Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Marc Steren. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Marc, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

During the pandemic, I was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University teaching entrepreneurship. A colleague of mine, John Jabara and former social impact entrepreneur of the year, suggested, why don’t we teach high school students how launch a venture but for social good. I thought we would get 20 kids signed up, we had 67 students from California to Florida signed up, taking the summer program. About 6 months later, I started to receive phone calls and emails, “Hi Professor, want to let you know that I wrote about your summer experience of launching a venture for social good, wrote about it for my college essay, and now I am at school X “(just amazing schools).

I didn’t give it much thought until I got a call from a foundation, saying, we heard what you were doing, what about the kids we work with, the under-resourced kid, can you help us? I had promised my wife no more startups (I have started 5 previous companies) but we knew we had to democratize the opportunity for all kids. So University Startups was born:

University Startups empowers under-resourced students with personalized pathways to higher education or career success through the entrepreneurial mindset and our universe of generative AI counselors.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am 3x author, 5x founder and former educator in both K-12 and college. I am most proud of impacting students’ trajectory- changing their lives for the better (and being a Dad!)

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Our initial set of angel investors are a group of investors who believe what we believe, that there is a fundamental unfairness in the market and a need to give the option of higher education and/or a better career to all kids. I use to believe that all investment dollars had the same value, they don’t, they have to align with the mission and core values of the company.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I use to believe that customers are looking for better solutions, they are not, they are only looking to solve their problem and the actual solution is not important to them. You also have to slow down, understand the efficacy of your solution. For example, another one of my companies was one of the leaders in mobile ticketing in the 90s. We signed up a movie theater, launched the first mobile solution in the world and then moved on to the next client. We should have slowed down, spent more time with that customer, learn how customers were using our product through specific metrics.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.university-startups.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcsteren/

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