Lehman says while there wasn’t a specific demand that led to the creation of the program, he found great interest when pitching the idea to entrepreneurial students at IU.
Lehman says students will have individualized goals to reach and receive personalized support through weekly lunch and learns with startup experts, mentoring from successful entrepreneurs, and a chance to pitch investors for feedback.Īs part of the program, participants must reside in Bloomington over the summer and will receive a $2,000 stipend. The eight-week program will see participants working 25 hours a week out of The Mill’s coworking space in downtown Bloomington. “So really, our hope was as a paid internship, they would be able to focus on building their company.” “What we really wanted to do is allow collegiate founders the opportunity to get paid to work on their startup over the summer and kind of alleviate some of the stresses that come with going through some traditional pre-accelerator programming where, unless you’re making revenue or have another side job or part-time job, you’re doing this thing and you’re motivated to do it, but you’ve still got to pay the bills,” said Lehman. The inaugural cohort, running in June and July, will also include a summer membership to The Mill.Īndy Lehman, head of accelerator programming at The Mill, tells Inside INdiana Business the goal is to remove a barrier for students. The Mill, a nonprofit entrepreneurship center and coworking space, is launching Startup Summer, a paid internship program where students from Indiana University and Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington will participate in programming to grow their businesses. (Inside INdiana Business) - A new pilot program in Bloomington looks to incentivize college students to build out their startups.