Yale-NUS students become entrepreneurs during Hustle Weekend

In late March, the Yale-NUS Centre for International & Professional Experience (CIPE) hosted Hustle Weekend, a weekend-long entrepreneurship bootcamp designed to immerse students in a start-up environment. “The bootcamp sought to allow students to experience what it is like to be a co-founder and pick up start-up best practices such as user-centric design, lean methodology, validation, and value creation,” explained Programme Manager (Career Services), CIPE, Nurul Jihadah Hussain. During the two days, students are immersed in a full schedule filled with hands-on experiences, ranging from prototyping, to mock pitches, to creating revenue models. Manager Nurul also shared that students were expected to deliver “a final pitch during their Demo Day Presentation with an accompanying prototype to a panel of external judges”.

Participants and staff of Hustle Weekend. 

Participants attending a workshop. Photos by Martin Choo (Class of 2023).

The bootcamp drew nine students — a mix of aspiring student entrepreneurs and curious individuals hoping to learn something new. For Xing Hao Wang (Class of 2023), Hustle Weekend was where he could test out a business idea he had in mind: “a YouTube channel teaching Chinese, Japanese, and Korean”.  The bootcamp proved to be an eye-opening experience for him as he was encouraged to expand on his idea.

Xing Hao Wang (Class of 2023) discussing ideas with a fellow attendee. Photo by Martin Choo (Class of 2023).

“The instructors pushed me to imagine what my business could be like beyond producing videos and to formulate a long-term vision,” shared Xing Hao. He added that the “the detailed feedback from judges helped [him] to sharpen the focus of [his] business… and was a great learning opportunity”.

Marcellinus Jerricho (Class of 2024) pitching his team’s idea during Demo Day Presentation. Photo by Martin Choo (Class of 2023).

Unlike students with prior entrepreneurial experiences, Hustle Weekend was Marcellinus Jerricho’s (Jerri) (Class of 2024) “first encounter with entrepreneurship”. Despite finding entrepreneurship an intimidating topic, the two-day intensive helped ease him into the subject with easily understandable material and helpful facilitators.

In a pleasant turn of events, Jerri’s team, Team Thoth, won the “Most Investable Product” category with their product idea and will be heading to Bangkok, Thailand, for a week-long CIPE-funded entrepreneurship intensive during the upcoming semester break.

The members of Team Thoth (from left to right): Marcellinus Jerricho (Class of 2024), Sanghyun Hwang (Class of 2024), Ryan Chenhao (Class of 2025), and Kriti Andhare (Class of 2025). Photo by Martin Choo.

The team’s winning idea, ‘Thoth’, is an online community for academic discussion. “Think of it like a Goodreads for academic papers. We want to bring the freedom and experience of a YouTube comment section to scholarly articles, which often have a high barrier to entry in understanding,” said Kriti Andhare (Class of 2025) from Team Thoth. Reflecting on how they conceptualised the idea, fellow team member Sanghyun Hwang (Harry) (Class of 2024) noted that it was not straightforward. “The process behind ‘Thoth’ ultimately was trial and error, where the first idea was not feasible despite hours of research and brainstorming, but the team laughed it off, called it ‘proof of concept,’ and moved on.”

For many of them, the journey to become entrepreneurs certainly does not end with Hustle Weekend. “I wish to use these skills [from the Bootcamp] to build our own start-up that can bring value to the community,” shared Jerri.