Calling All Aspiring Entrepreneurs and Creatives!

So. You have an idea for a new business in your head. But how do you take that idea, refine it, and turn it into something real and impactful?

3 Day Startup, the WHU Founders Bootcamp, is all about taking novel ideas and helping their creators determine the best path forward. From February 2 – 4, this student-led organization will welcome to the Vallendar campus at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management a group of small, two-to-three-person founder teams eager to advance their proposed business ideas. Open to both secondary and university-level students, the event will bring aspiring innovators together with prominent business leaders, all of which have a proven entrepreneurial track record.

The teams will hunker down at the school for three days straight to fully flesh out their concepts and attend exclusive workshops with JabsConsulting and Orrick on a variety of topics, including the allocation of equity and how to avoid the pitfalls many new start-ups fall into. Before getting to work, each founding team will be matched to a mentor who best suits their needs. At the end of the sprint, the teams will present their developed ideas to an expert panel of academics, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs, among them Professor Dries Faems, Chair of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technological Transformation at WHU and programmer behind LeanStartUp, in a pitch battle. The winning team will receive a branding package from Mapa Barragan, who will also act as one of the event’s many mentors.

Since 2011, 3 Day Startup has helped incubate a number of successful businesses when they were still just in their infancy. The minds behind Prematch, for example, a sports app centered around active local and regional soccer leagues in Europe, participated at 3 Day Startup and later in WHU’s Accelerator Program in 2021. Since then, the company, founded in part by WHU alumnus Niklas Brackmann (MSc, 2021), has gone on to complete several successful funding rounds, most recently in the final quarter of 2023.

And now is the time for the next wave of innovative thinkers to put their ideas to the test.

Those interested in joining in on the fun can apply now. Registrations are open to all secondary students (10^th grade and up) and university students, and slots are limited.