Executive Director, The Garage
February 23, 2017
Al Cubbage: Good morning. Thank you for joining us for the NULC Insider Series. My name is Al Cubbage. I'm the vice president of university relations at Northwestern University. I'm a Medill alum a couple times over both in journalism and integrated marketing communications, and also an NULC member, so I'm very pleased to be here.
We're very fortunate to have with us today, Melissa Kaufman, who is the executive director of The Garage at Northwestern. The Garage is really the hub for student involvement in entrepreneurship here on the Evanston campus. For those of you who've been on the NULC Insider Series before, you know that the series really gives members of the Leadership Circle a chance to learn about some of the new developments here at Northwestern and hear from some of our really great faculty and University leaders, but of course, I want to say right off the bat to thank all of you who are members of the leadership circle for your support. It's really important for Northwestern University. We're very fortunate to have a broad base of alumni support, but the leadership donors obviously are a key member of that group, so thanks for your good help to us in a lot of different strategic areas, and thank you for your generosity.
Let's introduce Melissa just for a moment. Like I said, she's the executive director of The Garage, and we'll talk about what that really is in just a moment. She's been with us for almost, well, about a year and a half now since fall of 2015. She's originally a Dartmouth College grad, although we won't hold that against her, and has been a Silicon Valley startup veteran as well. She's had significant experience working in consumer technology companies, Google and YouTube, and also had her own marketing agency called Storylark.
What we're going to really focus on today with Melissa is building billion-dollar people, not just billion-dollar companies. I think entrepreneurship, sometimes, people think about startups and the cashing in and making a lot of money, but it's also important, I think, about what do we do for our students? How do our students learn from being entrepreneurial, whether or not they go into an entrepreneurial adventure of their own? We'll get to that just to think.
A couple of real mechanical things, quite a few have already submitted questions for Melissa, which is great. That makes my job easier, and I appreciate your doing that, and we'll certainly try to get to as many of those questions from our audience as we can. If you are joining us by computer and you'd like to submit a question during the session, you can do so by typing into the Q and A box that is in the bottom right corner of your computer screen. Just feel free to shoot us a note, and we'll try to get to that as well as many of the other questions as we can. We should be around 45 minutes for the discussion, so we'll try to move quickly and get to as many of your questions as we can.
Melissa, over to you. Let's get started. First of all, what is The Garage? I mean tell us about it. It's actually a space in a parking garage, right?
Melissa Kaufman: It is. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for having me. Let me just give you a geographic context before we get started depending on when you were last on campus or when you graduated. The Garage is located on the second floor of SPAC in the North Parking Garage, so for those of you that were here a while ago, there used to be a big dirt parking lot next to SPAC, and now, there's a seven-story parking structure. On the second floor of the North Parking Garage is The Garage.
The Garage is a hub for student entrepreneurship and innovation for all students at Northwestern. That means we draw students from every single academic program in school from undergraduate freshmen to MBAs to PhD students. It's a place we've really given entrepreneurship a home on the campus. The students that are interested in starting their own companies, have started their own companies, have a place where they can come together and be supported by faculty, staff and alums who also share a passion for entrepreneurship. The space itself is about 11,000 square feet, and we're currently incubating 60 student-founded startups in our facility. We're open to all students, Monday through Friday during regular business hours, and the students that are incubating their startups get 24/7 access to our space.
Al Cubbage: I know that there's been a great deal of emphasis on entrepreneurship among students both at the undergraduate and graduate level but really now, particularly at the undergraduate here at Northwestern, so why did Northwestern create it? How did it come to be?
Melissa Kaufman: Yeah. Before there was The Garage, there was actually quite a bit of entrepreneurial activity happening on campus. A lot of students were interested in entrepreneurship or were starting their own companies, but there was no home. They were incubating in coffee shops, their dorm room, faculty member offices, really were quite nomadic. The university and the administration and the trustees of the university felt it was really important to give these students, the student founders a home, which is what The Garage has really become for a lot of their ventures. By giving them a home, it's allowed us to create a community of students that are interested and alums and faculty that want to come together and support them.
Al Cubbage: I know that there were significant donations for The Garage itself to actually help in the creation of it, and I think part of that was the feeling that, gee, Northwestern needs to get on board with this. Is this something that is pretty widespread in higher ed?
