Ideas that excite you are worth pursuing.
Startup Exchange is a nonprofit supporting student founders and the organizations that help them pursue the nontraditional path.
Our manifesto
Empowering student founders to reach their full potential.
Startup Exchange is on a mission to make the nontraditional path more accessible to college students who want to become startup founders.
We believe that choosing to become a startup founder at a young age requires self-awareness, clear goals, and the right peers to challenge you and 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 deciding that an idea should become a startup, you need the freedom to experiment, put it in front of users, and learn from their 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 help student founders find those people and build the communities that support them. Not through transactional networking, but through the shared experience of pursuing ambitious ideas 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.
In 2025, Startup Exchange shifted from primarily hosting its own events to supporting the broader student founder ecosystem. Today, we operate as a fiscal sponsor for student-led organizations and initiatives, helping them receive and manage funds through our nonprofit infrastructure.
We also host centralized events open to student founders across organizations and universities. Going forward, our focus is to build the shared infrastructure, culture, and cross-campus community that make it easier for every college student looking to pursue the nontraditional path.
Our vision is to make the nontraditional path more accessible to every college student looking to pursue it.
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