McMaster Entrepreneurship Association launches

The McMaster Entrepreneurism Association (@mcmasterentreps) held their first ever meeting tonight on campus. President Mark Taylor and a great group of executives are putting together this new club. The event was a mix and mingle with about 50 students in attendance, and due to a last minute guest speaker cancellation they asked me to speak at the event. I talked about community building and student entrepreneurism.

From the group’s website:

If you are interested in entrepreneurship & want to meet some awesome, like-minded people, there are many ways in which you can get involved with McMaster’s brand new entrepreneurial community.

The group is tentatively planning to organize the following activities:

– HTML/CSS Workshop
– Startup Week (sort of like a Startup Weekend, but across a week)
– A smaller scale LiON’s LAIR / Dragon’s Den competition, I believe it was called Marauder’s Den
– Talks by successful entrepreneurs
– Other networking events
– Access to mentors

It’s great to see a student-led push to create a stronger entrepreneurial culture on campus. It was pretty encouraging that several students in the room such as Mohamed El Mahallawy (@mmahalwy) are already fairly experienced entrepreneurs. There was some discussion about the summer company program, and some talk about opportunities to act as mentors to high school students too.

Let’s hope this new group inspires more entrepreneurism on campus, and I hope the broader community can help them with this initiative too!