What We’re About

New ventures are a dime a dozen these days — if you live in a tiny strip of California. In the rest of the world, and here in Ann Arbor, engineers aren’t spinning their class projects into businesses and art students aren’t applying what they have learned in school to run their own clothing line. And that’s the problem.

The MPowered Mission: To expose students to entrepreneurship and to support student ventures.

So the goal of MPowered is two-fold: one, to bring the few daring self-starters among us into an open forum to collaborate and converse, and two, to spread their bold passion to the rest of the U-M community. In short, we want to start the fire.

How We Started

It all began at an entrepreneurship conference in March 2007 on that tiny-strip of California (Silicon Valley) when two U-M students realized the lack of entrepreneurial passion within our university compared to those in the Bay Area. MPowered’s founders, Ashwin L. and Israel V., knew that changes were needed if the Michigan was going to keep up and fast.

Their vision was to foster a culture within the student body that embraces innovation, speaks openly about their ideas and then turns those ideas into something even more. It was decided that this vision would be accomplished by MPowered Entrepreneurship, a student-run organization focused on fostering student entrepreneurship campus-wide.

So there it began a busy, to say the least, summer with the first leadership team: holding team meetings in crowded dining areas, arguments on the website layout and deciding which logo was best. MPowered launched on U-M’s campus in Fall semester 2007. In just our first semester, MPowered held its own career fair, secured a community of over 700 students and built strong relationships with supporting faculty, alumni, and business leaders.

And the rest is history! Check us out here.