Announcing The True Entrepreneur Corps

We’ve spent considerable time internally (and on this blog here and here) talking about the importance of innovation for the long term recovery of our country and world. Our team has wrestled with the overall decline in resources for early stage entrepreneurs in the current downturn, and we recently turned to our portfolio company Founders to ask what we can do to help.

We’re introducing the True Entrepreneur Corps (TEC) in hopes that one small effort can build resources for the early stage ecosystem and foster the spirit of possibility in tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

TEC is a program for 20 college students to join True and our portfolio for the summer. Students will work directly at one of our companies for the summer, and they will participate in a robust program of speakers designed to expose TEC participants to the top trends, methods, and innovators in the early stage markets. TEC participants will be hand picked from universities across the US and matched to specific and identified needs in our portfolio. True covers the cost of the TEC folks for our companies, so for the portfolio founders this is a source of free, very talented, motivated labor. For the students, we hope that our platform can expose them to the world of startups and innovation early-on in their education. Our goal is to provide aspiring entrepreneurs with experience and resources that could impact their career at an early age.

True was founded with the belief that the entrepreneur is the protagonist and creative hero in the technology world. Since our beginning, we’ve made every decision with the viewpoint that the early stage, founding entrepreneur is our customer. While we can only invest in a very few entrepreneurs each year, we believe it’s our duty and responsibility to help support all entrepreneurs in their quest to create a better tomorrow. Creating TEC enables us to do two things: build resources for our portfolio at a time when they’re needed most and provide a valuable service to True’s future customers and our country’s great hope: the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

We have created a new section of our site with additional detail and we’ll keep you all posted on our progress. Please contact us if you would like to participate with this program in any way.