Resources
University of Florida Resources
Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Listserv
The foremost resource on the University of Florida, the CEI listserv will keep you up to date with all the important entrepreneurial events, opportunities, and resources on and off campus.
Startup Hour
Startup Hour is meant to get people chatting in a social environment so that people with complimentary needs and skill sets can team up to create a leading successful venture.
Annual TEDxUF event
TEDxUF is a self-organized event operated under a license from TED to discuss ideas worth spreading. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The tentative theme for the Spring 2011 TEDx event is “inspiring innovation” and will feature speakers from all different industries.
Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CEI) was created to teach, coach and inspire students to be entrepreneurial in their lives.
Gatornest
Gatornest is a hands-on learning experience for those who want to make a difference with a real company. Join GatorNest and take on some of the goals of a real enterprise. Offer consulting and find solutions to real problems companies face. This is a graduate course that can be offered to undergraduates if they meet certain requirements. See website for more details.
Office of Technology Licensing
The Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) at the University of Florida was established in 1985 to work with inventors to facilitate the transfer of technologies created at UF to the commercial sector for public benefit.
UF Young Entrepreneurs high school summer program
Have a younger sibling or friend in high school? Do them a favor tell them about UF Young Entrepreneurs Summer Program!
Courses offered at UF:
GEB3113: Principles of Entrepreneurship
EME 4406: Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum
ISM 3004: Computing in the Business Environment (More Technical)
Start-Up Resources
Entrepreneurship
Stanford’s E-Corner- A collection of over 1600 videos and podcasts of fantastic speakers from all over the entrepreneurial landscape. With categories of content including: opportunity recognition, leadership & adversity, and creativity and innovation, you can soak up a ton of knowledge from these podcasts.
How To Change the World – Written by Guy Kawasaki, early product evangelist for Apple and a well respected veteran of the startup landscape.
Techcrunch- If you’re a startup in the Web 2.0 world, bookmark Techcrunch and read it daily. It’ll keep you up to speed on the happenings of the startup universe. They work insanely hard to keep tabs on not only the big movers and shakers, but also innovative startups, new technologies, and people you should know.
Venturebeat’s Entrepreneur Corner- Just an absolutely invaluable resource for start-up entrepreneurs. Learn about common startup mistakes, VC’s, product development, marketing, legalities, etc. The great thing is that the content is all tailor made for start-ups. Most of the articles are actually written by entrepreneurs in some stage of the start-up process.
Basil Peter’s Angel Blog- A great resource for first time entrepreneurs looking to learn as much as they can about the angel investing (and VC) landscape. I appreciate Basil’s simple and straightforward approach, and its reflected in a lot of the useful document templates he provides. I love his discussions about exit strategies, term sheets, board of directors, etc.
If you’re a startup and you’re looking for a comprehensive, thought-provoking check list, make sure to take a look at this 52 step start-up to do list by Basil Peters. What I found most accurate is how it stresses the small stuff, like understanding what taxes your company must pay, buying an alarm system before you move all your computer systems into an office, checking, double checking, then triple checking that the founders are all in alignment, etc.
Venture Hacks - So you’ve gotten your feet wet and you think you’re serious about starting something? Then I would highly suggest you devour everything on Venture Hacks. Started by Nivi and Naval, two guys who have a ton of experience in the VC/startup arena, they’ve stockpiled a wealth of information, resources, how-tos, powerpoint decks, and tools dedicated to helping you make the right startup decisions. Looking for angel investors to pitch the next big disruptive technology to? Head to AngelList, a directory of some of the top angel and seed investors in the world.
Think you’ve got the perfect pitch? Then Head to StartupList and send in your pitch to Nivi and Naval and Venture Hacks. Each week, they’ll sort through the list and their top 3 will be sent out to the incredible list of angel and seed investors on AngelList. This is a golden opportunity to get your name out there. Perfect that pitch and send it out!
Term sheets can be confusing documents. Every VC/investment group has their preferences and will push to maximize their ROI, often to the detriment of the entrepreneurs and prior investors. Investment structuring, while important, doesn’t have to be complicated. Take a look at this simplified term sheet created by the founder of The Funded, a site where entrepreneurs rate VC groups. If you haven’t reached the point where you’re taking institutional VC funding and are looking for angel investing documents that share the same philosophy of simplicity and straight-forwardness, check out this document package provided by Y Combinator.
Marketing/Advertising
Rocket Watcher- a great product marketing resource for startups. It covers product launching, branding, social media, public relations, and a whole lot more.
Hubspot Internet Marketing- Started by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2004, I consider Hubspot to be one of the truly game changing internet/social media marketing firms out there. Above all, they seem driven to provide as much useful and practical marketing information as possible. Take a look at Grader.com- a compilation of grading tools that will analyze and give you grades on your website, press release, twitter accounts, facebooks pages, blogs, and more.
IP/Legal
IP Law for Startups- For young companies, there are few things more important than learning about how to protect your intellectual property. This is a new site started by a IP law veteran covering trade secrets, IP basics, etc.
Trademarkia- Not sure if your trademark has already been taken? Want to double check that logo? Head to Trademarkia to do some research. Its a lot easier on the eyes that the U.S. Patent Office, trust us.
Startup Company Lawyer – Contains a comprehensive list of posts relating to nearly every legal issue you can think of.
If you’re about to launch your website and are looking for a good Terms of Service (TOS) statement and Privacy Policy (PP), check out these automated TOS & PP generators created by Legal River. All you need to provide is some general information about the company and the goods/services you provide.