California is home to a whopping 41 of the top 100 universities in the nation. At the top, Stanford and Berkeley have produced a combined 51 tech billionaires. UCLA has only 1 (shoutout Greg Michelson).
UCLA is an amazing school with some of the smartest students on the entire planet. But unfortunately the culture here has been conditioned to praise corporate excel zombies and all different kinds of consultants that waste their natural talents creating "pretty powerpoints".
It's not their fault though; the school system, their parents, and almost everyone around them is telling them to take the "safe" path. The one that will give them "security"; which I guess is fine if you don't want to leave any lasting impact on this world during your short stay here.
Not everyone is cut out for this, and that is okay. I'm sure you'll be a great consultant one day.
But for the people who want something more, something bigger, to do great things: being a corporate jockey just won't cut it.
Startup: a company in the first stages of operations.
Airbnb, Stripe, Uber, OpenAI, Perplexity, Shopify…
All began as startups.
We are VEST, a different kind of organization here at UCLA. Rather than offering consulting services; we do real engineering, design, and marketing work for startups + building internal tools, sourcing, due diligence, and market research for VC firms.
But what does that even mean?
I'm not going to call any clubs out, but a lot of the bigger clubs here just offer consulting to everyone, which isn't the most logical thing (esp. for startups: it literally doesn't make any sense).
We enjoy getting our hands dirty, and doing the hard work (writing complex code, designing dashboards, and staying up co-working with friends). But it's all worth it when we get to look back at our results.
At Microsoft the average time to get your PR merged is around 19 hours, while at a startup your PRs could be merged within 5 minutes. Smaller companies work fast, and move quickly.
Need an internship this summer? Some of our companies are hiring directly from us for the summer.
Need a full time job? One of our companies is hiring in NYC for co '25.
We are sourcing the best startups, and they want the best. All of them potentially hire and that's always open for the right people.
You literally won't find another club here like us. (If you do, let me know and I'll personally show you why we are better + how we'll make you better)
Not only are we helping you in the short term (gain experience, join a community of hard workers, and increase your Silicon Valley network), but we're working slowly to change the startup culture here in Los Angeles.
*Aside
Software engineering and the CS field have been slowly waning away in the last 2 years. With the oversaturated job market and advancements in AI (Sonnet 3.5, O3, and Devin) the need for junior engineers and average coders is dissipating.
The CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff said he was no longer hiring any more software engineers in 2025 due to their agentic layer of engineers is already good enough. The CEO of Klarna has also stopped hiring engineers and even paying for enterprise SaaS companies because he's going to remake them all internally with AI.
Being an average dev is not going to make you the money you thought you would or even be enough to have a job. The skills you learn and develop working on/at startups (wearing many hats, working hard to solve creative problems, shipping fast and iterating quickly, and just being a self starter) will take you much further than just having been a normal SWE for a couple years (even at Meta/Google etc).
We're not necessarily looking for the best coder, or the best mathematicians etc. but we do value ambition, high agency, and passion.
Warning: Working at a startup is not easy.
But neither is anything worth doing. The hardest things in life tend to bring the most fulfillment. And that's why we're here.
Note: We're going to run this club like a startup. Under-performers won't last, and it's going to be hectic. If you don't think you can do this, don't bother applying. I'm sure there are plenty of other clubs that will take you.
If you make it through, congrats on being the 1% of the 9% that even gets into this school. I know you'll do great things.
Just know that we are going to work hard (really hard), but we are also going to have a lot of fun (seriously, work hard play harder). There are a ton of social events, club outings, and parties in the works, and I believe that this community is where you're going to make your best friends that you'll remember 50 years from now.
We want to bring the best opportunities to UCLA. Not sure if you've noticed, but UCLA has basically no startup culture—there's been like 5 startups in the last 3 years and most entrepreneurship clubs are just event management + consulting.
Just doing stuff is the only way to make it big. Build cool stuff, launch it to the public, just put yourself out there. Trust me, your efforts (if true) will be noticed.
If anything (and I mean literally anything) in here peaked your interest, my inbox is always open [email protected].
If we never speak again, good luck at BCG, Bain, or wherever you may go! :)