Melissa Kaufman: It is. For most universities, if they don't have a program like this or a space like this already, they soon will. I know Northwestern looked very closely at what some other institutions have done including Harvard, which has a space called the I-Lab, and every, all these communities are really built for …
Al Cubbage: Okay. This is a test to see if audio has returned. At this time, we were having some technical difficulties, so what we're trying to do now is come up with a workaround, which is a good entrepreneurial way to approach the problem. If so, then hopefully, we can make it work with Melissa and me crouching by a computer, which again is a good entrepreneurial thing to do. Does that seem like it's okay?
Melissa Kaufman: Right.
Al Cubbage: Okay, great. Well, again, this is Al Cubbage coming back in with Melissa Kaufman. I will say very briefly that when I was in radio as a college student, I once did the entire 15-minute newscast without bothering to turn the microphone on because I didn't know that little red button meant that you had to turn it on. I want to assure everyone that I did not make that same mistake now. I have learned something since college, but we will get back to Melissa and the important discussion again. We apologize for the technical difficulties, and are ready to go again.
Melissa, I think we were talking a little bit about two things. One, is this something that's widespread in higher ed? Then, really again, kind of the basic thing of, what's the purpose? I mean, are you trying to create entrepreneurs? Are you trying to create companies, or what's it all about?
Melissa Kaufman: Sure.
Al Cubbage: Hit both of those, if you—
Melissa Kaufman: Let me talk a little bit about the trend in academia. If schools haven't built a space like this already, a lot of them are working on it. We're not necessarily the earliest adopter. There were some other schools that were ahead of us, but I would say that we're early in the pack, and we've definitely become a leader. I always stress the importance of building these spaces for the uniqueness of your community and your campus, and so for our campus, it was really important that we're building a home for these student entrepreneurs. There's really no right way to do this. Other programs will put their alumni and their faculty projects and their students in one space. Our space, like others around the country, will continue to evolve for us with the needs of our student. Everything we do in this space is incredibly student-driven based on their needs.
A little bit too with the goals and the mission, so unlike a commercial incubator program that you guys may be familiar with, we're in academia. It's really important to remember that. Our goals are really different. In a lot of commercial incubators, their goals will be around dollars raised or exits or value created, things like that. Since this is academia, that's why I want to stress today's topic, which is around building billion-dollar people.
What that means for me is that the skill set that the students learn, that the creation of trying to start a new venture from creative problem solving to teamwork to effective communication, how to negotiate, how to network, how to get things done with scarce resources, is an incredibly valuable skillset for any job in the modern workplace. Whether they go on to be a doctor or a lawyer or a business person, or they do become an entrepreneur, those are the types of people that we need in the world and that society really is going to value.
At The Garage, I would say in our first year, 90% of our students went on to take a job after graduation. Now, most of them took a more innovative job than they might have thought of otherwise, so I have a student right now who's kind of in the final rounds of a job with Tesla. He has this great quote from before where he thought he was just going to be an engineer at a company in the Midwest that probably no one had ever heard of, but now, he was so proud that he had made it to the final rounds with a company like Tesla. I think it's the mindset that we're instilling in these students, that entrepreneurial mindset and toolkit that they can take with them anywhere that they go.
Al Cubbage: In order to do that, obviously, The Garage has to provide a variety of resources to the students. I mean, sure, they're taking classes. I mean, actual academic classes, but this is more kind of providing space and training entrepreneurship to an extent, correct?
Melissa Kaufman: Correct. Yeah. We inherit a lot of student projects from all over the University, some of them formed in dorm rooms, but a lot of them are forming in the classroom. There are two main entrepreneurial teaching hubs, academic hubs at Northwestern. One is inside of Kellogg. One is the Farley Center inside of the McCormick School of Engineering. Then, there's a smattering of classes across the other schools, but we do inherit a lot of those project-based class projects, so before there was The Garage, a lot of those projects are just getting dropped because there was no place to continue them outside of the classroom. Now, at The Garage, we work really close too with those academic centers to bring those projects and give them a home.
