Venture X is a fun progressive journey in venture creation. You go as far as your drive and motivation take you. It is as much a program about what you do, design and build out a concept, as it is about who you become: a confident innovator, collaborator, and value creator.
The world's most pressing problems do not come with instruction manuals. They reward people who know how to find the right question, assemble the right insights and the right team, and move with confidence through uncertainty. Venture X is where you learn to do exactly that, by actually doing it.
Over a few months you work alongside driven students from across Purdue's colleges and disciplines, all in one room, building at the same time. I have run this for a year now and I am convinced the single biggest driver of outcomes is founder density. Put enough people who are seriously building in one space and things happen. Collisions happen. Teams form over coffee. A hallway conversation turns into your next move.
That room is where the real work gets done. MVP tear downs. GTM brainstorming. Pricing debates. Running experiments on each other's ventures, not just your own. Trading contacts, and honest founder life reflections at 11pm when something has just broken. We call it the founder village, and it is the thing students still talk about a year later. You will learn as much from the teammate who thinks nothing like you do as you will from any framework or tool.
Throughout the journey you meet and work with people who are actively building and backing companies right now. Operators who have shipped and scaled, and who will tell you what actually happened. Functional experts in sales, marketing, design, and storytelling who will coach you through whatever you are stuck on this week. Founders a few steps ahead of you who remember the problem you are having. And active investors who will pressure test your thinking, name the risk you are avoiding, and lay out what it would take to get to conviction.
Last year more than thirty of them gave time to our cohort. The guidance was concrete and actionable. That is the standard we hold our guests to.
Both Venture X courses are now hosted at Purdue HIVE, Purdue's new hub for innovation, ventures, and entrepreneurship at BHEE. Ten thousand square feet of co-working space, workshop and pitch space, and an incubator, with a community of student founders already in the building most nights. It is a beautiful space and it changes the experience. You are not just enrolling in a course. You are joining the room where Purdue builds.
How does one go from passion about a problem space to uncovering the clear meaningful problems worth solving or the actionable opportunities to pursue? Once a clear problem is defined, how does one discover and build the right viable and scalable solution for the problem to maximize impact? Venture X is your opportunity to experience this venture creation journey firsthand, exploring a problem space of your choice, one that you are passionate about or want to learn about. You will develop game changing skills, a problem solving mindset, and the confidence to tackle any complex problem in front of you.
Fall · STRT 312H · 3 credits
Every great venture begins with a problem deeply understood. In X1 you immerse yourself in a problem space you care about. You map the system, build a list of real named people worth talking to, and then you get out of the building and talk to them. Two big components: customer discovery, run with discipline, and business design.
You learn to ask about the past rather than the future, to tell a compliment from evidence, and to write the test and the pass bar before you look at the data. Most of you will find that something you believed on day one is wrong. That is not a setback, that is the semester working.
On the business design side you frame the concept, a specific customer getting a specific job done and how they do it today, then build a value proposition with a mechanism of value in a unit they already track. You hypothesize an MVP that is minimum, viable, and valuable, size the market both ways, map the white space, and take a first cut at the business model and go to market. By the end you are making a business
case, not describing an idea, and that is what you pitch.
You form early team connections with students from majors you may never have worked with before. That mix is a feature, not a coincidence, and you feel its value immediately.
X1 Outcome: Your Challenge X — a clearly defined, validated problem or opportunity that becomes your foundation going forward.
Spring · STRT 313H · 3 credits
With a real problem in hand, you explore the universe of possible solutions, prototyping, testing, and iterating based on direct feedback from real users and markets. This is where teams solidify, disciplines converge, and the work gets real. The objective is to find a customer and sell.
You focus on what it takes to get closer to launch: value proposition, go to market, sales strategy, lead generation, pricing, and the business model underneath it. You engage with product designers, technical founders, and sales experts who have navigated exactly this phase, and their candor about what worked, what did not, and what they wish they had known is worth more than any textbook. You work with active investors and with experienced operators who pressure test your model and help you find your best shot at real world traction.
Funding: up to $5,000 per team to support product and customer development.
Who is in the room: most X2 students come from successful Venture X1 teams, and from the winning teams at the Burton D. Morgan Venture Concept Competition. If you have been through either, you arrive in January with a validated problem and a team already formed, and you spend the semester building rather than searching.
What last year's cohort did: teams shipped product and put it in front of real users. PipeLine and Oppit went to market. Nihal Gunukula is now in San Francisco, backed by Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun. Several others landed pilots and their first paying customers.
X2 Outcome: Your Solution X, a validated concept, tested with real stakeholders, ready to develop further or ready for primetime and investment.
Skills that matter everywhere: Opportunity identification, human-centered design, rapid prototyping, stakeholder engagement, business model validation, decision-making under uncertainty, and the ability to communicate your ideas with clarity and conviction.
A network you won't find in a classroom: Direct access to founders, investors, operators, and functional experts in sales, marketing, and design, as engaged participants in your journey who push back, advise, and occasionally open doors.
A cohort of builders: Your peers in Venture X will become some of your most valuable professional relationships. Engineers who can build what you imagine. Scientists who can validate what you claim. Designers who can make it real. Marketers who can find who needs it. You will co create, co work, and solve each other's problems all semester. The interdisciplinary nature of this program is not incidental, it is the point.
Confidence that compounds: This may be the most underrated outcome. Having navigated real ambiguity, built something with people unlike you, and engaged with real world innovators, you will approach your career's future challenges differently. You'll know you can figure it out. That confidence is yours to keep.
Who should apply: Rising sophomores and above, all majors welcome and encouraged. No prior startup experience or specific GPA required. Bring motivation, curiosity, and a willingness to get out there and learn.
Where we meet: Purdue HIVE, Duncan Annex, Brown Family Hall. Both X1 and X2 are hosted there.
Funding: Eligible teams/concepts have access to (up to) $5K of funding per concept to reimburse and support product and customer development expenses.
Team formation: Organic, not assigned. Teams form around the most compelling ideas and the people drawn to them.
Grading: Emphasizes meaningful progress and rigorous engagement, not just outcomes. Discovering that an idea shouldn't proceed is as valuable as one that advances.
Retakes: Any course can be repeated up to three times as your ideas evolve.
Honors College students (JMHC):
Certificate in Entrepreneurship & Innovation students:
Engineering (all majors) / CS, DS, AI / IBE Students:
Dr. Kostas Grigoriou (kostasg@purdue.edu)
Kostas has worked with hundreds of founders and venture builders, and brings methods and frameworks equivalent to those used by premier venture studios such as High Alpha, Alloy Partners, and Forum Ventures. This is as close to real world venture creation as a university program gets.
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