Ideas that excite you are worth pursuing.
Startup Exchange is a nonprofit enabling college students to build the self-awareness, goals, and mindset needed to pursue the nontraditional path.
Our manifesto
Empowering do-ers to reach their full potential.
Startup Exchange is on a mission to redefine the nontraditional path for college students to become startup founders.
We believe that the deliberate choice of deciding to become a startup founder as a young person requires mastery of self-awareness, goalsetting, and finding the right peers to hold you accountable.
College is inherently a linear path. It's scary to break the path of picking a major and applying to internships like your friends.
Here's the thing. You shouldn't need to worry about that at this stage. The biggest ideas and companies started simply as side-projects or inner-child curiosities.
Before you have any conviction that an idea should become a startup, it's important to tinker with an idea, to put it in front of users, and to get feedback.
What we believe
Most students don't fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they lack self-efficacy—the belief that they can actually do something significant.
College makes this even harder when you're surrounded by people optimizing for the same linear outcomes: the right GPA, the right internship, the right job offer. People that find you delusional in your conviction, and your ideas.
We believe the antidote is finding your tribe.
Not people who endlessly cheer you on, which prevents growth. We mean people who hold you accountable. People who question your goals, poke holes in your thesis, and genuinely want to see you succeed.
The best accountability comes from peers on the same path—or slightly ahead in their own way, but still behind in ways where you provide value too. It's a two-way street. Otherwise, it's the blind leading the blind.
Why peers matter
Building something is an individual journey. But the people around you determine whether that journey leads somewhere real or just in circles.
You need people who speak your language but challenge you in healthy ways. People who are stars in their own roles—not chasing a shared definition of success, but finding fulfillment in the uncommon path they've chosen.
SX exists to connect you with those people. Not through networking events or pitch competitions—through the shared experience of actually building something together.
The path forward
Since 2023, we've hosted over 100 events and have reached over 50,000 students from over 40 universities across the US.
As of 2025, we've decided to scale back our events in order to sharpen our focus on culture-building and enabling self-discovery.
Our vision is to enable every college student looking to pursue the nontraditional path.
If this is a movement that sounds interesting to you, please reach out to our team at hello@startup.exchange.
Team
Carter Cote
CO-FOUNDER
Vik Keerthipati
CO-FOUNDER