Youniversity Ventures Provides Funding for Student Entrepreneurs

Although we cover a lot of early stage start-ups on College Mogul, a lot of the most successful internet companies that we know today were also founded by young entrepreneurs. Take Jawed Karim, he left the University of Illinois to help start PayPal, and then YouTube with two of his colleagues, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen four years later. After selling PayPal (a business that helped inspire WePay ) for $1.5 billion, he then received $64 million dollars worth of stock when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. All while doing this, he managed to continue his studies to receive his undergraduate bachelor's degree in computer science and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

In the same way Bill Gates understands the importance of helping college entrepreneurs with his DreamSpark initiative, Jawed Karim is aims to aid college startups with Youniversity Ventures. (Not to be mistaken with Campus Venture Solutions ). Jawed has money to play with, and plans to do so along with Kevin Hartz, co-founder of EventBrite, Xoom Corporation, and ConnectGroup, and Keith Rabois, who was an early investor in YouTube and LinkedIn. (All three are Sequoia Technology Partners at Sequoia Capital now)

Youniversity Ventures, which started last year, will invest between $50k and $300k of their personal capital to help college entrepreneurs. Jawed explained in a recent interview that they "feel that the [college student] segment is underaddressed. There is not a lot of attention given there, even though there is a lot of innovation coming out of that space. People may be working on something that is very useful but they may not know how to take and translate that into an actual business."

Its an inspiring interview. Here are some takeaways and advice that he drops:

On becoming an entrepreneur:

"It's very difficult to get started. The best advice I can give is to learn by example. I was surrounded by other successful entrepreneurs. And I did a lot of reading. Pick a company that you admire and find out everything about it: who's behind it, how they got started."

He worked on this and focused on emulating his favorite companies; FedEx, Best Buy, Oracle, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google.

On mistakes made in Silicon Valley:

"Silicon Valley has a lot of noise, a lot of hype. People are very excited about all of the Facebook stuff, Facebook applications. It's just been a huge hype over the last year when actually ... there isn't really that much value. It's just a bubble. It's almost a distraction."

Focus on building a great idea and don't get caught up in concepts that you can't build an actual business around.

On what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do well:

"In Silicon Valley, what really helps is that people are always working together. You see people hanging out all of the time. Even people from competing companies are talking about stuff. It's that interaction that creates the motivation to do something... in Silicon Valley, people network all of the time -- on the street, coffee shops, dorm rooms, garages."

Surround yourself with likeminded people and network, network, network.

Youniversity Ventures Mission:

We help talented teams with innovative products to take the next step. We provide mentorship, expertise, contacts, and access to capital.

Youniversity Ventures focuses on the internet consumer space and works primarily with students and first-time entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.

FYI: Stanford Student Ventures also provides seed capital to young entrepreneurs.