Thanks to all the press embracing technology, the movie the Social Network and the emergence of the consumer web and mobile apps, entrepreneurship is in the spotlight again. With that comes the interest and excitement of students in college. You can see it on all the campuses around Boston as seemingly every school has an entrepreneurship club, a startup mentoring program and hackfests. These programs do everything from inspiring new entrepreneurs to coaching them through their first venture.

The problem is, the odds of you being the next Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clerico, or Aaron Levie is statistically insignificant.  What's more likely is that you can lay a foundation in college for an amazing career as an entrepreneur that later in life becomes a successful founder. Here's a few tips for making the most of college to prepare for being a great entrepreneur.

When you start a company, you are usually in one of two camps: a veteran who has worked at multiple startups and knows the monster challenge you're up against OR a first timer who has limited startup experience but an abundance of passion for the idea you want to solve. In both cases, there's always a lot to learn, but for the strength and vitality of an ecosystem, it's particularly important how we handle educating the first timers. 

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.

Last week, I wrote about what I felt was Boston's startup identity. The goal was to help us crystallize who we are, what we're best at and what we have to offer to potential entrepreneurs looking to move to or otherwise join our ecosystem.  As important was the goal to expose what we're not.  The single biggest thing Boston is not is a good place for pure consumer internet plays.

Before you jump out of your seat, follow me for a moment...

Boston has an identity crisis. Like a bad startup, we're trying to be everything to everyone. But we're not and we perform a great disservice to ourselves by being in denial of who we really are. We must not only embrace our strengths and weaknesses, but proudly display them. Just like a good startup looking to recruit a good culture fit, you attract the best when you can clearly show them why they should join you. It's time we did this for Boston.

After spending the last 2.5 years in our ecosystem and visiting NYC and Silicon Valley's ecosystems, I'm going to take a stab at defining Boston's identity. (Special thanks to Bill Warner and others at the Nantucket Conference who discussed this months ago, but didn't quite complete crystallizing.)

If you've been following my Twitter stream @Evanish you know I'm visiting the Valley this week. As I wrote months ago, I think a startup in our interconnected world has to be TriCoastal. I've made a number of trips to New York City in the last year, but it was finally time to make a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley. I came to learn how much of the rumors that reach Boston are true and get a feel for what the real differences are between the two coasts.

For the past six months I've been on a quest to find the idea for my next startup. It's been a journey of ups and downs, tons of meetings, many experiments and a healthy dose of customer development and old fashioned research. Through this process, I've heard the origin stories of many startups both local and famous. Listening carefully, I've discovered there are two common ways to start a company. Depending on which fits you better (which is often a product of your personality and current position) you'll end up following likely one (or sometimes both) of these paths.

I've been very fortunate over the past few months to get some really awesome press coverage for myself and Greenhorn Connect. I also worked at a startup where the CEO was extremely adept at garnering press as well. From these combined experiences, I've learned a bit about getting press. I'd like to share some of those lessons here and hope you'll leave any lessons you have in the comments.

Modern research asserts that only 7% of communication is verbal. Yet, today, we find ourselves using all kinds of tools that leave us communicating in flat text: email, SMS, tweets, facebook statuses, blog posts, etc.  Through these advances, we've rapidly accelerated our ability to communicate (for better and worse), but also damaged our abilities to get our messages effectively across. They all create communication debt. 

Communication debt is:

In the famous story of Don Quixote, the man of La Mancha goes on a quest to have a grand, chivalrous adventure like he's read in books. Unfortunately for Quixote, he creates more trouble than adventure as his distorted view of reality has him mistaking common day things for grand challenges. He is most known for fighting windmills he thought were giants.

Fast forward to today, as entrepreneurs, we are all chasing the elusive, odds-defying startup success. In this quest, we are always looking for the secret to success. We often look for magical solutions and silver bullets that will solve our greatest problems in the form of blog posts, books and successful founder talks. While there are great nuggets of wisdom to be gathered from them, we have to be careful not to take them too literally (as Quixote did the chivalry stories).