I always kind of talked about, The Garage does not specialize as much in ideation, the first step of where do you get your idea from, but really the next step of the entrepreneur pipeline, which is validation, so, can you find product market fit? Who is your customer? Is this actually a business? Then, if we can get them to the next stage, which is a growth stage company, that's where we can't really help them anymore. At that point, you need to get an office and raise some money and hire a staff, and that's really outside of the academic scope of our program, but we do work to build the off-roads to make sure that they have a place to go afterwards.
In terms of what the resources that we provide along that journey for the students, so, the main thing that I mentioned before was giving them space and a physical home so we can incubate those companies. We call the 60 companies that we put into our incubator our residency programs, so those students become residents of The Garage. They get special perks and benefits, primarily being 24/7 access to the space so they can use it as their office and home base for their venture, but we also do a weekly dinner for them that we call family dinner. We invite prominent entrepreneurs and founders. We have both the co-founders at Kickstarter this week come in and speak to the students about his entrepreneurial journey.
We do quarterly field trips. We took them down to a Bulls game, the Bulls versus the Mavericks game, to meet with Mark Cuban. He gave them 30 minutes of his wisdom and advice, 10 students that had to compete for that opportunity. They get access to our prototyping lab inside of The Garage where we have 3-D printers and some prototyping equipment. They also get the coveted Garage hoodie, which you would have seen in the last picture. We were on the floor of the Bulls game, so these are hard to get on campus. You can only get one if you've incubated your startup at The Garage. Students really wear them with pride, and it's great because students will stop other students on the street, say, "Hey, where did you get that hoodie?" It's a great opportunity for them to talk about their own company or startup that they're working on.
Al Cubbage: The Garage is a fashion-forward group. It's good to know. It's good to know. Actually, you were talking a little bit about the students. Let's continue on that vein for just a moment. When I'm out there, I see a lot of different students and different groups and all that, but give us a little bit of information about who are the students who are using The Garage. Are they strictly McCormick students? Are they from throughout the University? Give us this little background on who's actually up there.
Melissa Kaufman: Sure. I always believe that a diverse community is a healthier ecosystem, so the more students we can pull in from every year of study, from every school here at Northwestern, from every program, just the healthier that the overall quality of the ideas are because a lot of these students are helping each other. The entrepreneurial journey, if any of you have been founders before, there's always one team that's one step behind you and there's one team that's in front of you. It's the expectation that the team that's one step in front of you will kind of reach back behind and help you up, and similarly, when you get a little further along, you should help somebody who's one step behind you. It's important to have a diversity of skill set and experience in the space so that that can happen.
As you can see on the pie charts, if you guys are following along on the slides, it's pretty healthy in terms of breakdown from the undergraduate population and what year of study they are. We get students from every single school except for Bienen right now, which we're working on. I'd love to have more music majors in the program. We tend to naturally attract a lot of McCormick students because they're engineers, they're natural builders, and a lot of the Kellogg students since they're kind of natural business leaders, but we also get students from master's programs, PhD programs. We have JD-MBAs in the space, students studying everything from computer science to journalism. It's really nice and blended.
It's one of the few places on campus, I've heard from the Kellogg students in particular, the only time that they ever see undergraduate students when they're here on campus. They usually only see other Kellogg students. The Garage is one of the few places where students from across every school and across every area of study get to meet each other and kind of bond together over the fact that they're all interested in building new ideas.
Al Cubbage: Great. Yeah. I'd like to say that times that I’m up there seems like a real mixed group. There are students from all kinds of areas. Jumping around a little bit, I realize, but actually, that made me think. Talk a little bit about some of the projects that the students have actually been working on. I know, for example, there's one that was like an indoor drone or something like that. What sort of things are the students coming up with?
Melissa Kaufman: Yeah. Let me give you a couple of examples because it's really across the full gamut. We welcome anybody who's interested in building a new idea, so that can be for profit, not for profit, and then any, every single industry you can possibly think of. It could be a small business all the way through to a venture-backable business. The company that you're referencing, Al, is called Intelligent Flying Machines. They go by IFM. They make flying robots that use computer vision to monitor warehouse inventory for auto manufacturers. Today, in a lot of auto manufacturing facilities, if you can't find a part that you need to run the assembly line, you send an employee out with a barcode scanner, and they start looking for it.
