Every Friday at 6 p.m., a few dozen students gather in the Tech Exploration Lab at 1403 University Ave. where they commit their evening to the pursuit of entrepreneurship. For hours, they work on startups, discuss ideas and hang out, like a jam session but for founding new companies.
These “Build Nights,” co-hosted by the student startup organization Transcend UW and the UW Tech Exploration Lab offer a glimpse into the lives of a small community of student entrepreneurs, many of whom want to see a stronger culture of entrepreneurship develop on campus.
One of these students, Priyanshu Ghosh, arrived at the University of Wisconsin this fall expecting to quickly integrate with a community of student entrepreneurs, but found it more challenging than he expected. Ghosh, a freshman from the Bay Area, founded his first startup CrunchTutor in high school and took the startup culture of the Bay Area for granted, he said.
“When I came to Madison, that founder density was just not there at all,” Ghosh said. “I would run into a bunch of people, and I didn’t really hear much about startups and entrepreneurship. I actually started sitting in the dining halls, the freshman dining hall, in different tables just trying to find someone I might be able to relate to. I sat at at least dozens of random people’s tables.”
By pure chance, Ghosh would eventually sit down at a table in Gordon with Ben Lukszys, a senior who has been at the center of student entrepreneurship for much of his time at UW. Four years earlier, Lukszys, much like Ghosh, was a freshman struggling to find a community of entrepreneurs on a campus that he expected to be full of them.
Lukszys arrived at UW his freshman year with two goals in mind: start a company and find all the other people starting companies on campus. Finding other entrepreneurial-minded students proved harder than expected, Lukszys said.
“I thought the second [goal] would be easy,” Lukszys said. “You think in a school with like 35,000 undergraduates that there’d be like 100 of them that are starting companies. Not true. It’s actually really, really, really hard to find. And that was basically what started everything I did after it. I just really wanted to find this group of people, and I couldn’t find them.”
UW has a rich and highly respected history of bringing research to market and producing patents. In 2024, UW ranked sixth in the nation for total research expenditures and has consistently ranked among the top 20 universities for U.S. utility patents granted, according to the National Academy of Inventors. Also, UW has consistently ranked highly in undergraduate entrepreneurship, though the university dropped to #27 in 2025, behind peer schools like Northwestern, UIUC and Michigan, according to a 2025 Pitchbook report ranking universities by the number of startup founders among their alumni.
In recent years, UW has taken an active role in building up entrepreneurship on campus through an official “Entrepreneurship Initiative“ and the establishment of a new entity, the Entrepreneurship Hub. Independent of UW’s recent institutional push to grow entrepreneurship, though, a small community of student founders and faculty have been working hard to build a community of entrepreneurship for several years. With the establishment of the “Entrepreneurship Initiative” and the Entrepreneurship Hub, UW will be poised to pick up on the work of these student and faculty leaders.
Lukszys, one of the students leaders driving entrepreneurship on campus, would go on to serve as vice president of Transcend UW, a student-led entrepreneurship and startup organization, in his sophomore year. Lukszys then pivoted to work for Jon Eckhardt, Pyle Bascom Professor in Business Leadership, and Jack Koziol, Infosec Institute founder and CEO, with whom he helped build the student startup accelerator RAMP 100. He also began hosting build nights at his house and later used his knowledge of UW’s student entrepreneurship community to found a hiring agency, Breakout, that provides tailored hiring support to Madison area startups looking to draw talent from the university.
As his efforts to grow the startup community and provide services to student-founders grew, so too did the number of founders he encountered, Lukszys said.
“People started coming out of the woodworks,” Lukszys said. “They’re like, ‘Oh there are some people building companies,’ but they don’t really come out because they’re busy building their company. But if you give them value, then they’ll come out and they’ll be like, ‘Hey, I’m here. Can you help me?’”
For instance, UW senior and Top Floor Beverage co-founder Will Rutkowski had little contact with UW’s entrepreneurship resources for the first year and a half of working on his company.
Rutkowski began building Top Floor Beverage in his sophomore year after noticing a market gap for non-carbonated alternatives to the hard-seltzers that had come to dominate the market. Three years in the making, Rutkowski and his team now have 80,000 drinks in inventory and are aiming to get them on shelves this semester, Rutkowski said. When he began building Top Floor Beverage, though, he was not aware of all the resources UW had to offer, he said.
“At first I would say I did a lot of it on my own because I wasn’t overly aware of the resources,” Rutkowski said. “I feel like Madison, they have a ton of resources that they don’t really advertise that well, especially in the entrepreneurship department, but then I met Ben [Lukszys], and he is a key factor in my network.”
Since meeting Lukszys, Rutkowski has tapped into campus resources and the entrepreneurship community more and is now enrolled in UW’s WAVE entrepreneurship class, Rutkowski said.
In 2023, Nick Lawton and his founding team launched Sideshift as undergraduates at UW. Initially created as a gig marketplace, Sideshift quickly built momentum when Lawton and his team pivoted it toward a marketplace for user-generated content and brand promotion, Lawton said. Since then, Sideshift has grown into a multimillion-dollar startup and is now headquartered in New York City.
