The Five Reps: What I Tell Students Who Want to Start Something
Every September I get some version of the same message. A student, back on campus, still high on summer energy, wants to know how to actually become an entrepreneur instead of just reading about them (looking at you, Jordan). I'm a five-time founder; I work at Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio; I invest out of a venture fund, and I'm now CEO of Lev, an AI co-founder platform that helps founders think through and build their companies, so I see this question from every side of the table: building companies, backing founders, and now building the tool I wish I'd had as a first-time founder. My answer hasn't changed in years. I gave a version of this talk at Purdue's Anvil to a room full of students with more ambition than runway. It worked. One of them, Akash Raju, used it to launch Glimpse, a Y Combinator company that's since raised a $35M Series A.
You don't build entrepreneurial skill by reading about it. You build it in reps, same as fitness. Here are the five to put on repeat this year.
One: start side projects, not companies. The goal isn't a company. It's building skills and building relationships. Side projects are how you practice the decisions, recruiting, customer discovery, product development, and go-to-market work a real startup demands: finding the right channels, finding the right customers, and testing what strategies actually convert, before there's real money on the line. Relationships with the people you'll need later: classmates, future teammates, future investors, and advisors. I've written a lot about this: Rival IQ started as a side project and went on to a successful exit, when NetBase Quid acquired it in 2021.
Pick the idea along one of three lines. You have deep passion for the problem, you have direct, high-volume access to customers who look like your early adopters, or there's a specific skill you want to build- sales, design, a new technical stack- and the project is really just the excuse to practice it. Many of the best student projects are the second kind: something for other students, where campus itself is your distribution.
Short on ideas? Lev's founder tools are built to help you find and pressure-test one.
Then run it like a real team, not a hobby. Commit five hours a week, one month at a time, never indefinitely. Meet weekly and run a fast retro: what did we get done, what's next, and what skill are we actually building? Once a month, zoom out: are we still having fun, do we still believe in this, keep going or kill it and start the next one, and who's missing from the team. A monthly reset hands you a clean list of the gap, so you always know who to go recruit. Do this on a shared Lev canvas and the whole team works off the same retro, the same gaps, the same next steps, instead of scattered docs and group chats.
Two: find your community, or build one. Every campus already has a cluster of people doing this: side projects, company ideas, arguing about go-to-market over bad coffee. Find them. Can't find them, start inviting people for beers and pizza until a group exists. Don't wait for the club to invite you. Send the first text.
Three: find the entrepreneurs who've already done it, and engage them. Pick your focus area, healthcare, fintech, whatever, and find the people in your city or your alumni network who've already built something there. Ask them real questions. I learned this from Brad Feld, who taught me the give first mentality when I was a first time CEO. He gave me product feedback before I'd asked for a dollar, including one memorable email on Christmas morning. That relationship led our Series A. You never know which one will matter most, so engage the ones in front of you now.
Four: work customer discovery before you fall in love with the product. Building is easy. Finding customers is the part everyone skips. Figure out who your real ideal customer is, not who you assume it is, and get their words on record before you spend another weekend building. I wrote about the same Problem/Profile discipline for a fundraise pitch, and it applies just as much to a side project: real customer quotes beat a good-looking deck every time. Before you build anything, run the idea through CVFB: customer, value proposition, feature set, business model, one line each. It forces you to name who's buying, why, what you're actually shipping to them, and how you get paid, before you write a line of code.
New to these concepts? Lev Learn breaks down customer discovery and other startup fundamentals in plain language.
Five: create accountability with a monthly update. Half a page, printed, no more. Three sections: Did, Doing, Need help. I wrote about this same logic in the fundraising cookbook: a good update isn't just a status report, it's connection, an invitation to help, and the ask has to be specific enough that someone can act on it in thirty seconds. "Intro me to someone who's built X" works, or "help me choose between X and Y."
Send it to anyone who'll read it: a mentor, a professor, a founder you admire. At the end of any good mentor meeting, ask: "I send a monthly update on my projects; do you mind if I add you?" The update is almost beside the point. What it buys you is a tribe of people with a reason to check whether you followed through. Most ideas don't work, but the network strength survives. If you build one of these, send me the update - tam@helpshare.com. I'll read it and tell you where you're right and where you're stuck.
None of this requires quitting anything or asking permission. It requires reps. Start this semester, while the energy is still high.
All five of these reps are built right into Lev and Lev Learn, not just described. Canvases for each idea, prompts that walk you through customer discovery and go-to-market, the monthly did, doing, need help update baked into the workflow. Use it, and you'll work through more ideas, faster, and more systematically than doing it by hand. It's built for teams too: a project lead can bring the rest of the group onto the same canvas, so the whole side project runs in one shared place.