Building infrastructure for hundreds of student founders

Student entrepreneurship ecosystems tend to run on individual energy — a strong cohort organises good events, then graduates and the capability leaves with them. Founders need recurring access to capital, mentorship, teammates, and momentum, and none of that survives on enthusiasm alone.

• Lead Founders: Illinois Entrepreneurs, the premier entrepreneurship organisation at UIUC, as President.

• Organised Forge, the largest student-run startup weekend in the Midwest, convening 25+ startups and 30+ investors and mentors.

• Helped organise Keywords, the largest AI hackathon in UIUC history, run with Y Combinator and drawing 400+ participants.

• Created CoLini, a student-startup matching platform connecting 200+ active UIUC students with 30+ student startups.

• Built the partnerships, sponsorships, founder programming, and recruiting infrastructure underneath all of it.

1. 01

   Treated the organisation as infrastructure with a lifespan, not a calendar of events to fill.

2. 02

   Built Forge and Keywords as recurring institutions with reusable operating structure, sponsor relationships, and mentor networks.

3. 03

   Attacked the team-formation bottleneck directly with CoLini — student founders' scarcest input is usually a co-founder or first engineer, not an event.

4. 04

   Established sponsorship and partnership pipelines so programming is funded independently of any one cohort's fundraising ability.

• Every organiser and participant is a volunteer with a full course load — authority is entirely earned, never assigned.

• Bringing Y Combinator and 30+ investors and mentors to campus required credibility the organisation had to build before it could spend.

• Two-sided matching in CoLini fails if either side is thin, so students and startups had to be grown together.

• Annual turnover is total. Anything that depends on a specific person disappears within a year.

Organisation-building and ecosystem design. I'm drawn to the version of a problem where the output is durable capability — programming, partnerships, and platforms that keep working after the people who built them graduate.