Catalyst's Story and Lessons Learned

It's only taken 100 instances of my students asking "Why did you start this?" for me to write this, but here it is: how and why Catalyst XL got started and what I've learned.

Catalyst wasn't the result of some "light bulb" moment, but more like what I call a "snowball effect" of one event leading to another.

But what really matters is what started that snowball effect. And that was, without a doubt, my own search for meaning in my career.

So let's call that lesson #1: pursue meaning over all else, and you'll end up where you need to.

Even with all the mistakes I'm about to shamelessly admit to, building Catalyst has been the most rewarding and humbling experience of my life. I'm definitely no billionaire, but I get to work on stuff that I actually like all day. And I get to see other people benefit from it, which is all I could ever ask for.

But getting there wasn't exactly a straightforward path, especially starting as a full-blown corporate conformist. So that's what this essay is about.

If you don't know me I'm Nathan Bucci and I'm the Founder & CEO of Catalyst XL. Catalyst is a global community of entrepreneurial university students, and an education entity built to help students start or join startups. We run 4-week Cohorts with the goal of helping our students start working on their own ideas, or help someone else with theirs.

Part 1: Searching

I came into my freshman year of college with zero ambition whatsoever. Being from Illinois, the entire reason I went to the University of Florida was so that I could do all of the outdoor things I liked to do year-round. There was no career angle.

Luckily, I had a roommate who was there to further his career, and honestly, I credit him for helping me understand what a "career" even was. After I learned that, I decided I should probably find out what I wanted mine to be like.

So long story short, over the next year I began talking to more students in my business school, applying to student organizations, getting into some, applying to jobs, networking with professionals, and getting summer and spring internships.

I researched and even got experience in countless different career paths. All the classics for business students like sales, investment banking, marketing, etc.

But primarily, my sights were set on consulting. I thought that if I could be a McKinsey consultant, that would be the pinnacle of success.

I started case prepping, networking with people at McKinsey, and doing everything else a well-rounded professional candidate would do.

But my eggs weren't all in one basket. I looked for other things that were interesting to me that could still strengthen my resume for consulting.

And that's what led me to a deal sourcing "externship" with HP Tech Ventures. Which, in a nutshell, is an a-sync experience where you find 5 attractive companies for HP to potentially invest in, and get to meet occasionally with the Partner.

Tons of students do the program and have a mediocre experience, but something about even getting a glimpse into the world of entrepreneurship drove me to go all-in with it. It was the first "professional" experience that actually gave me energy.

Still, it was only supposed to be a stepping stone towards a McKinsey job. But it definitely got me to start wondering if I was on the right path.

Right after that, I did my first summer internship with a financial planning firm back in my hometown. The people were great, but the only things that gave me energy there were the 5 cups of coffee I had to drink to stay awake.

And even though I had been praised for securing an internship as just a freshman, and I was so excited to do so, I learned an invaluable lesson that changed the trajectory of my career:

Jobs are just jobs. You have to do what your boss says. You get there at 9 and you wish it was 5. And the highest thing you can aim for is a promotion.

That's why, if you pay attention, you'll notice that the only people excited about 9-5 desk jobs are the ones who haven't done them yet.

So I'd say this was about the time I realized I needed to find a way out. And that idea paired nicely with the love I found for venture capital.

According to every human on earth, pursuing VC as an undergrad was a risky play. But in my eyes, pursuing jobs that would lead me to hate my life was much riskier.

So here's what I did:

Part 2: All-in for VC

It was clear that not many undergraduates pursued VC right out of college. But after doing my research, I could see that it was definitely not impossible. I just had to play my cards right.

Now I know you might be thinking, "Why is a job in VC any better than all the other 9-5 desk jobs?" And the answer, though I didn't really know it at the time, is that VC runs on the spirit of entrepreneurship.

So what does that mean? It means there are no suits and ties, no "9-5", and simply a lot more interesting things happening (at the right firms). I was interested in the scrappy, "get sh*t done" nature of it. And honestly, all the entrepreneurs and founders I had met were just smart, purpose-driven people I wanted to be around.

