Students, alumni, and local entrepreneurs gathered in Weston last month for the launch of EphStart, an entrepreneurship and innovation program started by the ’68 Center for Career Exploration. The event featured an introduction by the Center’s Director for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Hope Ross Gibaldi, student club showcases, and a keynote address from Karen Kelly ’01, an entrepreneur working in artificial intelligence.
According to Gibaldi, the launch was not a one-time event, but a public introduction to an ongoing initiative. Ayanna Varma ’29, one of four students working with the Career Center on this project, described the program as an evolving series of events, workshops, and resources aimed at supporting students at every stage of an entrepreneurial project. “When we’re talking about bringing in these different student groups, [we are] building an entrepreneurship ecosystem so that everyone feels like they have a place,” Varma said.
EphStart represents the ’68 Center’s effort to encourage entrepreneurship at the College, according to Gibaldi. Last year, she began assembling a student team to design the program.
EphStart prioritizes inclusion, Gibaldi said. While other university entrepreneurship programs often prioritize tech startups and venture capital, according to Gibaldi, EphStart encourages small businesses, social enterprises, the gig economy, and even students who simply want to be creative with their careers to participate. “Entrepreneurship transcends academic disciplines,” Gibaldi said. “It doesn’t live in one place.”
Varma thinks students interested in a range of industries can benefit from EphStart’s lessons.
EphStart has already begun to lay the foundation for a larger entrepreneurial program at the College. Several clubs engaged with the ’68 Center at the EphStart launch party, including Williams Venture Studio, TAMID Group at Williams, and the Ubuntu Advisory Group.
Kawika Tu ’26, co-president of Williams Venture Studio, which is a club that helps students navigate the start-up world, highlighted the inclusion of local businesses in the EphStart launch. “I thought that was … a way to break the Purple Bubble,” he said.
The launch also featured a keynote address from Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Launch by Lunch, an (AI) education platform. Kelly’s talk focused on what it means to be a college student entering an AI-transformed job market and why students graduating from the College may be better positioned than they think.
“The skills we’re learning at Williams — seeing things from different perspectives, being able to articulate ourselves clearly — are even more important nowadays,” Tu said.
Gibaldi said she believes the program has already grown from when she first started working on it last year. “I was sure that … it would grow and the momentum would build,” she said. “And the launch really felt like that — like a snowball.”
In the long term, Gibaldi envisions an expansion of the program: a summer accelerator, a more formalized alumni mentorship cohort, and possibly even an academic concentration in entrepreneurship. “The goal is that every single student who comes through Williams gets the baseline knowledge of how to take an idea from conception to execution, or at least meets someone who’s involved in it,” she said. “The idea is to create a community.”