What this technology allows is drones and flying robots to scan the inventory racks during evenings when the factory's not running and make sure that everything is where it's supposed to be and check that against an inventory system. That's a project that's actually led by an undergraduate. He does have some PhD and master's students that are on the project with him. We were really proud of him this fall because he was a finalist at TechCrunch's startup battlefield, which was made popular in the HBO show Silicon Valley. He presented on stage to the who's who of Silicon Valley, and is doing really well.
Two other examples, just to kind of show you guys the breadth of what's going on, another project I want to talk about it's called Tiltas. It's run by a woman out of Kellogg, and it's a social good company that's working to connect formerly incarcerated men with employment opportunities. She's done really well on the pitching competition circuit. She recently won the Kapor Capital People Ops Tech competition. She won $50,000 in Oakland, California.
Then, a final example of one that I'd love to pitch because of the residency is called Unruled. It's an undergraduate project from four students. I think they're all from a different school of study here at Northwestern. It's a sustainable notebook for creative thinkers, and they just launched their Kickstarter project on Monday, so if anybody wants to support them, you just Google Unruled in Kickstarter. You can check out that project, see their video, and if you like Unruled notebooks, they have no lines but perforated, spiral bound notebooks, that's what they're working on.
Al Cubbage: Interesting. Interesting. Now, I know that there is an entrepreneurial competition called Cupid's Cup, which is about student entrepreneurial thing. My understanding is that we've got that here at Northwestern this year, and in fact, we also have a student group that's competing in that, right?
Melissa Kaufman: We do, yeah. I was lucky enough to travel out to Baltimore to the Under Armour headquarters. Their founder, Kevin Plank, CEO and founder of Under Armour actually became his entrepreneurial journey as a student entrepreneur selling roses on campus, which is why it's called Cupid's Cup. Now, that he's made a substantial fortune, he's reinvesting back in the student entrepreneurs. They announced this annual business idea competition, usually his alma mater, which is the University of Maryland called Cupid's Cup for $100,000 prize and have student and recent alumni teams compete for that prize.
At semifinals, there were 11 companies that competed. We had three alums who are competing, three alumni teams. One of them was lucky enough to make it to finals, so one of the five, it's called Luna Lights, and this is a technology that helps elderly adults who are maybe living in an assisted living home, the problem that they're trying to solve is that a lot of adults, older adults will fall in the middle of the night when they go to the bathroom, and that can cause a lot of problems. What this does is when they get out of bed, it not only illuminates a path of lights to the restroom, but it also gathers some analytics and data so if you see anything like somebody's getting up quite more frequently, you can send that to their care teams. Maybe that that person's experiencing some problems. Really great mission. They are a finalist team for the finals here on March 30th. It'll be in Pick-Staiger Hall, and we're hoping that they can take home the big cash prize.
Al Cubbage: Well, speaking as an aging baby boomer, it sounds like something that might be really relevant to me, unfortunately, but we'll set that aside. We had some good questions from listeners. Let's jump over to a couple of those. We have a really good question, I think, just about what is … For people who are part of the Alumni Admissions Council, and we have some alums who are very good about volunteering their time on that, what do you think it is that we want to be able to say about The Garage to prospective students and their parents when they're talking to them about The Garage? What sort of messages do you think would be best? What does The Garage really provide, what kind of environment, that kind of thing?
Melissa Kaufman: Yeah. Everything that we do at The Garage is extracurricular, so it's outside of the classroom. I think again, kind of to my billion-dollar people, I think it's a great experience for any student regardless of what they choose to pursue after school to participate at The Garage or even just show up for one of our events. You can hang out in our cafe and have a cup of coffee. For those of you that are more interested in seeing a real look under the hood of what we do here at The Garage, I encourage you to look for the upcoming article about The Garage in the spring issue of Northwestern magazine. This is a really great full feature. I think it's a six-page spread. It'll talk about the different teams that are in The Garage, kind of where their ideas came from, what they're working on, how we engage with alums to come in as guest speakers, and really gives you a feel for the space. There's some great photos of some of the students working as well.
