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“It’s only been a week, but it’s already been a wild ride,” Lianne Haug, a recent CU grad, said of her time at Techstars Boulder so far.
Two weeks ago Haug’s team was accepted into Techstars for their app, Varsity, which gives college students a personalized feed of clubs and events on campus. The passionate team behind Varsity is, not surprisingly, made up of about five CU students and recent grads.
Varsity's Big Data potential
Varsity does two things: allows students to discover what they truly love and allows colleges to discover who their students really are (as far as behavior and feedback). What the app really sets itself up for though is an insane amount of data-collecting on a largely under-analyzed segment of our population: college students.
“My future vision for us is to be a data company; if we are successful, we are going to have data on college students that never existed before,” Haug said.
There are about 13 million kids nationwide enrolled in college. That means Varsity has the potential to get insights on about 13 million socially influential people. But more important to universities themselves is the fact that these students will be leading the next generation and its views on the value of higher education.
"Universities are in trouble: the value of a degree is plummeting, the cost is increasing and the product remains unchanged,” Haug said in May. “Fifty percent of graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Tuition has increased five times faster than the consumer price index for the past two decades. Curriculum and faculty no longer differentiate college, lectures can be uploaded to YouTube and academic knowledge is a Google search away. Our work will prevent drop-outs, connect young people with their passions - and ultimately help shape students into the people that they aspire to be.”
Varsity's soft launch and the team's steps to Demo Day
Varsity will test out this theory with a pilot at CU’s business school in August and another launch at CSU right after that: “These first schools are meant to be experiments. We have student ambassadors there whose jobs are to help student organizers understand what Varsity is. We are going to soft-launch and see where we can improve,” Haug said.
To help propel this launch, Haug, her co-founder Devon Tivona and their team have already received an $18,000 investment and a $100,000 convertible note from Techstars. That financial momentum also helped them to make their first technical hire last week.
But funding isn’t the No. 1 priority for Varsity right now during their Techstars time. It’s simply the Techstars network that the young team, which includes student interns who got involved with Varsity during CU’s New Venture Challenge this year, is looking to benefit from. Haug and Tivona themselves are both computer science grads who are looking to beef up Varsity's business plan by Demo Day in October.
“We are young, but Techstars is helping us to not go down the rabbit hole by having us have discussions with really smart people; I can learn crazy amounts of information in just an hour at Techstars,” Haug said. “We are engineers. We are great at developing and executing our product. We do have a business plan right now but that will radically change - and Techstars is going to give us that power.”
