Hello and welcome to the exit presented by flippa. I'm your co-host Steve McGarry. And this is a 30 minute podcast where we sit down with expert entrepreneurs that have been there and done it. They have gone through and bought businesses. They have sold businesses and they have operated incredible businesses on a day today.

We get some awesome tricks and tips from them on a regular basis. And on this episode, I sit down with Melissa Kaufman, the co-founder of the garage. But before we dive into this episode, definitely be sure to check the previous episode out with my interview with Shaquille Prasla, the founder of SC Ventures. If you haven't had a chance to check that out, definitely check the show notes as well as any links around where you're listening to this on Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or iTunes. Definitely check out the links in the description.

So for today's episode, I sit down with Melissa Kaufman, the co-founder of the garage at Northwestern. And one thing that you're going to want to stick around for in this interview is she talks a lot about their study. They've been doing this incredible research on entrepreneurs in some of the specific characteristics that they have early on in college. And there are some doosies in here that you're definitely going to want to stick around for. So without further ado, let's dive into my interview with Melissa.

What is up everyone? I am here with Melissa Kaufman, the founding executive director of the garage at Northwestern. How are you doing today, Melissa?

I'm great. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for coming on.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So let's dive into the nitty gritty here. Let's figure out your story. Let's hear you background as to what led you into starting the garage at Northwestern.

Yeah, so the garage has been probably the happiest accident of my career. So I started, I spent the first two years out of school in New York City working at IBM as a strategy consultant. I loved in New York. I hated being a consultant and quickly realized I was in the wrong place.

So after a lot of soul searching and research, I was lucky enough to get a job at Google as an associate product marketing manager, APM, where's the second year of that program ever.

And I spent five years at Google, half of it in Mountain View at the headquarters and half of it at YouTube after we acquired them working on business development partnerships. I've been being in San Francisco and Silicon Valley kind of was drawn to working at startups because you hear about these startups and how great they are.

The first company I worked for was called Levocracy. So I started following, sorry, as a polyvore. I started following product managers. So first I worked for polyvore that I worked for a company called Levocracy.

And when I was in fashion, when I was in social shopping, at that point, I was sick of building other people's companies. I started my own company, which was one of the first influencer working agencies that specialized in Pinterest and Instagram. So I'd seen teenagers in their bedroom at YouTube. I'm asking huge followings and the same thing that's happening again on Pinterest and Instagram.

Nice. Nice. That's the first part of the story. And then, so that was all out in the Bay Area. Then I met my now husband, who was going to Chicago for one year for a fellowship program. So I came to Chicago thinking that I would just do a little consulting or take some time off because I was just setting down my company at that point.

And instead, I was recruited by Northwestern for something called the garage. And I didn't know what that was. But I knew that I loved working with students. And at first, I thought maybe I would just be a mentor or something.

But instead, they recruited me to be the founding executive director and really build a program for them.

Nice. I just kind of walked in one day and fell in love with the program.

Yeah, it was, you know, it was just one of the most serendipitous things. Like, you know, I went to undergrad, but I don't even have a graduate degree. So I thought, like, what would I ever be doing or teaching back in academia.

But it's really been an opportunity for me to build what I wish I had had as a college student. I've always been interested in entrepreneurship.

So this is an opportunity to build something new from the ground up and also to come in and treat it like a startup. So to understand, you know, who are Northwestern students are undergrads and grads and PhD students.

And what resources do they need and really pull everything together in one place so we could give them a true kind of entrepreneurial experience while they're students.

Nice. Yeah. And I love the fact that you had run a business. I think that there is a lot of controversial things around teaching entrepreneurship and having not run a business.

So that's valuable. That's extremely valuable just then on its own, you know, just you having run a business teaching it to people that to students is extremely valuable to pick up on that.

Yeah, I mean, it's very scary to like leave a job and start a company and kind of the risks and the emotional journey that you have to go on in order to do that.

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