Al Cubbage: Yep. That article or that issue of the magazine, it should be delivered in the next week or 10 days to all of our alums, so that's a good timely thing right there. Another couple questions we have from listeners, I think, who are worrying about … not worrying about, but interested in about how do alums get involved in entrepreneurship activities there, and are there corporate partnerships that exist? Is The Garage actually seeking that sort of direct support, or how does that work?
Melissa Kaufman: Yeah. Let me answer those one at a time. First, for corporate partnerships, The Garage itself does not currently have any corporate partnerships. We do work with some corporate sponsors and we encourage them to engage as financial sponsors for prize money for some of the events that we do. In addition to Cupid's Cup, which is Kevin Plank, Under Armour's competition that's coming to campus, we have our own that's just for student founders at Northwestern called VentureCat, previously called Northwestern University Venture Challenge, but we've rebranded it, which is our annual student focused startup competition.
Also, we run a 10-week accelerator program during the summer that we call Wildfire, and there's a demo day at the end of that, so we've had corporate partners put up the prize money, usually something around eight to $10,000 that's divvied up amongst the teams to help them with their student ventures. We like to see those corporate dollars going directly to helping the students pursue their projects.
In terms of alums, a couple ways that alumni can get involved, we'd love to have you sign up for our monthly newsletter. If you go to our website right now, thegarage.northwestern.edu, there's a box at the top. Subscribe to The Garage newsletter. That's just a monthly great summary that my marketing team has put together that'll kind of show you what's going on, talk about student projects in the space, upcoming events, and really just to kind of give you a real flavor for what's going on.
If you are somebody who thinks you could contribute to this community, either in terms of your expertise, maybe you've been a founder or an investor or you've worked in a big corporation so you just know a lot of things, we'd love to have you join our expert network. You can think about this as just kind of a really nicely curated list of alums for the students. That's for them to reach out to. For example, let's say you have a question. A couple companies right now, they're starting beverage companies, so we have some great alums out there. I think some of you are on the phone today who have started beverage companies and just even being able for those students to reach out and say, "Hey, can I get 15 minutes of your time to ask you a question about this since you're now a subject matter expert?" that's really, really helpful to the students.
If you would be interested in occasionally speaking with a student for 15 or 20 minutes, you can just email us at thegarage@northwestern.edu. Helpful if you can give us a link to your LinkedIn or a bio so we know what kind of expert you are so we can send students your direction. Then, finally, although it's not an option on the website yet, but if you'd like to support The Garage in our operational budget through your annual leadership gift, you can do so by just writing The Garage in the … I'm not sure what the form says. I think it says, like, where should this money go?
Al Cubbage: Designation [crosstalk 00:23:19].
Melissa Kaufman: Designation or something like. Just write in The Garage. We'll make sure that it goes to supporting all the work we're doing with student entrepreneurs.
Al Cubbage: Great. Now, is there actually an angel investor group that works with The Garage or is that not really something you're in just yet?
Melissa Kaufman: We work with several of the different angel groups in the Chicago area. Again, I was talking at the beginning about how we move students all the time through validations. The vast majority of our student ventures are not ready for investment. Most of them will go on to take jobs, and this is just a project and a great speaking point for them in their interviews when they're going to go find their full-time job after graduation, but that said, about 10% of our students do actually find validation while they're at The Garage and are ready to take their venture to the next level. For those ones, we do have a lot of angel investors and venture capitalists that we've built relationships with. The University has also put together something called NUSeeds, which is a $4 million venture fund for investing in student-founded startups. The checks are in the 10 to $100,000 size. That's usually part of the seed round of funding that the startup is taking, so it's kind of a nice way of us to support them as they leave the university to pursue their venture full-time. Yeah.
Al Cubbage: Great. Then, I guess the kind of a follow-up question that we got from a listener about that is that the capacity is obviously somewhat limited in The Garage. I mean, just space-wise, so how do you try to get as many students in there as possible? Actually, I think this is not likely, but do you think, what are you going to do if there isn't interest, or is that not a worry?
Melissa Kaufman: Yeah. So far, even in the first year and a half, it's just been phenomenal to see how many students are interested in this, want to pursue this. It's really, I think, changed the culture amongst the students that innovation is cool, and that's been really, really great to see. We do take 60 … Incubating 60 student-founded teams really is kind of our limit from an incubation standpoint. That means there can be up to 200 students at a given time who are in the space working if everybody showed up at the same time, which they never do. That's kind of our cap from an incubation standpoint.
