The Waterloo Engineering |Spectrum 28 Student Venture Program, which launches its first pop up classes on team building and idea selection this June, supports the entrepreneurship ecosystem at University of Waterloo by giving student teams direct access to Silicon Valley industry and faculty mentorship, plus a shot at part of the $2 million seed funding from Spectrum 28.
“By partnering with alumni, in this case Lyon Wong, founder of Spectrum 28, we are able to support our senior students at the earliest stages of entrepreneurship, which will make for stronger, more successful startups,” says Pearl Sullivan, Dean of Engineering.”
Alumni
Driven
What makes the program unique is that Spectrum 28 works closely with faculty from Waterloo Engineering to mentor the teams as well as jointly making the final funding decisions
Seen as a precursor to the existing campus incubator or accelerator programs, this program is designed to create strongly led teams with a robust mentorship network and access to much-needed seed funding.
The idea for collaboration came from Wong, a Waterloo Engineering alum (SYDE ’03), who saw that entrepreneurial student teams at Waterloo were missing out on the twin advantages of having a closer connection with engineering faculty members as well as having graduate students or faculty members as co-founders. Wong says he has seen firsthand how close collaboration between senior students and faculty at leading universities bodes well for startup success.
Mentorship and Access
“It’s not enough to just have bright, hard-working students who dream of entrepreneurial ventures. They need to understand that having a diverse team of co-founders that includes both graduate students and/or faculty with deep technical knowledge is a distinct advantage when creating a startup that has any hope of long-term success,” says Wong. ‘Too many teams struggle because they are strictly undergraduate focused and they aren’t accessing the mentorship from the experts in the Faculty of Engineering or in Silicon Valley. The core value in this program is access and mentorship, but $2 million worth of funding is also enough money to help multiple startups,” says Wong.
To assist in selecting teams who will vie for the mentorship and seed funding opportunity, one pop up class focuses on how to select defensible ideas that have the right market fit, while a second class will help selected students identify personal leadership traits, including choosing other co-founders to form diverse and long-lasting teams.
Wong acknowledges that his firm is interested in funding early stage startups who are solving the deep problems of the world. “It would be exciting to know that we exposed a problem that no one had solved and that Waterloo solved it,” says Wong.
For more information on the program, see our Waterloo Engineering | Spectrum 28 Student Venture Program webpage, or attend a drop in information session on May 25 at Velocity Start, 2nd SCH, 5-7 pm.