Looking back, I know now that that interest in "the spirit of entrepreneurship" was really an interest in building something myself. But that hadn't come to fruition yet, so this was my way of working with the people who were doing that.

As summer came to a close, I started looking for internship programs at VC firms that I could do the following summer. Then one application process gave me a mini internship experience in itself.

I was asked to find a startup and pitch it to a firm as my "interview". I didn't want to settle for half-baked information, so I viciously pursued countless founders of startups I thought would be a fit. I cold emailed, called, and texted hundreds.

Finally, 2 days before the pitch deck was due, I got one on the phone. I got all his information, made a deck, and pitched it.

I didn't get the job, but while emailing the guy who rejected me, something interesting happened.

Part 3: Gator Venture Capital

At this point, I had been thinking for a little while about an idea. I knew I wanted to pursue VC, and I also knew there were no VC-focused student organizations at my school the University of Florida.

Basically, I had theorized that we could make a pretty legitimate experience for students simply by partnering with VC firms and offering to do pro-bono work for them.

And if we did, maybe students could see the same thing I saw: that there was a world of people working for a purpose, not a paycheck. And we could take part in it if we really tried.

It was a nice idea, but at the time I didn't feel qualified to build or run it. I had little to no network, and didn't think I knew enough about VC.

Then, on this email thread, after this guy told me they had already filled the VC position, he mentioned an opportunity to do unpaid deal sourcing. So I mentioned I could put a team together to do it. And of course, he was interested.

Here's the thing: I had nothing. No students, no registration with my school. Not even a name. Just an idea. But this was the spark that got me to start building.

And it's what gave me and my co-founder at the time the courage to start partnering with other VC firms. By spring we had 5 partners and 50 students.

And in successfully making the idea real and beginning to teach educational sessions about VC, I learned something crucial: though I had previously thought my qualifications were holding me back, the only barrier was my own beliefs.

I may not have been a VC expert, but I knew enough to teach our students impactful lessons and build the network we needed. I just had to be willing to start.

Once I did, I saw some interesting things unfold. Students did start to see the same things I saw. And they were actually way more interested in working with the startups the VCs invested in than with the VCs themselves.

So fast forward, and in one conversation with a potential VC partner, they asked how much we charge. When I said we don't, they actually told me we should.

Part 4: The Original "Catalyst XL"

After that conversation, we realized there could be a business opportunity on the table. We had always had plans to expand beyond UF, but this gave us a route to actually do it in a monetizable way. VCs could pay us to assemble teams of bright students who would support their portfolio companies. Simple enough, right?

My Co-Founder went to a number of VCs in Florida and asked if they'd be willing to pay for what we could offer if we had enough students. And for the most part, the feedback was positive.

Side note: This was before we knew that that isn't how you should conduct customer interviews. When you do customer interviews, ask about the customer's problems ONLY. Not about your solution and their opinion on it.

On top of the feedback from VCs, a number of students had said they'd commit to doing the program over the summer.

So that was enough to make us believe we could have a viable business by the summer. We dropped our internships (mine at a Fortune 500 tech company Zebra Technologies and his at Deloitte in New York) and got an apartment in Tampa to try to get connected with the startup ecosystem there.

Then, a conversation with our mentor uprooted all of our beliefs. This mentor was a VC who knew more about the industry than likely anyone on the planet, and he explained why a VC's fund structure would make our offering difficult to pay for.

But he did propose a solution: that instead of charging the VCs, we swap to charging the startups directly.

So we started dreaming up some ways to do that. I grabbed a blank piece of paper, and started mapping out a 12-week program.

That sheet became a long document detailing something I called "The Cohort" (not a very creative name). The plan was to bring a bunch of students in, teach them about startups and VC for 4 weeks, then pair them with a startup to work with and charge those startups a fee to take part in the program.

Then eventually my co-founder and I basically said "nope, too small". We forgot about it and moved on to the real startup ideas.

