The Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, known as CCEI was established in 2007 as the first organized center to support entrepreneurship activity at UConn. CCEI leads initiatives focused on innovation, entrepreneurship, experiential learning, and economic development. It’s been recognized in the Princeton Review’s Top 50 Entrepreneurship Programs nationally and has supported more than 1,400 startups and served over 2,500 entrepreneurs. CCEI carries the legacy of the inaugural entrepreneurship education initiative at UConn, funded by the Wolff Family in the mid-1980’s. Jennifer Mathieu joins us on this episode of the podcast. She has been with CCEI since 2017 and was named executive director in 2021. She is an entrepreneur herself, has degrees from UConn and Springfield College, and has been recognized by the Hartford Business Journal’s Top Women in Business and Connecticut magazine’s 40 Under 40. CCEI even has its own podcast too!
Listen to Episode 163 on Podbean
Mike: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Izzy, it’s summer in Storrs.
Izzy: I know. I couldn’t be happier.
Mike: We had a great graduation weekend here, and we’re now moved on to the summer portion of the campus season, and it is a little quiet here.
Izzy: I know. It’s feeling a little empty.
Mike: It is feeling a little empty. Sometimes once the summer picks up, some other things go on, but right now it’s kind of a quiet time of year.
Izzy: It is, and the Dairy Bar lines are shorter, which I’m never mad about.
Mike: The Dairy Bar lines are shorter. We still have a couple baseball teams playing in the Big East Tournament this week, and so there’s a few things going on. So anywho‑ha, our guest today is Jen Mathieu. She’s the executive director of the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, CCEI, as it’s known here in Storrs.
It was founded in 2007 as the first organized center to support entrepreneurship here at UConn. It leads initiatives focused on innovation, entrepreneurship, experiential learning, and economic development. The Princeton Review has recognized it as a top 50 program nationally, and it’s supported more than 1,400 startups and served over 2,500 entrepreneurs.
And Jen has been with CCEI since 2017, was named executive director in 2021. She’s an entrepreneur herself, and she’s going to talk a little bit about how that experience helps her here at UConn. She has degrees from UConn and Springfield College and has been recognized by the Hartford Business Journal as a top woman in business and Connecticut Magazine’s 40 Under 40.
I’m not eligible for that anymore. Yikes. I’m not even eligible for 60 Under 60.
Izzy: Time’s ticking, right?
Mike: Time’s ticking. Anyway, Jen, thanks for joining us today.
Jen: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Mike: So, we described in my introduction a little bit about CCEI, but how about in your own words you give us a few more details and how it fits into the overall mission of UConn?
Jen: Yeah, so as you mentioned, it’s been around for 20 years, which is incredible to think about—20 years in 2027, actually. But we have supported entrepreneurs across the university, and that means students, faculty, alumni. We also work with a lot of community members, so we might have an alum or a faculty member that has a co‑founder that is outside of the University of Connecticut. We welcome them into our programs.
But we basically support entrepreneurs. Once they have an idea, they come to us, and we have a variety of different programs that we offer, everything from ideation and support, customer discovery, through accelerator programs, and the ideas to launch their companies. And we support scalable, high‑opportunity companies.
So, we don’t really work a lot with the small businesses. We have the Small Business Development Center here at UConn that kind of supports those. But we really try to support entrepreneurs and build founders alongside building companies.
Izzy: Companies that have a CCEI affiliation just reached the $1 billion mark in valuation. Why is that a significant number, and what does it mean for the future of CCEI?
Jen: Yeah, so it’s actually now at 1.5 billion—wow—which happened super quick. But what that means is our founders have brought on follow‑on funding to support their ventures in the 1.5 billion, and that’s only in the last 10 years, because we didn’t do data tracking the way we probably should have before I had landed at CCEI.
But that just means that our teams have raised that much capital, and what that shows is that we are spinning out companies that actually have fundable businesses and are going off to get support from angel investors and VCs. That number does not count revenue, which is a whole other data point that we track separately, and it doesn’t track company valuation, which is a whole other level as well, which is incredible to see.
But UConn startups are really making headway in so many positive different fields and making an impact on the world that I’m so proud to be a part of that.
Mike: Going off script here a little bit, can you tell us—are there any companies or entrepreneurship activities that the general public might be familiar with that started at UConn?
Jen: Are you saying like businesses?
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Jen: That’s actually interesting. So, that’s a different question. So, we have founders that have developed technologies here at UConn many years ago and have gone off into, like, selling those or whatever.
But the companies that CCEI has supported over the last 10 years are—because they’re scalable and they’re high tech—a lot of them are just finally getting into revenue‑generating because it takes so long through regulatory processes and other things to get onto the market.
