We visited the headquarters of Asana is an application that enables companies to communicate and track member’s work in a streamlined, effective way. We then had dinner with several Asana employees and Wesleyan alumni, including those we’ve already with Alex, Pi, and Mika, as well as Max Gunawan, Adam Smiley Poswolsky, and Nina Chen. - Rosa Munson-Blatt '21 & Frederick Corpuz '20
We visited 500 Startups, a venture capital with a vision of “Since our inception, we’ve made it our mission to find and empower talented founders, whether they’re across the world or overlooked in our own backyard.” Upon entering the space, we felt a buzzing atmosphere with a seminar with 50 rising entrepreneurs in attendance and other teams in the background working on whiteboards, sticky notes, and desktops. - Frederick Corpuz '20
We visited the headquarters of Pixar where alumni Elyse Klaidman and Noah Newman gave us a tour. We had the opportunity to see internal exhibits that Elyse had curated on the recently released film Coco as well as the upcoming Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 movies. - Kiana Autry-Dawkins '18 & Rosa Munson-Blatt '21
Fall 2016 was a period of renewal for Kai. We launched new programs, recruited new team members, created essential “apocalypse documents” that preserves our institutional memory, and began handing down the reigns to our younger team members.
By Mika Reyes (Kai Entrepreneurship Wesleyan Co-President)
I probably sent out 70+ emails total to coordinate the annual Silicon Valley trip we had early this year - cold emails to our hosts, reminder emails to our participants, follow-up emails to the Kai team. Kai’s Slack channels were buzzing with ideas about how to fundraise for our participants, where we should live for the week, which companies to visit on each day, how to be smart about our funds. We worked tirelessly to make this program successful for the second time in a row, and I like to think we did just that.
Over spring break, Kai Wes traveled to Silicon Valley to learn from Wesleyan graduates and entrepreneurs. Leah Cabrera, Olivia Chavez, and Fortune Jackson-Bartelmus wrote a reflection on their trip below. Linked here is a short video of the experience.
By Alex Garcia (Kai Entrepreneurship Wesleyan co-president)
This Fall was Kai’s most eventful semester yet with an event almost every week that helped us accomplish our mission of entrepreneurship education and exposure for Wesleyan students of all backgrounds. October had three big events that Kai helped organize: Startup Weekend Central Connecticut, the Kai Speaker series, and the NYC Fall Break trip to tech offices.
NYC trip reflections from Amanda Yeoh '19, Mario See '18, Antonio Rabayo '16, Pi Songkungtham '19, Elliot Williams '18, Jisung Jung '17 and Alex Garcia '17.
Today we dove deep into problem identification, personal pitching, and media representations of the tech industry. On the hour subway ride to a Chipotle right across from the NYC Google offices we started our discussion about problems we recognized growing up in each of our hometowns.
