RC Startup Factory
Built with the same co-founder as BLang, because the hardest part of our own first company had not been the idea. It had been knowing anyone who had done it before.
The problem
Robert College had no shortage of students with ideas and no route from an idea to a company. My co-founder and I had just been through that gap ourselves with BLang. The difference between us and the year below was not talent. We had accidentally met people who had done it before, and they hadn’t.
What we built
A programme that connected student teams to venture capitalists and founders who had built real companies, and mentored them from concept toward something incorporable. It ran across the 2024–25 academic year.
The year finished with RC Bobcat’s Den, a Shark Tank format demo day where teams pitched for real investment in front of a jury of four Robert College alumni who had gone on to found or run companies, spanning classes of ‘94 to ‘03. Several teams walked away with thousands of dollars of initial funding and continuing mentorship.
The result
We graduated in June 2025 and handed it over.
A year later we learned that RC Startup Factory had become the largest club at Robert College by total participation, ahead of Model UN and Debate, both of which are decades-old institutions at the school. The demo day ran again without us, bigger.
The funding placed matters less to me than the fact that the programme kept running after its founders left.