A group of young entrepreneurs from the Dartmouth community gathered at the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network on Friday evening with a purpose: to share, innovate and their own ideas and, in 72 hours, put those concepts into a distributable form before a panel of judges with experience in entrepreneurship. The event was organized through a DEN-sponsored program called “3 Day Startup,” a program originally formed by students at the University of Texas in 2008 to “make entrepreneurship ubiquitous at the university level,” according to the national program’s website.
“3 Day Startup” functions as “a lab for entrepreneurship,” student organizer Ryan Buckvar ’17 said. The program takes 26 people — mostly students, although it is open to the public — and asks each to pitch an idea for a project.
The best ideas are then selected and teams of about six people are formulated, Rob Thelen Tu’16, who participated in the October iteration of the program, said.
After groups form on Friday evening, teams to go into the community on Saturday and work with business leaders and the public to gauge interest in a product and gather ideas, Buckvar said. Thelen added that in some cases, developers will work on coding for the projects.
By the end of the day on Saturday, groups are meant to have a “minimum viable product” — that is, a design that is presentable if not marketable, Buckvar said. Finally, on Sunday, the groups present their ideas to a panel of judges, usually drawn from a group of mentors who assisted teams throughout the day on Saturday, Thelen said.
“These types of events provide a runway,” Buckvar said. “At the worst you get to meet cool people and dive into specifics and realities of entrepreneurship. But at best, your idea progresses to formal pitch.”
This winter’s gathering was the third “3 Day Startup” event at Dartmouth, following an event in fall 2013 and a workshop in October 2014.
One of the major success stories of the College’s “3 Day Startup” program has been Thelen’s startup, FliQ , a mobile app that allows users to share contact information wirelessly between smartphones at close quarters using Bluetooth low energy signals, Thelen said. After achieving second place amongst a group of teams that pitched ideas at the 2014 “3 Day Startup” event, FliQ won a Founders Grant through DEN and seed money through Thayer School of Engineering, Jeremy Mittleman ’17, the co-lead organizer of “3 Day Startup” with Buckvar, said.
Next, FliQ will compete in “The Pitch,” a startup competition hosted by the DALI Lab.
FliQ seeks to “tear down [the] wall” that exists between various social media platforms, Thelen said. Ideally, it will allow people to meet each other and instantly share contact information, saving time and eliminating problems caused by forgetfulness or confusion with names, Thelen said. FliQ instantly scans a room, establishes contact with other FliQ users and allows the user to choose information — from a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account, for instance — to share with someone nearby, who can then choose which information to keep in a contact. FliQ users can also share to cell phone numbers, according to the company’s website.
Since its founding in October, FliQ’s founders – Thelen and Orestis Lykouropoulos ’17 – have invested time and energy into creating a basic platform for the mobile app, which is now functional but rudimentary, Thelen said. While they are not yet at beta testing, they are hoping to be at that stage by the end of the year, Thelen said. While the app has not been laid out in a presentable way, users can already “FliQ” between each other at close quarters.
Thelen said that the “3 Day Startup” workshop would have been useful even had FliQ not come out as a viable idea.
“At the end of the weekend, you know if it’s a good idea, an okay idea or a bad idea,” he said. “And all that information is good. Even if you’re told it’s a bad idea, that’s good information to have.”
Thelen said that a major advantage of DEN lies in its ability to bring different types of people together. For example, if he had not decided to work at DEN, Thelen might have only had access to other Tuck School of Business students, while Lykouropoulos might only have worked with other computer science majors. Within DEN they can collaborate with a large variety of people to further each others’ projects.
While judges initially had doubts about FliQ’s viability, Thelen said that the company has managed to “pull it off ” in the past few months based upon the advice of experts at “3 Day Startup.”
Thelen said that he hopes FliQ can be launched in time for the Class of 2019 to use it to become acquainted with their new classmates. Thelen said one of the successes of “3 Day Startup” is that it allows students to experiment.
“As they say, all these entrepreneurs need one failure under their belt before they can do great things, so this really lets you get out there and try things,” he said.
Annie Ma contributed reporting.