We do see over 1,000 visitors a month that come in for our events and our workshops. We do office hours with a number of experts, people who've started companies before and could give general business advice all the way down to accounting office hours, legal office hours, IP office hours, marketing office hours from different experts that come in. Any student can access those resources, not just the ones that are incubating their startup, so it is quite busy sometimes when we're at full capacity right now.
I think to your question of what do we do if interest wanes, it's a very student-driven space, like I said, so everything that we've done so far continues to be around kind of the needs and the interest of the students. We'll continue to do that, so I don't expect this to be a static space at all. One example is last year, we had two classrooms, and this year, we only have one. The reason that that is, is that we took our second smaller classroom, and I realized … Coming from Silicon Valley, I thought that a lot of students were going to be building apps and websites and digital products, and it turned out, I think given that Northwestern has a really strong engineering school and Chicago has deep manufacturing roots as a city, we have a lot of students that wanted to build physical product. We took that second classroom, and when we turned it into a makerspace, so we put all of our 3D printers and some light CNC milling machines and sewing machine and some light prototyping materials.
Here's a picture of a student in the space right here that can take a look at, and turn that into a makerspace. If you need to go somewhere where you need to use a drill or swing a hammer or do some like light electronics work, there's now a space in The Garage where you can do that. What's great about everything being flexible and on wheels and having polished cement floors is that we can continue to evolve the space based on what the students are looking for.
Al Cubbage: Great. Actually, that was a question that came in from a listener was, are there any kind of academic prerequisites that students have to have to become involved in The Garage?
Melissa Kaufman: There's not. Again, any student can come to The Garage to do things like office hours or meet with a teammate, hanging out in our café. You can have a free cup of coffee and talk to a professor, an alum, or a friend about a business idea. For the incubation program, we look for three things when we're accepting those teams. We do get more applications than we have space for, so we usually get about 80, but I think this quarter, we got 80 applications for 60 spots. The three things that we look for are you have some semblance of a team, so it's not just you by yourself, doesn't have to be a co-founder but an intern or another student that wants to work on this with you.
We look for some kind of a recommendation from somebody who's in the program, or a faculty member who's had you in class, just vouch for you and say that you're going to actually spend your time working on this. The third thing we look for is traction, so just that the students have done something, have you done a little bit of customer research, have you built a prototype, just to see if they really are in validation or if they're still in the ideation stage.
I'd say for those companies that we do turn away from incubating and making The Garage their physical office, they usually fall in the two categories. Either they are a hard sciences company that needs a wet lab space, and that's something that we just aren't built for. We don't have roof venting and all of that. If their ideas are kind of too advanced, we don't have the right resources for them, and we can encourage them … There are some other places around Chicago that we can send them. Then, the other one is the teams that are probably still really in the ideation phase. We encourage them to take a class or keep working on your idea or just come to The Garage and come to our office hours and meet with some experts to learn more.
Al Cubbage: One of the things that a couple people have asked is really, how do you measure success? I mean, it's easy if it's an entrepreneurship thing where the goal is to launch a startup and get investors. That's not really where The Garage is here at Northwestern though, right?
Melissa Kaufman: No, it's not. Again, let's go back to billion-dollar people. Our success will really be measured a couple years out when I hear from students that The Garage was kind of a fundamental and defining part of their Northwestern experience. We're already hearing that from the students who have graduated last year. Again, a lot of them do go into tech. They're working in companies like Uber and Pandora. Some of them are on the screen: Uber and Deloitte, and so I really look forward to seeing what happens with those students' career. Maybe some of them will go on to be entrepreneurs down the road, but I think that they can always kind of point back to The Garage is maybe where they caught that little bit of innovation bug. Maybe it helped them put them on the career trajectory that they were, we're hoping to be on and maybe it'll even inspired them to be founders. I hope that they will join the rest of great alums in giving back and coming and telling their founder story to the students.