And by that I mean we started dreaming up totally non-feasible but scalable ways to accomplish essentially the same thing the Cohort did for both students and startups.

We talked about tech platforms (neither of us could code), courses, and other things that would probably take months to build.

And through all of this, we were completely sh*tting ourselves. It was already summer and we had no internships and no plan. And all of the students who said they'd work with us bailed.

Luckily, this was when we discovered Y Combinator's YouTube channel and podcast. And it was when I started asking my dad, who sold a company to Ticketmaster, what the hell I should do.

And all signs pointed to one conclusion: we needed to do the simplest thing that would solve the problem for some people, even if it didn't scale.

That's how startups can launch fast, learn as much as possible, and prepare themselves to pivot if their assumptions were off.

In our case, that meant running the Cohort. So immediately we announced Cohort 1, recruited for it, and started sessions in late May.

And low and behold, it actually worked. I ran the curriculum while my co-founder somehow convinced startups to work with teams of students. We made a bit of money, and got positive feedback from students.

After that, to us, it was just about doing more and doing it better. So we ran Cohort 2. We got about double the students and double the startups, and charged startups more than double what we charged before (nobody complained the first time, so why not?)

Though we did have a lot of happy students, this was the Cohort that raised a lot of red flags with the business model. A number of startups expressed that they didn't receive the value they expected.

Now to be fair, it didn't help that we probably overcharged and that we were simultaneously working full-time jobs at Techstars. But even with that being the case, there were some other uncomfortable facts.

One was that we were making promises we couldn't necessarily control. The skill level of students varied, and a lot of them had unpredictable schedules. So in some cases, no matter what we did, the support they offered startups was sub-par.

And even though our fee was simply a "placement fee" for essentially finding the students and referring them to the startup, the startups still grouped students' performance into the value they received from us.

And to me that was a problem not only from a business perspective but also from an ethical one. So the solution we thought was best was to charge way less and serve a lot more startups in order to stay profitable.

And what we found was the fully optimized way to do that wasn't these hands-on programs we were running, but a tech platform where students and startups could find each other, and startups would be charged a small fee.

I started cobbling together the no-code MVP of this that fall while I was at Techstars, sometimes even while I was at the Techstars office. They didn't like that very much.

So after I quit Techstars, I went all-in on trying to make this viable. And I learned a lot of hard lessons those next few months.

Part 5: Catalyst Recruiting

Every wonder why our domain is "recruitcatalyst.com"? Well, this is why.

Once I had all of my time back, I ramped up the effort I was putting into building the platform. But I lacked direction. I had never built a product before. I didn't know what features it needed, or what would make it most attractive to founders.

Then I realized why: I hadn't asked. I needed to go full-force on customer interviews. So I reached out to hundreds of founders. I got a handful of them on calls and asked if they had ever hired interns before.

If they had, I'd run through a series of questions about what went well, what didn't and why. After only the first 5 conversations, it started to become much clearer how I could help solve their problems and make internships go much better.

Then spring came around, and it was time to start recruiting students. On January 1st, I put out a post on LinkedIn about the platform launching, and that post got over 400k impressions. We got hundreds of student signups from it. And the promise was that we'd launch and post 100 internships by the end of the month.

It was an overly ambitious promise, but I was confident. The team was me, my co-founder, and two interns. And all of us had a number of startups in our network. Plus I had just dropped out, so I was on an all-time high.

Then, leading up to that launch, my co-founder and I began to have some difficult conversations that made us realize we were at different points in our careers, and it may not be best to work together anymore. Which of course, made everything about the future of the company uncertain.

With that being the case, the unfortunate fact was there were too many unknowns to responsibly continue with business like nothing was changing. So we had to put the launch on pause.

Part 6: A Big Slowdown

That last fact unfortunately remained true for a number of months until we were able to finalize an agreement. Luckily the entire thing was done on good terms and in good spirits--no hostility at all. But even with that being the case, legal stuff tends to take an unnecessarily long time.

But of course, I wasn't going to do nothing. So I continued growing the student side of the platform, letting users know we had to launch a bit later.

