Everything you need to know about Ricky Van Veen’s talk

‘If you’re not failing, you’re not trying’

Last night, Ricky Van Veen (’03) spoke at Wake Forest Business School. Van Veen is the co-founder of CollegeHumor, Vimeo, and Busted Tees.

He awarded fourteen-student groups seed grants for their business ventures as part of The Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship Excellence Celebration. The awards were given to students who established companies, like Loopey Laces and UpDog Kombacha.

Ricky Van Veen graduated from Wake Forest in 2003

During his interview with Provost Rogan Kersh, Van Veen explained, “There is nothing as exciting as starting something from scratch.” Van Veen acts as an advisor and angel investor for many start-ups, and added: “I think of investing in young people as betting on jockeys, not horses.”  

Van Veen said: “Everything is up for grabs and being revolutionized by technology,” so entrepreneurs should be aware of the changing landscape of today’s society. He added: “Just because you can start something doesn’t mean someone else can try to undercut you.”

He also shared with the audience”two concepts [he] wished [he] had learned sooner were scalability and defensibility.” Being able to understand the barriers to entry of an idea is one of Van Veen’s greatest priorities. 

Being a self-starter, to Van Veen, is most crucial, not just in entrepreneurship but life. He said: “You have to learn entrepreneurship even if you are not going to start your own business,” and “it is cool now to be an entrepreneur.” College is an excellent time to “explore your potential.”

Millenials, Van Even observed, do not want “gatekeepers” — people telling them what to do and how to do it. Instead, we want to make things happen us.

During his hour-long talk, Ricky Van Veen said he values his experience at Wake Forest because of all that he learned, both inside and outside of the classroom. He said: “The best thing is to get a little knowledge from a lot of disciplines, which is the essence of a liberal arts college, like Wake Forest.”

Provost Rogan Kersh interviewed Van Veen

He said that in the past ten years Wake Forest has changed drastically. Aside from the physical improvements, Wake is intellectually more impressive. “People are smarter, and the bar is higher,” he said. One of the greatest advancements is the development of the entrepreneurship program.

Now, starting a business while a college student is quite common —  “Wake Forest even encourages it.”

Entrepreneurs “come in all forms now.” It is not just a coder in a hoodie and flip-flops hunched over their computer. Instead, self-starters can be found all throughout the world, in different arenas. The students who won seed grants for their companies are a testament to this: they are diverse in gender, race, age, and ethnicity.

Van Veen concluded his talk by explaining the importance of social entrepreneurship.

Our motto at Wake Forest, pro humanitate (“for humanity”), guides our life as Demon Deacons. It was wonderful to see that Van Veen has remained true to the crucial framework of our school. He said he, like many other millennials, he “wants to feel like [he is] are adding to the world, not doing it for good PR or to feel good about ourselves, but because it drives business and results.

“A more diverse workplace is a better workplace because there is a more diverse range of viewpoints, which teach us so much.”

More
Wake Forest