The opportunities below include various competitive programs for entrepreneurial funding. Some award hundreds-of-thousands of dollars and potentially require you to take a gap-year. Feel free to check out the opportunities’ websites, as well as associated reading.
Incubators/Accelerators
HMC is an eight-week incubator for all students and alums of the Claremont Colleges. It is modeled after the famous YC Startup School, and carries prizes up to $50k in investment.
Techstars is a successful organization with numerous 3-month accelerator programs. The locations for their past accelerators include Amsterdam, Boston (with the Air Force), and Singapore. CMC alumni are known to have worked with them.
This is very much the gold standard for accelerator programs that help propel startups. Its top companies include Stripe, AirBnb, Coinbase, Doordash, Reddit, and Dropbox. YC is not traditionally a ‘college accelerator’; its companies range from teams that have completed entire careers to young college students. At the very least, it is worth checking out their resources.
Plug and Play provides a unique network for connecting startups with talent and investors.
Consistently receiving high marks from MIT’s seed accelerator benchmark, this ultra-competitive accelerator lasts 12-weeks. While its acceptance rate is less than 1%, all of its graduated-companies are worth at least $14m.
This institution has various programs to support ventures based in New York City.
Scholarships, Grants, Fellowships
I Am SoGal Black Founder Startup Grant
This opportunity hopes to change that black women entrepreneurs make up less than 0.5% of VC-funding. The applications are rolling, and offer $5k to $10k for black female or black nonbinary entrepreneurs.
Created by the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir, and Founder’s Fund, this fellowship gives $100,000 for students to turn their idea(s) into a company. It requires students to take a leave of absence from school for 2 years. The process is very competitive, but additionally provides unique mentorship from an accomplished team.
This fellowship opportunity is for students about to graduate and interested in a career within venture-capital. The fellowship is a 2-year-program with its own training camp, job network to apply to, and accelerator. Fellows who end up founding a company years later receive direct support from VfA.