One of our most notable companies right now just IPO’d in February. They’re called Veradermics. So, they IPO’d, and we’re so proud of what they’ve accomplished, but they have developed an oral treatment for hair loss.
Mike: Oh, okay.
Jen: Yeah, and just very, very impressed with the work they’ve done, and that was a team out of UConn Health that developed that technology.
Mike: So, tell us a little—how did you get an interest in entrepreneurship, and we know you’ve founded some companies. How has that strengthened your role here at UConn in supporting other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Jen: Yeah, do you have many hours to reflect on my experience? No. So one of the things that I found, and a lot of entrepreneurs do, is that entrepreneurship is a way to show creativity. It’s a way to do something that you’re passionate about.
And I had become passionate about a business that I had developed, and this was before CCEI. And then I found the posting for the position at CCEI, and I was like, “Wow, I’m building this, and I could go help other entrepreneurs build what they’re building.”
And so, I ended up, in tandem, really starting the next step of CCEI and helping to build capacity and programming. My background is in higher education administration, supporting educational opportunities for students and alumni and creating something that supports their career goals and their career trajectory, and this just only seemed natural.
And alongside building CCEI and building that first company, I learned really how difficult it is to start a company. I learned about how much you learn about yourself as an individual. It isn’t actually just, “How do I build a viable business?” But it’s, “How do I build myself as a founder and a leader? How am I going to make the critical decisions that I need to make and onboard the right team members?”
There are so many parts to that journey that I don’t know that anyone truly appreciates until they’re in the seat and doing it. But I think that the thing that I learned the most about myself that has helped me in this role is knowing when to say no or knowing when enough is enough.
I don’t think we celebrate failure enough, and I realized with my business that while I could have decided to go do that full time and leave my role at CCEI and carry on with my company, it just wasn’t something that was fueling my fire anymore.
It served a purpose for me for a few years, navigating some difficult parts of my personal life, and it helped me to overcome some of those challenges. But once it served my need there, being able to recognize that I’m done with that chapter of my life and being able to let it go—that was actually very difficult, and I don’t think I was ever prepared for that.
And that’s something I now teach our entrepreneurs: when do you know that this business, this idea is no longer worth pursuing? And then how do you let that go if it has become so core to who you are?
Even when you go off and you’re successful and you sell your company, our founders have a really difficult time with that, because think about how long that was their focus—80, 90 hours a week of focus.
Mike: It’s like raising a child almost.
Jen: Yes. Yes, and actually we do hear our founders talking about it that way.
Izzy: Well, it’s great that UConn has you as a resource to help navigate during those times. CCEI recently celebrated the five‑year anniversary of Build Hartford. Can you tell us a little bit more about that program and the celebration that you had?
Jen: Yeah, so sort of switching gears a little bit—our Build Hartford program is designed to support students that are not necessarily founders but are very interested in entrepreneurship. These are creatives. These are students that have technical capabilities in digital media and design, marketing, photography.
They have so many skill sets, and they don’t necessarily have a place where they can learn to do that or translate that into real businesses. So, what we do is we bring interdisciplinary groups of students—undergraduate and graduate students—together every semester for our Build Hartford course, which we offer in our downtown Hartford location.
And what we do is we provide a few different projects throughout the course of the semester where they go off and support real businesses in Hartford, and each project is themed throughout the course of the semester. So in the fall, we did one focused on athletic facilities, so they went out and they worked with the Yard Goats, they worked with Hartford Athletic, and we were able to do real projects where our students could go out and meet the individuals that are running these organizations, meet fans, and tell a story of the place, of the business, and of the community that was created.
And we celebrated five years of this program a few weeks ago, which was incredible, and I said this in a LinkedIn post—that usually you go to an event and you walk away and you go, “Okay, that was great,” and you sort of move on from it.
I continuously saw on LinkedIn individuals that attended—just people maybe we had never met before—posting about going to the event. I would say probably 80 to 90 percent of our attendees posted on LinkedIn that it was moving for them, and that is a huge testament to the program.
Professor Rory McGloin is our faculty on that program, and I just want to say that being at UConn for as long as I’ve been here, experiential learning is the future of higher education. Going out and advocating for what you want to learn and what you want to build, and doing that through real, tangible examples, is so important.
And I’m so glad that we’re part of a program that’s leading that here at UConn, amongst many other faculty that are doing incredible work in this space.
Mike: So, we were talking a little bit about the spring semester just ended, and you folks at CCEI have an eight‑week summer program called the Summer Accelerator. I don’t know too much about it. Can you describe that to us a little bit?
