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Mentor Student Founders

The Forty Acres Founders Program offers undergraduate and graduate student founders the opportunity to study potential customers, improve their product, establish product-market fit, and position their product for success in the marketplace.

Mentors will provide guidance to participants as they work to discern if a need exists for their startup concept in the market.

Mentor meetings can occur in person or remotely and will be scheduled based on the availability of the founder and the mentor. By participating, mentors will provide 30 minutes of support to two founders each week for 10 weeks, resulting in a time commitment of one hour per week.

Interested in mentoring a student founder?

About Forty Acres Founders Pre-Accelerator

Launched in Spring 2020, the Forty Acres Founders Program at the Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center offers undergraduate student founders the opportunity to study potential customers, improve their product, establish product-market fit, and position their product for success within the marketplace.

Students learn to vet their ideas, develop skills for researching and understanding customer needs, and develop tools for building a product and service that appropriately fit a market need.

Spring 2020 Cohort: Final Pitches

Twenty student founders spent the Spring 2020 semester rigorously establishing if a market need existed for their product or service. Some are continuing their project with new tools and funding, while others are using their product-market fit skills to develop new ideas.

Four founders advanced to the pitch competition in the final week of the course. Sebastian Brau, Anel Cuarenta, Vaishnavi Lakshmanan and Thomas Smith competed for $20,000 in seed funding.

Watch the Final Pitch highlights below:

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