We've actually already had some students who graduated last year who are full-time entrepreneurs and have done things like … With one student team, they were undergraduates that went to HAX, which is a hardware accelerator in China where they worked on their idea for three months. They've been accepted into a business-to-business accelerator in San Francisco, so they're living there now. They drink Soylent for breakfast and work out of their living room with their other colleagues. They're truly living the founder lifestyle, but we've had them come back to campus and talk about their experience.
Similarly, we had a student who's working at LinkedIn. He's in the associate rotational program. He's in the HR department right now. He came back and talked to students about what he wished he had known when he was applying for his tech job just from the recruiter standpoint because he's now sat on the other side of the table. I think that just having our alums come back as speakers and as mentors and to work with the students and again, reaching back to people who are one step behind you and helping them further along is critical to the success of this ecosystem.
Al Cubbage: I've certainly found that in my class that, I teach in the IMC program, is while I like to think that the students are listening to my words of wisdom, the most popular speakers are when I bring back someone who was in my class two or three years ago, and he's now working for an ad agency or a PR company or a major corporation. They talk about what they are doing now and what they had learned here at Northwestern. I think having an alumni connection really makes a big difference. The Garage is starting to churn out some alums, so that'll be a good network for you to have in the coming years.
Melissa Kaufman: It will. I think when we talk a little bit about the space constraints and how do we continue to strengthen the program, I think it'll be the reinvestment of our alums back into this community of students that will really be what continues to strengthen the program since we can't physically pack more students into the space, but they can continue enrich and deepen their experience and help them along with their network.
Al Cubbage: Great. A couple questions came in from listeners while we're doing this. One is, did the teams that are already there, are they pretty much an established team, or do they have openings to add students during the course of the process?
Melissa Kaufman: Great question. Sometimes, they're a big team because they came out of a class, and maybe there's four of them in there. They've all been working together for a while. We will take up to six students per team. Sometimes, we can even go a little higher if there's some special circumstances, and that's really just, again, about a capacity issue but we do have students that will add new team members throughout the process, new co-founders. We even welcome in students from other schools, particularly for our summer program. Again, it's called Wildfire. That's our pre-accelerator program, 10 weeks full-time, working on your startup. It's a great opportunity to invite others to come in as well.
Al Cubbage: Good. Then, another one is, one of the things that I think here is increasing awareness of sort of the social consciousness or social policy. Are there projects currently, you think, that are focused on social policy issues being done at The Garage, or is it—
Melissa Kaufman: That's good. It's a newer theme right now, and I'd say that I'm starting to see the basic, like the beginning activities of it. A lot of those students are still in the ideation phase, but I do have one team that I know is applying for the spring that's working on a social policy idea and engaging other millennials in social causes, so I'm excited to see where that one goes.
Al Cubbage: Good. I'm going to try and get to squeeze in the last few questions from our NULC—
Melissa Kaufman: I'm happy to follow up with anybody on this call afterwards. If anyone would like to learn more, I could talk about The Garage all day long. I love it. I love my students. I'm very proud of the work we've done, so happy to chat with you guys offline.
Al Cubbage: You had mentioned that Chicago and the Midwest and all that is, there's always the talk about, well, are we entrepreneurial enough here in the Midwest? What's your take on Chicago and really Northwestern specifically as a place for entrepreneurship?
Melissa Kaufman: Yeah. For Chicago, in general, coming from … I spent the last 10 years in Silicon Valley, and I kind of asked my peers before I came out here, what do you think of Chicago as a tech scene? They said, "Oh, it's a flyover area. There's nothing … There's no tech scene there." That's absolutely not true. There's a ton of tech right now in Chicago. There's a vibrant community that's warming. It's just a very small community compared to Silicon Valley. It's a very new community, so it's a couple years behind but you're really starting to see a lot of these. As Chicago itself puts down hubs that are similar to The Garage, spaces like 1871, there's a new one called mHUB, that's really getting the community to fuse around supporting each other and having an entrepreneurial community, so that is a really great thing to see.
For Northwestern, in general, I would say that in general, this is a pretty risk-averse student population for the most part. These students have worked incredibly hard to get into Northwestern or into Kellogg, and for the most part, that means they've achieved, achieved, achieved their whole lives on tests and in the classroom, et cetera. One of the things that has been really important for The Garage is to give these students a safe space that they can fail and that they can try new things because that's not something that comes naturally to them. It is something they do not want to talk about.