And I worked to solve half of the startup internship problem by getting students up to speed on how to secure startup internships and perform once they do.

That was when I wrote my first big essay, "A Student's Guide to Startup Internships" - an 8500-word guide with absolutely everything a human could ever need to know about that topic.

And it was when I got a lot more serious about reaching out to potential customers. But honestly, it was tough. Especially at first. Founders typically either weren't interested in hiring interns, or already had great ways to hire them.

After so many conversations, I started to understand what it would take to make that business work. Founders basically wanted a hands-off way to give projects to students, and wanted little to no contact with the students actually doing the work.

There was only one problem with that: it was completely against the entire mission of the company.

From the start, my mission has been to help students discover more meaningful careers. And a major part of that was connecting them with the people who already found those careers: entrepreneurs.

It was my way of giving back what I'd been given: exposure to the world of entrepreneurship that changed the trajectory of my career for the better.

If students couldn't actually interact with the founders, that value would be completely destroyed. It would be nothing but a resume-boosting platform for them. Which is fine, just not aligned with my mission. Plus, there's no shortage of ways for students to boost their resumes if that's what they're after.

So that got me thinking. And on a long, silent car ride after a severely short night of sleep, I realized I had everything backwards.

Part 7: The New Catalyst

From the start, everything we did was for the students. Or at least, it was supposed to be. GVC started with a student problem, not a VC problem. And so did Cohort 1.

But the fact of the matter was that students were never the customer. And because of that, most of the company's attention and resources always went to whoever was. So students were getting significantly less value than they could've been.

That meant that our business and how it worked wasn't aligned with our mission to ultimately serve students. And that's what led to so many of our problems.

Plus, our previous model was to charge for something we couldn't control. Nobody can promise the perfect student intern. But I knew I could make reliable promises to students. I could definitely promise connections, knowledge, and skills. Because I had already been making and fulfilling those promises for an entire year.

So instead of giving students a few options of startups to potentially intern with, we could give them the skills to open up endless startup internship opportunities for themselves.

And instead of hope students would wind up starting their own company, we could center the entire program around teaching them how to do that.

It became clear: we could make it free for students and give them a little bit of value and sort of achieve the mission, or we could flip to a tuition-based model and give them 100x more value and fully achieve what we set out to from the start.

So I wrote the new, 100x more in-depth curriculum our current students experience, let the Catalyst Recruiting users know to apply to Cohort 3, and launched it a few weeks later.

But I'll be honest; I launched Cohort 3 way before I was ready to. And if you talk to my Cohort 3 students, they would probably confirm that. But I didn't know I wasn't ready until it started, and this is the last big lesson I'll include:

"If you wanted to know if the plumbing in a house was strong, you could spend days checking every pipe for cracks and holes. Or you could just turn the water on." ~ YC Partner Michael Seibel

I learned things from Cohort 3 I never would've thought about if I had just spent all of that time preparing for what ended up being Cohort 4. And as a result, Cohort 4 ended up being by far the most successful program Catalyst has ever run.

So my point is this: if you're at the earliest stages of starting your own business, launching fast is the best thing to do. It doesn't matter how long you prepare. There will be problems that you can only discover by launching. So launch as soon as possible, find out what they are, and fix them.

Today (August 2024)

With Cohort 4 just coming to an end, we're now just in the "more and better" phase. How do we make the program even better than last time, and how can we do more of what worked?

As I find the answers to those questions, I'll be sure to document my learnings in this blog.

If you made it all the way here, I know for certain you're either working on your own venture or thinking about it. Why else would you care enough to read this whole thing?

So I'll just say this: you're not crazy. Though my story has had its ups and downs, there's not a single thing I would do differently. Most people have to settle for a career consisting of nothing but work. Entrepreneurs are the only ones who get to truly experience a career characterized by adventure and meaning.

Some say it's the "harder" or "riskier" path. But like I said, if the alternative is spending your life doing jobs you hate, it's not as hard or as risky as that.