Entrepreneurship programming has students excited about startups at all our universities. Now what do we do with them?

It is nothing short of amazing to see the entrepreneurial revolution happening at our local universities. From the EClub and IDEA programs at Northeastern to ILab and HackHarvard at Harvard to StartLabs and Startup Club at MIT to the BCVC at BC and the VDC at UMass Boston, there are tons of programs at different schools. This is creating hundreds of startup hungry students.

Right now our biggest challenge is making them aware of our ecosystem, but soon I believe we may solve that issue, but be left with a new challenge: What to do with all of them?

This is a multi-faceted issue that has 2 key groups in my opinion:

1) The Top 1% of the 1%

It is quite rare for a student to come straight out of college and be the next Mark Zuckerberg or even a first 10 employee contributor. However, there are some impressive exceptions to the rule in our ecosystem.

When we talk about losing great talent and future leaders from our ecosystem these are people we need to focus on retaining. But how do you do it?

The key is finding the right opportunity for them in our ecosystem that taps the talents they already have, arranges them to work with great people to learn from and providing mentorship for them. A great example of this is how Kristin Dziadul started out crushing on a HubSpot job opportunity but then ended up in a marketing role at Backupify. Kristin ended up a smaller company with more responsibility than the growing orange machine, HubSpot, likely could have provided.

If you find a great talent, but can’t hire them yourself, help them find something else great in Boston.

2) The long tail of talent: aka the 99%

While startups are cool and many students are excited by them, few are really ready for the demands of a super early stage startup role. So what do we do with all these kids that need time to grow into a role, but have caught the "startup bug"?

We need to slot the remaining talent into growing startups and companies with a startup culture but just past startup phase (some of our recent IPOs like TripAdvisor and Carbonite likely fit this). They need to get in the startup environment and work under great people they can learn from.

If we can just get them to take their first job in our ecosystem, we’ll have them hooked; they’ll get a lease on an apartment, build relationships in the city and start their post college life. As their career evolves, they’ll likely work at earlier and earlier stage companies and become key members of our ecosystem.

Challenges in this plan:

1) How do we funnel students into larger entrepreneurial companies?

Anyone can found a company, but when that fails and it’s time to get a job, how do you sell them on working for a 100+ person company?

Possible Solution: Show how others like them have built a career to success by going to bigger companies too. (I started at EInk when they have 100+ employees)

2) How do they find the larger entrepreneurial companies when they’re in the suburbs?

Until recently, virtually every company left Boston when it grew up to be out in the suburbs. A few are now in the Innovation District and around a few spots in and around the Red Line, but for the most part they are still out of a student’s natural reach and awareness. Then again, even companies in the heart of our ecosystem are hard to spot; who would know recent IPO company Brightcove is right in the middle of Kendall Square?

Possible Solutions: Get some people from your company engaged in the community. Try to engage students on campus by having high level team members speak to entrepreneurship clubs (Dropbox is doing this regularly in Boston).  Also have a presence at big events like WebInno and RubyRiot. Just find them and have a conversation with young people about the opportunities they could have at your company.

3) How do we get students excited about Boston startups that are larger not consumer?

It’s easy to get excited about a consumer web startup that your mother, uncle and best friend would recognize. Boston has fewer of those, but there’s nothing wrong with that! The key is asking ourselves how we can position ourselves as interesting to our young talent?

Possible Solution:  It starts by promoting the startup career benefits in general and then emphasizing we have those opportunities right here in Boston. The next step is then having charistmatic founders who can sell young talent on their visions for changing the world; being into startups is sort of geeky, so luckily “really hard problems” and the opportunity to build products for the Fortune 500 can still be cool if spun the right way.

4) How do we show logical career paths for students?

This is a question that plagued me when I started out my career. I knew I wanted to eventually be a successful CEO, but I had no idea how to build a career to get there. I’m still winging it today.

While I think you have to accept some uncertainty and a healthy dose of serendipity, understanding the path that others have taken in the past would be a great help; when I spoke to the Northeastern E Club last week, the most common question I got from students after my talk were all related to what I did after graduation to get where I am today.

Possible Solutions: Start a conversation about different startupers's career paths. How did people actually get to the role they're known for now? Arm everyone with these stories in video or blog form and we can then share them with students.  If you get a chance to speak to students, mention a bit about how you got to where you are today.

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This is obviously a complex issue, but we should always try to stay one step in front of the challenges on the road ahead.

What are your thoughts on the student retention and engagement issue?