Jen: Yes. So, our Summer Accelerator is one of our flagship programs that we offer at CCEI. So, when we say 1.5 billion of follow‑on funding, those companies are coming out of our Summer Accelerator. So, we’re going into our 11th cohort, which means so far, we have successfully launched 100 startups from the last 10 cohorts, so it’s 10 per cohort.
We offer them $15,000 in seed funding each, and we provide them with a lot of pro bono services through our program sponsors. We have about 10 program sponsors that come in and offer services to them, like accounting, legal, marketing, branding, and all kinds of different support to help them get off the ground.
And they spend eight intensive weeks going through that process. Last summer, about seven out of the 10 were already revenue‑generating companies, and now have gone off to the next stage, and whatever that means for whatever industry they’re in, it might mean that they are now moving on to another top‑tier accelerator program that is internationally known, or they are in the market and selling.
One of our notable alumni is Hailey Seeger, who’s also a UConn alum from CLAS 2017. She launched onewith swim which ended up making its way onto Shark Tank last year. So those are the types of companies that we’re launching from this accelerator, and it is one of my favorite programs we offer at CCEI, because we can work with them from very, very early stages through the summer and get them to the point where they are ready to move on to that next step.
Izzy: That was so awesome seeing her on Shark Tank. I was like, “Oh my gosh,” I love when things like that—when you see UConn in the real world. I’m sure this won’t be a surprise to our audience, because you’re incredibly well‑spoken, but you have your own podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Jen: Yeah, so we do. So, we have a podcast called Timely Topics, and it’s hosted by Rory McGloin and myself. And we host it in our studio called The Collaboratory at CCEI, which is in downtown Hartford.
And the space was really developed and designed to help our faculty, our students, and our entrepreneurs learn how to communicate the value of their business venture. So, it sounds like, okay, if you’re building a business, you should be able to tell everyone about it, right? But actually, communicating succinctly and effectively is a difficult challenge.
And we found that as our companies are going on Shark Tank, QVC, Good Morning America, they’re going on these shows, they’re speaking on podcasts, they’re becoming thought leaders in their space, they need to learn the skills to be able to tell that story—why it matters—and to speak in a way that is, for lack of a better word, like layman’s terms.
We have a lot of research scientists on this campus that are developing technologies that are going to go out into the world and change the world, but if you can’t articulate what that value is and to whom that value is provided—so who your customers are—it’s going to get lost in translation.
You can’t sell that to a VC. You can’t sell that to somebody else that’s going to come into your company and help you do that. So, we developed the space to do that, and alongside developing that space, we said, “Why don’t we start our own podcast? Why don’t we talk about business, leadership, and the intersection of personal and professional life?”
Which is entrepreneurship—it’s bringing your personal self into your business self. And the coolest part about it is not listening to Rory and me speak for 45 minutes each episode—the coolest part is we have a team of students that we bring in every semester and train them.
So, we train them on how to manage a podcast. There’s a whole end of it beyond just the audio and video editing—that’s a huge piece of it—but it’s also building a list of guests to bring in, helping design each episode, doing research, pulling quotes, pulling articles, and even working on sponsorships.
So, we’re really teaching students how to manage digital communications and entrepreneurship at the same time.
Mike: Well, we’ll put a link to that podcast in our description. We’ll be a cooperative effort. People can listen to both. So, I’m sitting at home listening to this podcast after your podcast, and I’m saying to myself, “I got an idea. Maybe I could be an entrepreneur.” Can you be too young or too old? And if you have an idea, what do you do with it?
Jen: Mm. That’s really funny. I don’t think that there’s ever… I don’t think you can ever be too young or too old to do anything. I think that if you’re passionate about something, like now is a good time to start. They say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now. So, you definitely want to make sure it’s something you’re passionate about.
We only have a, a limited amount of time, finite amount of time on this earth to do the things that we want to accomplish. Are you so passionate that you want to go out and spend your time doing it?
The other thing I would say is, is the problem you’re trying to solve something that you personally feel the need to solve? I don’t, and I don’t know if our listeners and if both of you have this experience, but we walk around every day and we see something that could possibly be better, right? We’re like, “Oh, why isn’t this this way?” Or “Why couldn’t we do it another, another way?”
We can’t possibly go out and build all the things for which we have ideas to improve, and just because someone else goes and does that doesn’t mean you failed ’cause you didn’t get into the market before them. It just means you weren’t the right person at the right time.
So, I would just ask yourself, “Is this something I’m passionate about doing, and am I the right person to make this happen?” Age doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think that that should even be a thing we’re thinking about.
Mike: If you became an entrepreneur, Izzy, what would you do? I’m putting you on the spot.
