Why I miss DartBoston and if you care about Student Retention, you should too.

I miss DartBoston.  Yes, there's a DartBoston still around today, but I miss Classic DartBoston. The group all about young and student entrepreneurs. I miss the energy of their Thursday night Pokin Holes events and the community it formed. I miss the one of a kind atmosphere that removed any fear from your first networking event and brought out a uber-high-caliber group of young entrepreneurs. Today's DartBoston is great with their flip cup and concerts, but it does not have the same effect of the Classic DartBoston days. That's why I miss DartBoston and if you care about student retention, you should too.

The Secret Ingredients to Classic DartBoston & Student Retention:

1) Welcome Everyone the Hard Way

What Cort and Jake did to welcome people at DartBoston is unlike any other event I've seen anywhere and it made all the difference. They would stand at the door and greet everyone that came to the event the second they arrived. They would then ask them, "what are you working on?" and connect them with someone else already there that would be interesting to talk to based on that or something else they discovered (like where you went to school).  

DartBoston was often the first startup event a young person would go to. To have a friendly young face welcoming you and immediately helping you make your first few connections is tremendous.  It guaranteed everyone would meet at least a couple good people that night and warmed up even the most introverted people by making their first conversation easy to enter.

Now today, there are no events this welcoming and whether you look at Angry Cort or Nice Cort the message is the same and has been for over 2 years now: it is scary to go to your first networking event and most events don't seem all that welcoming to a newcomer. Even I was scared the first time I was in a sea of suits at the Xconomy XSite 2009 and I was so turned off by the event there I didn't go to another event for two and a half months...when I went to a DartBoston event and fell in love with our community.

2) Attracting Students Starts by Going to Them.

Once Pokin' Holes events started packing back bar rooms, Cort and Jake made a bold move to further grow the DartBoston community: they went on tour to schools. Through the series of events at schools like Tufts, Olin, Northeastern and BU, new students discovered the Dart community, heard how awesome Boston's startup scene was and made fast friends with others at the event.  From those friendships and the energy and enthusiasm from the event, many of these students went on to start attending other events.

I want to emphasize the key to this: the majority of students who came to the DartBoston event on their campus had never been to a startup event. The brave few students who went off their campus anyways were the ones who opened the doors to DartBoston coming to their campus. 

I've heard too many times from students in Boston that have no idea our startup ecosystem exists even at places like MIT's Founders Journey class.  In college, you live in a different world that we cannot expect them to omnisciently know to step out of to check out our ecosystem; when you're in 3 student groups, have 4-5 classes, a girlfriend/boyfriend and live in a dorm, Boston startups aren't the first thing you think about. However, these are our future leaders and we need to go to them to give them a taste of what we have to offer. Valley startups are happy to come speak to our students on their campuses and sponsor events there (see Sequoia at Startup Bootcamp or Dropbox visits to Olin and MIT). Are you?

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There will always be students and young people who have the guts to plow ahead no matter what and enter our ecosystem. However, if we truly want to build a bridge to our students, then we must accept the responsibility to make our community more welcoming to them.  We had the ultimate onramp in Classic DartBoston, but it has been gone for over a year now. This is why I miss DartBoston and if you care about student retention, you should too.