When Lawton and his team were getting Sideshift off the ground, though, UW’s entrepreneurship community was just beginning to take shape as well, according to Lawton.
“So the thing with the startup community when we were there, it was just starting to grow, I would say,” Lawton said. “In 2023 when we first started Sideshift, it really did not exist. There was CS NEST and Ramp 100 had just started, but it was a very small cohort of people, like both of these groups, right.”
UW’s changing approach to entrepreneurship
UW has recognized many of the challenges facing student entrepreneurs and is currently carrying out a mission to address these shortcomings. In October 2024, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin commissioned a report on recommendations for how the university could grow entrepreneurship on campus. The report recommended that UW should fundamentally shift its approach from focusing primarily on research and move to support founders at an individual level, according to the report.
UW has a proud history of bringing scientific discoveries to market through a system known as “technology transfer” that was pioneered at UW, but today’s entrepreneurship economy is drawing from less traditional sources of innovation, Eckhardt said.
“If you look at a modern campus, you’ll see many companies are being formed in and around the campus that don’t necessarily use university technology, but they use knowledge that people are acquiring here and relationships and everything else,” Eckhardt said.
Eckhardt has been among the faculty driving entrepreneurship on campus, where he co-founded the Entrepreneurship Science Lab, served as executive director of Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship and serves as a special advisor to the chancellor for entrepreneurship.
Over the summer, UW took a major step toward carrying out recommendations raised in the report, launching a new entity — the “Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub.” Through the Entrepreneurship Hub, UW also established a position for an associate vice chancellor of entrepreneurship. In February, Lewis Sheats, a serial entrepreneur and former director of the Saint Lewis University Chaifetz Center for Entrepreneurship, arrived on campus to serve as the inaugural vice chancellor of entrepreneurship and director of the Entrepreneurship Hub.
The Entrepreneurship Hub, not yet a physical space but a centralized network of entrepreneurship leaders on campus, will address the issue of disconnectedness that has historically been a challenge for the student founders, Sheats said.
“There’s so many cool things at Wisconsin around entrepreneurship, they’re not necessarily all connected, and I see an opportunity to be able to pull all those things together,” Sheats said.
The Entrepreneurship Hub, with Sheats at the helm, will seek to centralize and coordinate a network of 60 different entrepreneurial programs available to students, according to the report.
Undergrads also often lack the capital, experience and connections that college graduates have when starting a company, but through his work in the Entrepreneurship Hub, he hopes to help offset those challenges, Sheats said.
“What I’ve tried to do the last 20 plus years is take that first five after you graduate and shift it into your college experience, because then you’re going to be better prepared to launch a company if you get outside that college bubble,” Sheats said.
While UW is taking a new approach to supporting campus entrepreneurship, gaps like a lack of flexibility in the internship requirement for School of Human Ecology majors remain, Rutkowski said.
Rutkowski, a Consumer Behavior and Marketplace Studies major, simply did not have time to work an internship on top of trying to get Top Floor Beverage off the ground, he said.
“I’m required to take an internship, but I work my company full time, like it’s between classes,” Rutkowski said. “It’s phone calls on the walk to another class, so I don’t really have time to do an internship and work full time for another company on top of school and on top of leading my team and leading the company.”
Through advisors and administrators, he was ultimately able to waive the internship requirement, but it took him half a year and significant effort to do so, according to Rutkowski. UW’s report on entrepreneurship did not explicitly address the impact of internship requirements on campus entrepreneurship, though the report repeatedly recommended the university take a “founder first” approach and engage in sustained supportive action of entrepreneurship at an institutional level.
Women in entrepreneurship
Another recurrent theme in discussions surrounding UW’s entrepreneurship culture was the lack of female representation, a finding reflected in the university-sponsored report. The report drew on data from the Entrepreneurship Science Lab to determine that female students were far less likely to be involved in entrepreneurship on campus. The report also noted that individuals tend to innovate in areas of life familiar to them, citing a study that showed patents with all-female inventor teams are 35% more likely than patents with all-male teams to focus on women’s health.
UW junior and startup founder Trinity Krohn noticed the dearth of female founders early on in her experiences with entrepreneurship and founded UW’s first female entrepreneurship organization, “Women in Entrepreneurship,” last spring.
The first time she went to a meeting for CS NEST, a UW venture creation program, she was the only woman there, Krohn said.
“I went to the meeting and it was literally all men, there was not one girl there,” Krohn said. “I was really surprised because I’m from a CS major, so I’m used to this already, this gender gap, but entrepreneurship is even worse.”
Eventually, the lack of other women at the CS NEST meetings became so apparent that her male friends even encouraged her to find a way to connect with more female entrepreneurs, Krohn said. Krohn then began looking for a female entrepreneurship organization to join, only to find that no such club existed on campus, so she founded “Women in Entrepreneurship,” Krohn said.