When we do our weekly family dinner with all the students, they're incubating at The Garage, before we have our guest speaker on, we'll invite student teams to come up and talk about successes, so what's going really well with your startup? "Oh, we launched our Kickstarter. We sold to our first customer. We finished our product. We love for everyone to check it out," and we clap and we celebrate, but then we ask the question, what have you failed at this week? Really, that's to encourage students to come up and talk about, what are you trying that's new, that's different, that's not working out the way you expect it, and the most important question for failure, which is, what did you learn from it? It's like pulling teeth. The students do not want to get up. They do not want to talk about their failures because it's not something that they're used to, but slowly, and now, the new rule is they can't eat the actual dinner until somebody comes up and shares a failure.
Slowly, sheepishly, one of them will come up and will tell a story about something that's not going so well. Those students have told me afterwards that that's been an incredibly cathartic experience for them to know that it's okay to stand up and talk about something that's not going great, and it's also been really great for the students who hear those stories so that they realize that this is part of the journey.
] Then, almost always my guest speaker will get up and laugh. We had Jai Shekhawat who is the founder Fieldglass and a Kellogg alumn who sold his company for a billion dollars a couple of weeks ago. He got up there and laughed, and he said … He kind of pointed at the whole room of students. He said, "I have more failures than this entire room of students combined." It's nice to hear, to kind of have that message reaffirmed because I think sometimes, if you just read the media, you think, "Oh, it's all sunshine and sparkles and roses. Then, one day, your company IPO’s and you’re a billionaire," and that's absolutely not the case. It's more of a journey than a destination.
Al Cubbage: Yeah. There we go. Last question really and then, we're out of time is, overall, I guess we've talked a little bit about the mission and trying to create billion-dollar people and that kind of thing. You're in an academic institution. Our duty is to teach, to research, but also to a great extent, to train the next generation out there. Do you like it?
Melissa Kaufman: I do. I love it. These students are so smart and so talented and such a pleasure to work with. There's just something incredible when you can see them take their idea and make it real. One of my favorite companies right now on campus is called BrewBike. It was started by two freshmen who had an idea that they wanted to start kind of a student-run coffee shop on campus. Literally, it was just the two of them chatting, and the next thing we know, a year later, they have not only a mobile cold brew coffee bike that they pedal around campus, but they now have a pop-up coffee shop in Annenberg Hall where they serve coffee 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday, so everybody, check that out too. Support BrewBike.
You can see that experience and know and hope for that student … He's not going to go on to be a coffee entrepreneur most likely after graduation, but right now, he's really interested in … He's from New York. He wants to intern at Warby Parker this summer, so he's really interested in seeing what is it like to work inside of an innovative company, and that's really the moment, I think, when you kind of unlock the potential in these students and they can take it wherever they want to take it.
Al Cubbage: Great. Good. Well, I'm afraid we've reached the end of our time, at least pretty close, so I like very much to thank Melissa for her great work, certainly incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about her work at The Garage. Again, having been up there myself, it's really a cool place. It's very interesting to see the very innovative things that our students are doing these days. Again, thanks, Melissa.
Melissa Kaufman: Sure.
Al Cubbage: Appreciate you taking the time to do it. Our next speaker in the NULC Insider Series is going to be Adrian Randolph who is the dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and also, I think, will just be a great interview. Adrian's a really interesting person, has done some very innovative things already in Weinberg, so I think he'll be someone that you'll be definitely interested, not just graduates of WCAS but people from other schools as well, so I would urge you to join us. That will be May 11th from noon to 12:45 Central Time, so mark your calendar. It'll be with Adrian Randolph, dean of Weinberg.
If you've liked these, if you would like to hear the recordings of our previous NULC Insider Sessions are available online. They're available at wewill.northwestern.edu/nulcinsider. Again, wewill.northwestern.edu/nulcinsider. Then, one final request, if you will get a survey after this session, please fill it out because it really does help the feedback, helps us make these future webinars even better.
The last thing I would say is thanks very much to all of you, NULC members, for first of all, taking your time, and then second of all, the great questions that you provide. It really helps us to develop the program, and learn what it is that you're interested in.