When I joined the entrepreneur club, I had only worked in organisations where roughly speaking, what needed to be done was pretty clear, and you’d have someone on the team who had a pretty clear idea of how to get it done. I was then a vector to trying it out, asking for help if I got stuck for too long, and then shipping the thing a bit slower than that other person would have done, but it was done and now I had graduated to becoming like the other person. I could work on bigger, more interesting problems and start the process over again.
The entrepreneur club at EPFL in 2024 was not like that. “What the club did” changed every semester, and I joined a group of people who either really liked startups and wanted to spend time with other people who liked startups, or people who wanted to get a cool line on their resume and really did not care too much where that line came from. For the first time in my life (to that extent), I had come across a project that was ripe for a complete rip and replace; something worth making a project of one’s own.
The interesting thing is that having this feeling gave me an energy that I had rarely felt before. For the next 18 months I worked tirelessly to define a clearer direction, redesigning the org from scratch, writing documentation for every important task in the association (having to do them myself and thus learning a ton in the process), and trying to graduate from doing everything myself to a well-oiled machine that would not require my input at all.
I believe I partially succeeded at Entrepreneur Club. On one hand, I did all of the above, and by the end of my time there I and my friends had successfully delegated and documented most tasks. I believe that over the long term this will set a great foundation on which everything we did can be iterated on until the club can become something truly amazing.
On the other hand, I do feel like a bit was lost in the process. A chaotic machine is chaotic, sure, and much more volatile, but it is also where the magic happens. A well oiled machine will do its task, and nothing more. But in a chaotic organisation, every once in a while a really interesting idea will just hit, and the quality of the idea will take over the association from a demand pull, instead of just because of stability.
I said earlier that I had defined the club’s vision more clearly. This is actually what I think I did the least well. I rip-and-replaced the internal org, into something that objectively is much more stable (which may allow the student club to keep running for much longer than it would have without), but we had not reached “product market fit” yet. Our events were moderately interesting and our hackathons competed with dozens of others on campus. We did not have a clear demand pull and I had been too unwilling (or intimidated) to keep rip and replacing what we did until we found something interesting enough that it would just be “default alive”.
The dynamics of a student club are peculiar, because in many ways the club exists only to please its own members, and this is what keeps clubs going over years and generations of unpaid students who come and graduate. You’re thus optimising for two things: how can I make the association an interesting and enjoyable part of campus, and how can I make something that people (ie. students not in the association) want. I had unconsciously focused on the first, in a pull to make the association “something that can stand the test of time”, but only time will tell whether I was right.