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September 2024

Welcome back to First Chair 🚠: Your rundown on Vermont’s startup scene brought to you by your friends at VCET. Today’s gems:

💎 They’re Baaaack

💎 ZymoChem awarded $1.57M from the Department of Defense

💎 A spotlight on founding VCET board member & BioTek legend Briar Alpert

💎 Start Here podcast episode #93 with Senator Patrick Leahy

They’re Baaaack

I love September. Cool nights, warm days, and the early fall light over the lake and mountains fill me up. September is such a jaw dropping time of year, and the perfect welcome for students returning to Vermont’s colleges and universities. Campuses are filling up and students have returned with all their energy, hope and revelry. Their collective energy is undeniable and a lot of fun to witness daily across our programs. For 20 years now, colleges and universities have been the core partners in VCET’s orbit. Supporting student and faculty entrepreneurs is one of my favorite parts of the job…and maybe another reason I love this time of year.

Here are a few of our VCET squad’s favorite numbers for the upcoming year:

0 – Student entrepreneurs and interns working for companies pay $0 for access to our VCET coworking resources. We accommodate as many as we can within limits thanks to our paying members, corporate sponsors and individual donors.  

1 – Advising 1:1 over 60 student founders and teams each year at multiple campuses, which is about 15% of VCET’s annual clients served.

4 – The UVM ARC program that pairs paid student teams with researchers to start and commercialize businesses enters its 4th year at VCET. Our 2024 Venture Associate, Will, is taking it back to the University of Washington to launch.

13 – Number of years instructing the Middlebury College Entrepreneurs course. Highlights include when Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings zoomed in, witnessing Georgia Grace Edwards launch SheFly (now Gnara), and our annual visits with the Burton Snowboards crew.

64 – Selecting our next student Venture Associates. So far, we’ve had 64 lifetime interns, graduate fellows and associates. These stars are our best “exits.”

200 – The second year of the $200,000 winner-takes-all Meyers Cup business competition kicks off. Our team serves as mentors to many of the teams

2025 – Planning starts with our Middlebury Innovation Hub partners on MiddWorks internship opportunities for summer 2025. Check it out please!

Know a Vermont college student that should connect with VCET? Have them reach out.

Dave

Thought Partner by Greg Shove via Scott Galloway

“The hardest part of working with AI isn’t learning to prompt. It’s managing your own ego and admitting you could use some help and that the world will pass you by if you don’t learn how to use a computer, PowerPoint … AI. So get over your immediate defense mechanism — “AI can never do what I do” — and use it to do what you do, just better.”

🥃 Lost Lantern featured in Food & Wine! Check out Want to Taste the World’s Most Exciting Whiskeys? You Need to Go Indie by Liza Weisstuch 

🧪 Holy moly! ZymoChem awarded $1.57M from Department of Defense

🥇 Fluency voted G2’s #1 choice for relationship satisfaction—including a 98% score for both support and ease of doing business. They’re #1 across key categories for 5 quarters running! Full Report Here 

📈 Inc 5,000! Widewail ranked 1,401 out of the top 5000 fastest-growing private companies in America, with a 3-year growth rate of 366%.

You know Briar Alpert from BioTek fame, but did you know he is a founding board member of VCET? Learn more about Briar and how we got so damn lucky to have him “on board”…if you will.

One of the reasons VCET has always valued coworking as part of our business model is that it allows us to surround our small team with a lot of smart people everyday. It also gives our in-house startups the advantage of having key resources at their fingertips. So when we noticed that many of our founders were working with coaches, we figured it was time to sit down with these coaches and ask some hard-hitting questions. What IS a coach? Who can benefit from working with one? And why are you at VCET? Boy were we blown away. Thanks Peter, Alexa, and Steph 🙏🏼

Stories by VCET Marketing Associate, Blaise Siefer

Prefer to listen to stories? Check out our latest Start Here episodes 👇

and don’t forget to follow, rate, review, and subscribe!

Growing high-paying jobs in the state of Vermont is central to VCET’s purpose. Check out these sweet gigs with some of our portfolio companies.

Are you enjoying First Chair?

Do you have a (kindly worded) suggestion for how to make it better?

I’m all ears! 👉 sam@vcet.co

Special thanks to our strategic partners ❤️ Senator Patrick Leahy, the University of Vermont, Middlebury College, Consolidated Communications, the Vermont Technology Council, the State of Vermont, M&T Bank, HUD, & SBA.

Today’s newsletter was brought to you by Sam.

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