Students, graduates activate their business plans with summer venture program

Siddhi Jain and her sister, Labdhi Jain, started their business by selling hot chai on Michigan Avenue. They were just two college students trying to make a little pocket money. But soon they had people lining up, repeat customers and even requests for catering at events and weddings.

Now Siddhi Jain has a new plan - to make what's become their online business, Pyaali, into a cafe.

Jain, who graduated from UIC this spring with a degree in information and decision sciences, was one of a handful of participants in the Innovation Center's Summer Venture Accelerator, which wrapped up its second iteration in late July.

It's not a class, and there is no credit, explained Dan Hogan, a professor in the UIC College of Business Administration who organizes the program. It's free for students and graduates to help them get their entrepreneurial ideas off the ground.

"They're making a commitment to, over the months of June and July, to work independently on taking an idea and moving it toward reality," Hogan said.

The Summer Venture Accelerator program grew out of EXD, an entrepreneurship course offered by the Innovation Center where students - in business, computer science and design - devised a product or service to solve a specific problem.

"It was basically like, hey, you spent two semesters working on this idea in school. Now you want to really work on bringing it to the real world," Hogan said.

Each student gets a volunteer mentor - UIC alums Hogan has kept in touch with startup entrepreneurs, who answered his call for volunteer mentors, and others.

There are also workshops, networking opportunities and guest speakers. Patrick Tannous, who sold his first cups of tea on campus as a UIC undergrad before launching his brand Tiesta Tea, was one. Mariah McGregor of the UIC Library gave students guidance on how to use the library's resources to get insights into their target markets. Representatives from Chicago law firm goodcounsel visited to talk about laws affecting startups and considerations for growing a business.

As a young program at UIC, the Summer Venture Accelerator is still small; there were eight participants representing seven projects this year. But the business ideas range greatly, from the Jains' chai business to a consulting service for startups that encompasses prototyping and market research to a concept for using AI to find efficiencies in the insurance industry.

"We have some of our participants who are very early in the idea stage, and so this summer's been about just getting out and talking to people and testing their basic assumptions," Hogan said. "We have some who are a little further along."

The Summer Venture Accelerator encouraged Miguel Rascon and Celine Alonzo, both recent UIC graduates in industrial design, to test their idea in the real world, Rascon said. Networking and making connections in Chicago have been crucial steps.

Their consultancy, Locale, grew out of their love for Chicago and a desire to share the city's neighborhoods, highlights and quirks. Through networking, fun events and unconventional marketing, they aim to build community hubs at local businesses where people can socialize and explore Chicago.

"There've been a lot of people who have privately expressed how terribly lonely they are," Alonzo said. "And it's like, 'Wait! Let me show you these places, and you can find someone or something.'"

"And that's exactly what we want to do," Rascon added. "We want to help people connect." By looping in local businesses, Locale can help create gathering spaces while driving customers to these businesses.

"These places want to be community hubs, and there's people that want to hang out at community hubs," Rascon said. "We want to bridge that gap."

Right now they're organizing their first event, which they're calling Chairs and Chai. The idea: Ask people to bring their favorite piece of furniture to a gathering spot and drink chai. The aim is to create a cafe-like space for people to be together. They've connected with the chambers of commerce in Wicker Park and Logan Square to potentially host their first Chairs and Chai in one of those locations.

Alonzo and Rascon have decided they'll continue to build Locale, not something they had considered at the beginning of the Summer Venture Accelerator, Rascon said.

"My favorite thing was it forcing me to finally go out there and try it," Rascon said about the summer program.

Through the program, Jain weighed the benefits of continuing Pyaali as an online business or as a cafe. A cafe, she decided, would give her the personal interaction with customers she wants.

"This program helped me decipher what I truly want to do in my life," Jain said.

"We had started off on a whim," she said. "It was just two college students who were broke and wanted to make some money. And in order to make this into something that's long-term and what we want … we needed to have something more concrete. And that's where I wanted this program to push me."