As part of the Duke Global Entrepreneurship Network, www.dukegen.com network, we have been coming up with creative ways to grow the network's strength, presence and momentum.  One such way is to capture and publicize the profiles and stories of Duke alumni who have gone on to do some amazing entrepreneurial things, often starting or joining an exciting new venture.

The goals of this initiative include:

• Inspiring, motivating, and educating those who are interested in starting a new venture
• Helping them decide whether entrepreneurship is or is not right for them
• Getting them to buy into the fact that Duke and Fuqua are great places for entrepreneurship in general

If anyone is interested in volunteering, you'd have an opportunity to interview and write a profile on one or a few Duke entrepreneurs of our choice.  The benefits of being an interviewer are numerous:

• Get access to high profile entrepreneurs and build your professional network
• Learn how challenging and exciting it can be to start a new venture - first hand
• Improve your writing and communication skills
• All while giving back to the Duke community

What's our role?

As interviewers writers, our job is pretty simple.  We essentially need to contact interesting Duke alumni who would be interest and willing to be profiled, interview them (by email, phone or in person), and write an article.  If you have anyone in mind you'd like to contact, that is great.  Otherwise, we can identify alumni that may be conveniently located in your geographic region, or in a particular industry of your preference.

What's the process?

We are following a pretty simple process:

• Choose a candidate to be interviewed, either from http://www.dukegen.com/dukestartups or we can help identify a good candidate
• We are holding monthly conference calls to discuss ways to identify and prioritize good candidates
  
• Contact candidate alumni and schedule a time to meet, talk or email 
• Prepare for and have the interview
• Draft profile article with narrative and quotes
• Pass to the coordinator - we have additional writers helping us with editing
• Obtain approval from interviewed alum - just to make sure that the facts are right, and the alum is comfortable making public the content of the article
• Finalize and publish - once the content is finalized, we can handle publishing it on DukeGEN.com

We also have goals of getting a broader demographic representation of alumni, but are open to suggestions and writers' preferences.

What's in it for you?

Aside from the benefits that are realized for the Duke community and its entrepreneurial reputation, our team has been very impressed with how exciting interviewing and writing has been.  Not only have we gotten to meet exciting entrepreneurs and are building up our professional network, but we've learned quite a bit from how they started their ventures, and what makes them tick.  On top of that, our writing and communication skills have certainly improved.

How do I sign up?

We have prepared an online application form that we would like you to fill out if interested:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&cfg=true&formkey=cjJfaXl2Wkl6V2s3Qk90b2dwZUZSeEE6MA..
Once you've gone through this application, we will set you up with access to other shared google doc resources that are very helpful as build the team and keep moving forward.

Finally, if you have any feedback or ideas on the initiative, please let us know.  We are very excited to have the opportunity to help with this project, and hope to continue building momentum throughout the summer as we prepare for the upcoming Fall season.

Thanks, we look forward to hearing from you,

Jozef Krakora
Student Chair, DukeGEN
Jozef.Krakora@fuqua.duke.edu