Izzy: I know, and I’m thinking… like, what would I do?
Mike: I don’t know.
Izzy: What would you do?
Mike: I’d do something, interested in sports, probably something involved in sports.
Izzy: But—like, what? That’s too vague. I know it is. If you’re going to put me on the spot—
Mike: That’s why I asked you the question. You seem like the type of person that would be an entrepreneur.
Izzy: But, like, what would I do? Like, I love pickleball.
Mike: Well, see, there you go.
Jen So we’re basically, we, what we have just done now is we’re listing our hobbies. Right. Which you can do without having to start a business.
Izzy: Right. But, like, I feel like if I did start a business, I would want it to be something—that you’re passionate about—that I’m passionate about. So, like, I love pickleball, I love golden retrievers, I love hiking, I love skiing. What, what could I do to, like…
Mike: I don’t know. Jen, she just gave you those topics. What, what could somebody—Yeah… what, what could somebody do with those topics? What could they entrepreneur about?
Jen: So, I honestly don’t think that there’s such thing as really, like, true novel or new ideas anymore. I think what we’re doing is we’re taking the intersection of two or three different business models and merging them together. So, if you were just thinking about pickleball, indoor pickleball courts already exist. Dog bars already exist. Could you create an indoor pickleball and, like, dog… Like, you know how, like, goat yoga or something? Like, could you do something where you’re merging, like, dogs and pickleball? Like— I don’t know… puppy pickleball? Yeah.
Izzy: All right. There you go. I’m going to start it. There you go. Here we are.
Mike: Let’s get a website for you and get going.
Izzy: All right. Puppy pickleball. You heard it here first.
Mike: Well, I have no ideas, to be honest with you, but that’s okay. Well—maybe I’ll come up with one…
Izzy: yeah, that was crazy. Yeah. Like, you really made me think.
Mike: I didn’t make you think. And now you’re just like—I’m totally bailing out on you.
Izzy: I know. That’s okay. And that took a lot of hard work.
Jen: Can I also just say that I think there’s a difference between I’m going to start a small business because I want to go do something, I want to spend the 40 hours a week or whatever I’m, I’m doing working on a s- on a thing that I own and that I’m passionate about.
That gives you the economic freedom to go build your pickleball puppy courts, right? That’s, I think, different than saying, “Oh, I saw this problem. I want to make sure I can create a solution ’cause I’m so passionate about solving it,” and knowing that there’s so many unknowns to that process in moving forward.
I think there’s, there’s a difference between those two things, and one, I think, I think is, you know, economic freedom and doing the things you love, and the other is going out and chasing something that you don’t necessarily know how it’s going to result. Both of them are entrepreneurship. One, I think you stumble into, and one you sort of build by design.
Mike: So, Jen, I have a question for you. Does somebody have to be, have economic freedom and be in a place where they don’t need to rely on the income of this company, they find to be an entrepreneur?
Jen: There’s nuance to that. I think you certainly need money, but if you have an idea that’s investable, I think if you get the right people behind you that have the money to support you. Also, I think when we work with students, they’re at the best time of their lives, where they’re on campus and they’re learning, and they don’t have, most of them, right, don’t have a, a mortgage or a family to take care of.
They’re undergraduate students that can just balance all these things and they can learn. That’s such a good time to build something. Not that it necessarily has to be this big, amazing company that they go off and it’s super successful, but that’s a good time to learn and play around with things, ’cause you have that freedom.
For individuals—and I see alumni that come back—that have a full-time job, and they’re in a certain industry, and they found a solution to something that they work in their day-to-day lives in, it is so much harder to get them to quit the job because they have kids. It’s their way that they have, you know, health insurance and other benefits.
So, everything is a balance, right? You can’t—I don’t think you truly can have it all. I think you have to ebb and flow with the season that you’re in. You need money to start a business. If you can get people behind you to support you, that to me is the best-case scenario.
Mike: Do most entrepreneurs have a steady job, or is it, is it their prime focus?
Jen: It depends. Everyone’s different. Some, like I said, some will work on a business alongside of starting a company. Sorry, some will be working full time along starting a company. Some will quit their jobs and do it because they have enough faith in themselves or, or have the ability to move back with their parents or whatever it might be. So, everyone’s different.
Mike: Excellent. Well, Izzy, if you start something, I’ll help you out.
Izzy: Puppy pickleball.
Mike: Yeah, we’ll see.
Jen: There we go.
Mike: So anyway. Well, our guest today on the UConn 360 Podcast has been Jen Mathieu from UConn CCEI, and really interesting stuff. Very different. So, thanks for joining us today, and we’ll catch you next time on the podcast.