Part I: Two Founder Journeys

Two years ago, "Jason," one of the 80+ student founders in my entrepreneurship course, stood up to present on Demo Day. Twenty teams had already pitched. I had no idea what Jason was about to present.

Nearly everyone pivots over the 16 weeks of the class, but Jason's pivots were more extreme and never linear. He started with a tech idea in the first class. Then an import-export business. Then a restaurant support idea. And probably some other ideas in between that left as quickly as they came. I never thought these were bad ideas, but none of them stuck. The course clearly wasn't easy for him.

To make matters worse, he was a quiet one. He rarely spoke up, only occasionally pulling me aside after class to ask some short, vague question about his latest idea. Nothing in those chats hinted at who he actually was. He needed every minute of those 16 weeks to go through all the twists and turns, all the false starts, before a real answer could surface.

So it was bizarre that in this entrepreneurship class, in a business school, one of the best in Europe, after hearing all his founder-classmates present confident pitches about how their startup would change the world... he stood there and announced his actual ambition: to become a musician.

We were all confused, but also enchanted by his words, spoken with rare conviction. Jason quickly walked us through each pivot, the mistakes and insights he'd learned from each, and why none of it ever felt right.

When he finished, the class erupted in applause, and not the polite kind you give the twentieth pitch of the day. It was something closer to admiration. You could feel it in the questions afterward: they wanted to know his personal story, his style of music, his plans and obstacles. They actually cared. And my guess is many wished they had taken such a risk themselves. They realized the actual purpose of the course wasn't to start a company, but deep personal exploration. This course was merely a vehicle for exploration, risk taking and growth.

Of course, every founder's journey is unique. Another student, "Robert," found his way in almost the opposite fashion. He was building a tool for healthcare partners to better manage inventory during crises and supply shortages. Unfortunately, his cofounder had a medical emergency and Robert was left holding an idea that wasn't even his to start.

Still, he was determined. He visited pharmacy after pharmacy, called hospital after hospital, but few gave him any attention. After many months of rejection and his own interest fading, he pivoted to other smaller, unrelated ideas he'd been carrying in the back of his mind. They were more personal, but ultimately they went nowhere in the few weeks of class left.

Then, just days before Demo Day and unsure of what he was going to do, after one last-ditch attempt, he received an unexpected message back from a hospital. It was an invitation to collaborate with a far bigger stakeholder than anything he'd imagined. Suddenly, the original project came back to life. Robert revealed this surprising call-back in his Demo Day pitch and showed us what was possible when you are persistent.

Looking back, it's striking how different Jason's and Robert's journeys were. One kept his real intentions hidden, even from himself, until the very last moment. The other fought hard for weeks to pursue an idea that wasn't even his, until a breakthrough appeared. After nearly 20 years in entrepreneurship, across 2 continents, I still could not have predicted either path if I tried. And yet, I consider both to be successful outcomes for this course.

Neither was the "best" founder in the class... but what does that even mean? Do we really need more startup bros? Or what kind of founders do we as a society actually need? These are the exact questions I ask myself after each semester, taking a step back to see whether I've fulfilled the promise of the course and how to do it even better next time.

Part II: Startup Program Design

So what makes a course like this succeed? My answer: students get the space to experiment, try on different versions of themselves, find what resonates, and turn it into something bigger. Jason found his through music. Robert found his by refusing to quit. Neither needed to win Demo Day.

No lecture would have gotten Jason to explore his true passion. And even the most cited research professor in the world could not have gotten Robert to make one last attempt. To be clear, I'm not taking credit for any of this. In fact, I'm making exactly the opposite point: I got out of their way. I don't think entrepreneurship can be taught, but I believe it can be learned. I've seen it firsthand, over and over again.

Lecturing and writing papers about startup theory rarely turns students into entrepreneurs. More often, it prepares them to be employees. That is not a reason for a school to give up and simply hope founders appear in the classroom. Instead, we have to design the conditions where founders discover what works, both for the market and for themselves.

Taking a step back, why do we need a different approach? It starts with what entrepreneurship actually is. It's a practical skill, like user interviews, rapid prototyping, and pitching to collaborators and partners, all used to bring something to life in the market. It's not conceptual, and that sets it apart from most of what a business school teaches.

Because it's a skill, no one gets it right the first time. Failure is the norm. And while each attempt gives you incremental insight into the users, the market, and the potential of a given technology, every attempt has a price. The pain of failure shows up in four ways: financial, time, social, and personal. That last one hits hardest early on, so traits like appetite for risk, persistence, and creativity matter most.

