Entrepreneurship Bootcamp

This last weekend hosted the Tepper entrepreneurship bootcamp. A bootcamp is supposed to be a "drinking from the firehose" experience related to the subject. It was held at the same time as the two finance bootcamps, so people did have to choose between one or the other. A little surprisingly, attendance at this bootcamp was also charged - to cover speakers and food, apparently.

The camp was very heavily focused on innovation and designing products (and not services oddly). There were a lot of First Years in the camp; a fair amount of the content was directed at how to start up a company and resources available - not really relevant for First Years. Given how tuition is ncreasing, probably not even relevant for when we directly leave the program.

But the good takeaways I got from it was that you don't need to have an idea in order to start your own business. There are apparently more people in the technical side of the campus that have ideas just no business knowledge to push it forward. Second, an innovation panel seemed to state that marketing the product to people was probably the most important thing - there was a very heavy focus on marketing. Third, I met a new faculty member - Dave Mawhinney - and a couple of venture capital lawyers at the mixer on the friday night. I was able to put into practice some of the networking tips Jonna Martin had presented from earlier. I have no interest at the moment in venture capital or starting my own business, but I figured it's useful information to have.

Also, Friday night was my first introduction to Hofbrauhouse, a HUGE german beer pub. Highly recommended.