Grant (broken link)
This opportunity hopes to change that black women entrepreneurs make up less than 0.5% of VC-funding. The applications are rolling, and offer $5k to $10k for black female or black nonbinary entrepreneurs.
Peter Thiel Fellowship
Created by the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir, and Founder’s Fund, this fellowship gives $100,000 for students to turn their idea(s) into a company. It requires students to take a leave of absence from school for 2 years. The process is very competitive, but additionally provides unique mentorship from an accomplished team.
Venture for America
This fellowship opportunity is for students about to graduate and interested in a career within venture-capital. The fellowship is a 2-year-program with its own training camp, job network to apply to, and accelerator. Fellows who end up founding a company years later receive direct support from VfA.
Skill-Building
Below is a list of resources helpful for learning about or building parts of a startup, from the financial and legal aspects to coding & design.
All students are recommended to sign up for the Github Student Developer Pack, even if you have never written a line of code. It provides hundreds-of-dollars-worth of free tech resources that can help bootstrap any startup. One only needs to make an account and provide proof that they’re currently enrolled in school. Some free resources include:
- 2 years of domain registrations
- $200+ worth of credits with cloud companies (AWS, DigitalOcean, Microsoft Azure)
- 6 months-access to premium coding tutorials
- Waived transaction fees on Stripe payment processing
- CodeAcademy
- Github Student Pack
- This provides free access to numerous premium coding tutorials, including Educative, Frontend Masters, and DataCamp
- ReactJS Official Documentation
- Learning ReactJS teaches industry-standard web and app development
- Corona SDK
- Corona SDK is a fantastic way to learn more fundamentals regarding application development and computer science. It has numerous guides, and lets you make extremely simple mobile apps that actually run on your phone.
- ProductHunt
- 99Design
- This website has several 10-15 minute tutorials and guides on specific aspects of visual design, from creating logos to typography lessons
- Inc.com’s Tips & Tools for Online Marketing Research
- Alexa
- This powerful tool allows you to perform in-depth SEO and marketing research on specific brands and communities. It can help you understand the digital presence of potential competitors, or recognize where your own company’s digital presence stands.
- “Find your Product Market Fit” – San Francisco Product School
- “How to find your product market fit” – YC, David Rusenko (founder of Weebly)
- Market research & competitive analysis – U.S. Small Business Administration
Job Hunt
Below are tips and resources for finding startup jobs perfect for you.
AngelList is a platform for startup founders, employees, and investors to build new connections and find new opportunities within the industry.
Tips for using AngelList
Its feature-set is powerful, from angel-syndicate creation to filtering through openings at startups around the world. For the CIE Fellows Candidates, the latter is most important. When you create a profile on AngelList, the process is similar to other websites (i.e. LinkedIn or Handshake). It’s recommended that you populate and update your Angel.co profile similar to how you would on LinkedIn–the more concise and enticing your profile is, the more likely you are to hear back from applications.
Assuming you’ve created an AngelList account with an accurate profile, you can now proceed searching for jobs. You can find Angel.co’s jobs page right here. Immediately, you will see numerous startups posting job listings. The experience level ranges from senior engineer to ‘intern’. To find internships on this page, it is recommended that you take advantage of filters, similar to the image below. The keyword to find is “intern” or “internship”.
Now, how do you optimize your internship hunt so you don’t waste time applying for already-filled positions? Here are some recommended tips.
Firstly, make sure that you have the jobs page sorted by “Newest”. This helps you make sure that you’re not applying to year-old postings. From there, pay close attention to the details of each startup and its job description(s). The badges below are your best friend in understanding whether a company is great for you. Growing fast and recently funded are great signs that a company is not only experiencing positive growth, but can also offer monetary compensation for your work.
When you click apply for a job, a form similar to the image below should display. When you “write a note” to the hiring contact, treat it like a cover letter. Highlight any professional experiences that are most relevant to the position you are applying for.
Additionally, make sure to read the entire job description. Some entrepreneurs prefer to communicate with applicants outside of AngelList, and will mention that applications have to be sent via email or LinkedIn instead. Do not waste time sending an application via AngelList when the description says “Email CEO@startup.com with your resume and a cover letter”.
BuiltIn has openings for various tech startups, ranging from just-launched to Series B or C. They divide these postings by location, specifically American cities with established or growing entrepreneurship ecosystems.
Dribbble is a portfolio and networking platform for anyone interested in, or hoping to pursue a career in, visual design. The platform enables users to showcase their work and connect with other designers in a range of disciplines.
Helpful Media
Below are a selection of documentaries, books, and other entrepreneurship-related media recommended by Claremont entrepreneurs and faculty. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to reach out to the CIE Student Leadership team.
- Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: Harper, 1985).
- Eric Ries The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Business, 2011).
- Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle How Google Works (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014).
- Ray Dalio’s Principles
- Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise by Byers, Dorf and Nelson
- “How do you evaluate and encourage startups?” by Steven N. Kaplan, CMC Athenaeum
- YCombinator YouTube Channel
- Resources include advice from YC’s CEO, previously co-founder of Twitch.tv, and other YCombinator partners
- “The Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make” by Michael Seibel
- “Growth for Startups” by Gustaf Alstromer
- Bloomberg Podcasts
- Bloomberg offers a variety of well-produced podcasts regarding entrepreneurship and the global economy
- How I Built This with Guy Raz, NPR
- Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
- Harvard Business School Resources
- This website has numerous world-class videos and books for learning more about entrepreneurship, in addition to engaging case studies and articles on current events in business.
- Stanford d.School
- Stanford’s Design School provides numerous free resources on idea generation, including self-guided coursework and reading. Their content is extremely insightful and recommended for anyone wanting to learn how to design a product.