I travel a good deal here at Grasshopper in my mission to meet entrepreneurs from all over.  When I meet people outside of Boston they tend to bring up 2 things right away:  1. Recently, “have you seen “The Town”?”  and 2.  Wow you guys have like 725,436 students over there in Boston huh?

Living in Boston, it’s easy to tell you are in a college city, however, this weekend I truly got to experience firsthand the power of our college community.

This past Saturday, thanks to BostInnovation, college entrepreneurs from across the city gathered at the Microsoft NERD center and rallied around the idea of entrepreneurship.   The event was called “Shut up & Start up”, and was supposed to bring aspiring college entrepreneurs together with other students and local mentors.

I was extremely fortunate, and humbled, to be a mentor this weekend.  Students gathered in groups and vetted out ideas, identified road blocks, and talked out next steps with mentors.  I was personally taken back with how motivated these students were.  It was really fun to listen to some of their ideas and see how far along they were.  A few ideas that stuck out to me:

• Book Blunder – a Website that analyzes (based on which class) if it is worth buying the required book or not.  Is the old edition good enough? Etc.  Very useful.

• Speak Easy – a cell phone application that would allow you to text a statement in English and then select a specific language, at which point it would spit out the phonetic spelling of that phrase in the language you asked for.  This company was going to target students going and returning from abroad as their early adapters.

• Risk, in real life – This group of students was creating a location-based phone application modeled off the famous board game Risk.  The logic being, their campuses buildings would be the countries and you could travel from location to location building up armies.

Outside of the “Startup Weekend – like conversations”, students learned about opportunities from Microsoft, including the Imagine Cup (which by the ways looks really awesome).

The weekend was rounded out with a presentation by Kristin Dziadul about how she got a job using Social Media.  This was followed up with a panel discussion including her, Cheryl Morris, Ali Powell, and myself.  Some highlights of the panel included:

• Creating a personal blog and blogging about local events / happenings is a great way to develop your personal brand as well as get noticed by local companies.

  • Ali and Kristin both landed jobs because of their blogs (Ali at Hubspot & Kristin at Backupify)

• Cheryl talked about the value of using Twitter to meet new people, and how its worth @ replying people even if they don’t respond.  Cheryl was able to use her Savvy tweeting to land a full time gig at BostInnovation (lucky!!).

• I talked a bit about the power of connections & networking to impress potential employers.  I was able to land my job as the Ambassador of Buzz through a LinkedIn recommendation.

Some Tweets from the weekend:

• @hackerchick : #ShutUpStartup was complete awesome, met most amazing peeps @AaronGerry @sliggity @cheryllmorris & all the @BostInnovation folks-thx guys!!

• @alipowell21 : Great time today at #shutupstartup - happy to be part of the @BostInnovation magic. Empowering entrepreneurship from college

• @bvmike : Cool to see so many young entrepreneurs building companies while in college. Great ideas/prototypes and a lot potential! #shutupstartup

• @michaelgaiss : Pivots r gut-wrenching, but if good at it, it is the key asymmetric weapon as an entrepreneur; big companies cannot do. @m2jr #ShutupStartup

• @IDEANEU : Good stuff - IDEA ventures will be on there soon :) RT @BostInnovation: http://yfrog.com/mhxghtj 20 new boston's startups! #shutupstartup