On the 2017 Ignite Silicon Valley Trek, 55 Rice graduate and undergraduate students met and learned from some of the most successful and up-and-coming entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Students visited over a dozen companies, including Square, Parsable, AirBNB, LendUp, Tesla, Maana, Benchmark Capital, BOX, Proteus, 23&Me, Five Prime, and 5am Ventures. The intense immersion experience included company visits and entrepreneurial speakers throughout the trek. Representatives from the various companies shared personal stories of entrepreneurs working to build their companies and learning from the successes (and failures).
The 2017 Ignite Silicon Valley Trek is coordinated by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. RCEL is a sponsor of this program. Participating Rice students came from the Jones Business School, the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, and the Texas Medical Center.
Ignite 2017 Student Feedback:
“Ignite brought me into the living room of entrepreneurship, and I did not even have to knock. Hearing the founder of a dozen successful start-ups turn them into big companies gave me an inside look into what makes a good leader: the skill to build teams stronger than yourself, quantitative planning, and a lot of grit. We not only heard all this, but got to speak and interact with the physical embodiments of these characteristics. Go see for yourself – Ignite 2018!”
– Nishant Verma, Bioengineering
“The 2017 Ignite Silicon Valley trek was amazing! I really loved the opportunities we had to meet with real-world entrepreneurs and a partner at one of the top VCs in the world. Having them to share their ups and downs really helped me better understand entrepreneurship. It is definitely my most unique experience, and it is not something we could learn at the school. It was so great that we were able to meet people from different backgrounds.”
– Heng-Yi Lin, Computer Science