Launching a Startup While in College

At the Startup Rally on February 18, 2013, a panel of former students who launched their own startups while in college discussed their startups and a variety topics concerning student entrepreneurs in the startup community. Chevon Hines of Chevon Hines EnterprisesKyle Azevedo of viaCycle, and Jerome Choo of Whizzimo weigh in on how students can break in to the greater startup community.

In this video segment, we ask the question “What are the challenges you faced launching your startup while in college?

Audio Transcript

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What are the challenges you faced launching your startup while in college?

Kyle Azevedo, viaCycle: One of the biggest challenges for viaCycle was striking the right balance between marketing and development. It’s kind of been a start/stop process, where we will make improvements to the product that we really need to make and then we will go out and spread it as much as we can. And then we’ll get more feedback like, “Ah, you have to go back and fix this or change this and tweak it a little bit.” So it was a challenge recognizing when this needed to occur and I think we have gotten better at it but we still struggle sometimes. The process of really going through all those milestones for the first time, launching for the first time or raising funding for the first time is so important. You can read as much as you want but there is something to be said for having been there. It’s harder but you figure it out and you come out stronger for it.

Chevon Hines, Chevon Hines Enterprises: The biggest challenges for me were what they are for most people: time management and learning how to get the most bang for your buck out of your day. Everyone gets 48 hours, what are you going to do with yours? So time management can be the biggest challenge. Many companies start out by bootstrapping and so you have to maintain a regular job or another source of income and try to build your business. So the challenges are time management, prioritizing, knowing what’s most important in this moment right now that’s going to make the next step possible. So those have been some of the big challenges but once you conquer those you are so good. There will be other things that you need to conquer, but once you get time management and prioritization down, you are in a much better place.

Jerome Choo, Whizzimo: I definitely agree. Time management is so key, because even right now I’m struggling with time management even though I’m taking three classes. And it’s terrible because I can’t say no to stuff so I end up working weekends. This past Saturday, I wasn’t doing anything and I felt so weird. It definitely felt like there was something wrong in my life. So try to take days off, that’s really key. I don’t think you can stop once you get into it.