Women in Entrepreneurship now has 380 members on its mailing list and, among other things, has worked to advertise CS NEST for women on campus, Krohn said. During the spring 2026 kickoff event for CS NEST, the number of women present was far higher than usual, and many women stepped forward to share their startup ideas, Krohn said.
“We have started advertising CS Nest, and I noticed a lot of women there on the kickoff,” Krohn said. “I was excited about that, and there was even this thing where Grant [Watkins], the runner of CS NEST, asked people to pitch their startups. Every person that pitched their startup was a girl and he even said, ‘Guys, you need to pick up the base here.’ And that made me really happy to see, especially since it was so different when I started.”
The AI boom’s impact
Krohn is also busy working on her startup, Substrata, which uses software to help companies identify underground locations to build data centers. Krohn, Ghosh, Rotkowski and others interviewed for this article are either building startups around AI, like Krohn and Ghosh, or incorporating it in their day to day operations like Rutkowski.
In July 2025, Ghosh launched his second startup, Pyrent, which uses machine learning to optimize how much companies spend on advertising to get the highest return on investment. Since launching Pyrent, he has shifted to incorporate large language models as a way to broaden the feedback he can give to companies and advise them on the kind of advertisements that are likely to be most successful, Ghosh said.
Beyond incorporating LLMs into the services Pyrent provides to its customers, they also greatly reduced the amount of time it took him to build Pyrent, Ghosh said.
“LLMs are actually hugely helpful in the development of the company,” Ghosh said. “I don’t know that I would have developed it, at least definitely not as fast as I did without LLMs.”
One might expect the recent boom in the AI industry to have spurred a flurry of entrepreneurial activity among undergrads on campus, but the reality is more complicated than that, according to Eckhardt and several student founders.
It is difficult to quantify the number of students involved in entrepreneurship on campus. Some data shows that the number of student founders has remained steady over the past few years, while other factors point to increasing interest in entrepreneurship among the student body.
Every year, Eckhardt conducts a campus wide survey to assess the number of students that self-identify as startup founders, the results of which have hovered around 2% of the student body for as long he has been doing the survey, Eckhardt said. Though artificial intelligence does not appear to have increased the number of student founders reported in his survey, the quality of student startups that he comes into contact with has grown significantly, according to Eckhardt.
“From our data [the number of student startups] tends to be pretty stable,” Eckhardt said. “It goes up and down a bit and there are some limitations in the methodology that make it difficult to truly know the actual underlying number. What I would say is this: the quality of the companies that are being started by the students is increasing dramatically in the current era.”
Despite the results of Eckhardt’s survey, some other findings suggest that entrepreneurship may be growing on campus. For instance, the number of applications to Transcend’s annual pitch competition, in which $50k is awarded equity free to the top three finalists, jumped from 85 in 2025 to over 120 in 2026, according to Transcend president Siddharth Singh.
Additionally, CS NEST has seen rapid growth since program manager Grant Watkins joined the program in Fall 2023. When Watkins joined CS NEST, the number of applicants for the organization’s accelerator program increased from 58 in the fall of 2023 to 190 in the fall of 2025, according to Watkins. This semester, the number of applicants is at 140 and still climbing, according to Watkins.
The findings of Eckhardt’s survey and the increasing interest in Transcend and CS NEST raise poignant questions about what truly leads to the growth of entrepreneurship on a university campus. AI has already fundamentally changed higher education and venture capital in the U.S. Globally, AI captured 64.1% of venture capital deal value in the second quarter of 2025 and contributed more to real GDP growth in the U.S. economy than the dotcom boom did in 2000, according to Pitchbook and the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank.
One might expect the surge in AI economic activity to be reflected in the startup culture at UW. Many of today’s student founders are finding ways to incorporate AI into their operations at some level. The growth of CS NEST and number of applicants to Transcends 2026 pitch competition are also suggestive of a student body more inclined to investigating the entrepreneurial opportunities available to them on campus. Eckhardt’s survey, on the other hand, does not show an increase in the number of student founders in recent years.
UW’s recent investment in campus entrepreneurship through the “Entrepreneurship Initiative” and the establishment of the Entrepreneurship Hub shows both a self-awareness of the shortcomings that have historically hampered student entrepreneurship and a desire to invest in entrepreneurship. Pivoting away from an emphasis on intellectual property development and research to supporting founders at an individual level seems to make sense in an age when students have the power of AI at their fingertips.
Given that the Entrepreneurship Hub is just now getting off the ground this semester, it’s difficult to determine the impact of UW’s new initiative on increasing student interest in Transcend and CS NEST. The role of student leaders like Lukszys and Krohn in increasing engagement among student founders and the broader student community certainly should not be overlooked. Additionally, many student founders seem to have an entrepreneurial streak that manifests itself regardless of the resources or technology available to them. Ghosh, Krohn, Lukszys, Lawton, and Rutkowski had all started or attempted to start businesses prior to the ones they currently run. This enterprising spirit has flowed into UW’s entrepreneurship community itself, where Lukszys, Krohn and others have been driving change on campus alongside founding their own companies.
