Students want a quicker and less expensive way to get to this skills-based training than to wade through years of irrelevant courses.
John Richards comes from an entrepreneurial background. As an active angel investor in Utah, Richards has poured money into the unique and beautiful snowflake known as the Utah tech and startup scene. As a mentor, he has guided and nurtured many a fledgling startup. While co-founding several different ventures, he has learned one major life lesson: how to fail, how to get back up, and how to try again.
John Richards also comes from an educational background. He has taught entrepreneurial classes at both BYU and UVU, and was named one of the Top 25 Entrepreneurial Educators in the United States. His time in the educational space has taught him one major life lesson: from an entrepreneurial perspective, traditional education is limited in the learning opportunities for students.
So what do you get when you blend an entrepreneur’s thirst for creation with an educator’s teaching ability? A brand-new entrepreneurship bootcamp called Startup Ignition.
“I’m going out and doing angel investments, I’m mentoring a lot of people, and I’m seeing the same mistakes,” Richards told Beehive Startups. “So many basic mistakes, repeated and repeated.”
Startup Ignition — founded by Richards and his sons, Tyler and John Richards Jr. — is a 13-week course chiseled from the bootcamp business model and designed to eliminate these mistakes. The first four weeks are spent with intensive in-class instruction and applied learning, the next eight weeks are spent putting those skills and knowledge into use, and the final week is an in-class rendezvous to assess where each entrepreneur is at.
Between providing direct connection to people within the entrepreneurial scene and accelerating the learning process, Startup Ignition is providing all people (not just students) an alternative route.
“After more than a decade of teaching entrepreneurship at Utah’s universities and mentoring top students to success, I felt the timing was right to start what essentially is an entrepreneurship school,“ Richards said in a statement. “Students want a quicker and less expensive way to get to this skills-based training than to wade through years of irrelevant courses.”
Tuition is set at $2,000 and a meeting is scheduled for June 18 (7 pm at The Startup Building in Provo) to disclose more information to any interested parties.
In addition to Richards, noted entrepreneur, angel investor, and educator Ron Lindorf will be serving as an instructor at Startup Ignition.
If you’re interested in applying to Startup Ignition, visit their website and submit your application.
Published 6/4/2015
