Tim Draper wants to extend his university's 7-week program into a fall-starting master's degree that adds hard skills like coding, design, and sales. Graduates choose between job placement or launching startups, with winners competing for $1 million in funding.
Chapters
I know you mentioned that with the 7-week program, it's really early to tell if the companies that alumni are going to be successful yet. I know you have this vision for Draper University's master's program, which launches this fall. What did you learn from the 7-week program that gave you this idea to launch this master's program?
What I saw with the 7-week program was that we were creating heroes. They were going out and they were ready to go. But there were all these hesitations. Some said, well, gee, I don't know how to code, or I need a coder, or I don't understand finance, or how do I get salespeople in here, or how do I make something happen? What we realized was after the 7 weeks, they were full of vim and vigor, And they had their plan, and they had laid it all out, and they had pitched it to venture capitalists. Some of them actually got money. Well, now what?
Yeah.
And, uh, and I think that we are going to build this master's program so that people have some of those skills. We're going to do it in the same fun way. We're going to do team-based. We're going to do— everything's activities. There are going to be lot of activities. But, you know, during marketing, you'll see focus groups. During finance, you'll see simulations. During the coding, you'll design a game or you'll design a wireframe of what your product's going to look like. You're going to be very active and doing something that you will feel, intrinsically feel. But you'll have that extra time to go out and test your business with customers and get that feedback, or go out and find that team that you need, or go find the money that you need. I do know that it's— and it's nice to have a bit of a soft landing after they've been through something like this. They're ready to go take on the world. It's nice to have a little soft landing where they— They don't have to get uprooted. They can stay, continue working, and get— and learn how to code, learn how to design, learn how to— what finance and accounting are all about, learn how to market and sell their product as they're doing it. I think that's going to be our new program. We're incorporating a lot of interesting new things.
Great.
things in it. And with us, it's always an experiment.
Yeah, it sounds like a lot more of these hard skills, the coding and the design, the finance, the marketing and the sales. What are your expectations for students who come out of this program? What do you think they'll walk away with at the end?
So the plan is for them to, at the very end, we'll go through all these skills and At the end, they'll either go get a job or start a business, and there's going to be a hard fork there. That's for the last month or 2 that we're calling Go. Go is going to be, if you're going to go get a job, then you're going to get mentored to build the resume, get the interviews set up.
Right.
Connect with people, learn how to interview, learn how to get those jobs, and then learn what to do when you get the job. By the way, if you ever, you know, first day you get the job, my recommendation is to always take somebody new to lunch and to try to meet 4 new people a day. You will then be the most valuable person in your company within about a year. Because you'll know everyone and what they do. Always ask them, well, what do you do here? That's good advice. That moves you toward the employment, go get a job side. Those who are going to go start businesses, we're going to be going down the path of mentorship, business planning, pitching, Pitch skills, and then team building. How do you build your team? Who do you hire, and what do you need next? So we'll go through all of that. By the end of that, for that group, there will be another demo day, but that demo day will have a— will be associated with a bigger demo day. Where I'm putting $1 million to work. So there's an opportunity there to potentially get some funding, and we think that this could be something entirely new and exciting and educational, as well as great for people's careers.