Lastly, there is no fixed target to aim at. Founders are expected to build something meaningful and connect it to real stakeholders, but what counts as meaningful is different for everyone, and it changes with each new experience. Entrepreneurship is deeply personal and introspective.

That's why the real curriculum is self-awareness. Students can't be handed the answer, so they need to know themselves well enough to find it, and they need a safe place to try, fail, and try again.

Below are the 6 aspects I've found a startup program needs to develop founders who actually build things. While this article discusses a university context, I’ve been a part of other startup programs, incubators and accelerators and the insights still apply.

1. Cultivate self-awareness. In practice it looks unglamorous: weekly journals, personality assessments, and deeply personal provoking questions. But the result is real: one student wrote in his journal, "I am not sure if I am ready to bear the stress of a startup." For me, that one line is worth more than any polished pitch. The course keeps asking students not just what they're building, but who they are. Their values, personalities, and tendencies all show up within the startup, clear as day, especially week after week, when compared to the other founders in their cohort.

This is the foundation, and almost everything in the course is built around it. By self-awareness I mean knowing what you're good at, your biases and their limits, and understanding the difference between your perspective and someone else's.

2. Failure must be reframed. It seems paradoxical for any program to let participants fail, let alone a university. You certainly wouldn't advertise it. But for an emerging entrepreneur there may be nothing more important to learn. Failing the project is not failing the course. Failing the startup is not failing at life. Failing isn't final, it's an everyday occurrence for entrepreneurs, and it is the first step towards learning.

And I get it, the instinct is to help. Watching a student struggle feels like a failure of teaching. But Jason needed his ideas to go nowhere before he could see what he really wanted. Robert needed his side projects to collapse before the one that mattered emerged again.

3. Ownership is what makes failure worth something. Some programs attach a dedicated mentor to every project. It sounds supportive, but it quietly takes away the connection that makes the decision feel real. In the middle of chaos and uncertainty, the natural move for a young founder is to ask someone older and more experienced. Yet, finding your own direction in the absence of information (or worse yet, chaos) is another basic skill for a founder. Agency has to be something students exercise, not something an advising structure hands them.

4. Friction is good. Self-awareness alone has a blind spot. Curiosity only shows you your own interests. The uncomfortable clash of collaboration and cross-pollination corrects for that. Having founders work on each other's projects, not just their own, forces a different kind of attention. Reacting to someone else's problem, where the risk isn't yours, makes you freer to think clearly about it, and that clarity gets fed back into how the original founder sees their own project.

Again, there’s a natural learning that happens by observing dozens of peers make different progress week after week. It isn’t passive, either. I highlight what’s clearly working and push them to think why some move faster than others, and for those who are ready, I work with them individually to confront their own excuses.

5. Trust is what makes such exchanges possible. For friction to be useful, there must be a culture of openness and equality. We're not all in the same place, but we're all on the same journey of exploration. That includes me. I frequently share my own challenges with the class… times when I struggled to find clients, times when I burnt out… with the explicit clarification that I’m not glamorizing the difficulty but to normalize talking about challenges so we can help each other. In this way, we also learn how to exchange feedback: what kind of insights & advice help, and how to hear it as care, not as an attack or empty critique. While true trust is bidirectional, it starts with your own vulnerability. Without that, weekly exchanges become one more performance, where nobody tells the truth about their project.

6. What counts as building must be widened. Papers and theses are a unit of assessment built for an institution that hasn't caught up to what building now means. If a program wants founders, "building" needs to include furniture, food, festivals, or fashion. (By the way, these are all real examples from my course). Each one requires the same underlying discipline: a habit of creating and communicating, sustained over time. And each one, examined closely afterward, teaches you something about what you think about the world and what it takes to make something with longevity. That openness towards the result also allows for more honest and personal exploration for each founder.

Conclusion: Try Anyway

Entrepreneurs are a special breed. I truly believe we need more brave, critically thinking, and practically creative solution makers in the world. But it’s as if startup programs today think that all you have to do is let participants dress up in black hoodies and rehearse pitches over and over as if it were an incantation or spell… and somehow their startups will magically become “unicorns.”

Teaching entrepreneurship may be impossible. But creating the conditions where it can be learned is not. Put self-awareness at the center. Redefine failure. Let them chart their own path. Cross-pollinate. Be extremely vulnerable. Be open to the process. Give that recipe enough time, and I believe you that eventually the leaders that walk up to the front of your Demo Day will surprise you too.

When I caught up with Jason a year and a half later, he was still pursuing music. I know his story isn’t quite entrepreneurship. But it's the closest thing I know, and it's worth trying anyway.