As universities across Europe and the Middle East, including HEC Paris and Imperial College London, strengthen their entrepreneurship ecosystems, the real challenge begins after Demo Day, when student founders must transition from validation to scalable execution. Bridging this “post-program gap” requires structured execution support, market-validated milestones, and stronger industry alignment. Rohan Bansal, Founder of AvenirX Labs, shares insights on scaling ventures, redefining entrepreneurship education, and building outcome-driven pathways for student founders, in an exclusive interaction with Garima Pant of Elets News Network (ENN). Edited excerpts:
Having invested in growth-stage technology companies across Europe and the Middle East, what patterns have you observed in founders who successfully transition from early validation to scalable execution?
The founders who scale successfully share one common trait: they obsess over execution metrics, not vanity metrics. Early-stage founders celebrate their first 100 users or a successful pilot. Growth-stage founders track unit economics, customer acquisition cost, and repeatability of their sales motion.
I’ve seen this across portfolio companies in both regions. The shift happens when a founder moves from “we can build this” to “we can repeatedly sell and deliver this at a margin.” In Europe, this transition is often smoother because there’s a culture of rigorous financial modeling and investor accountability from the seed stage onwards.
The second pattern is talent density. Successful founders ruthlessly upgrade their teams during the transition. The scrappy generalist who helped you reach product-market fit may not be the operator who builds repeatable systems.
Through your work at AvenirX Labs, how do you define the “post-program gap,” and why do so many promising student ventures struggle once hackathons and entrepreneurship courses conclude?
The post-program gap is the period between winning a university pitch competition and landing your first paying customer. It’s where 90% of student ventures die, not because the ideas are bad, but because the support infrastructure vanishes overnight.
Universities are brilliant at sparking entrepreneurial thinking. I’ve worked with innovation offices at HEC Paris, Imperial College London, and increasingly across UAE institutions like Zayed University and others. They run world-class accelerators, offer mentorship, and initial support. But the moment the program ends, student founders hit a wall. They need someone to open doors with potential clients, navigate legal structures in new markets, or help close that critical first pilot. The mentors who helped them pitch? They’re focused on the next cohort.
This is structural, not accidental. Universities optimise for educational outcomes; they’re not set up to be ongoing execution partners. They also can’t follow founders into complex commercial negotiations without jeopardising their academic neutrality.
AvenirX exists specifically to fill this gap. We don’t replace universities; we extend their impact by becoming the execution layer that helps student founders turn validated MVPs into revenue-generating businesses with signed contracts.
Universities often celebrate idea generation and pitch competitions. What structural changes are needed to help student founders move toward sustained execution without increasing curricular load?
The fix isn’t more coursework; it’s embedding execution infrastructure directly into the innovation ecosystem. Universities need three structural shifts.
First, they should designate “execution partners” the same way they designate industry mentors. These partners, organisations like AvenirX, don’t teach; they operate. They take the top 10-15% of student ventures post-demo day and provide hands-on support: drafting partnership agreements, navigating pilot pricing, and managing stakeholder introductions. This doesn’t burden faculty or add to the curriculum.
Second, universities must reframe success metrics. Right now, success is measured by the number of startups launched, media coverage generated, or business licenses registered. Instead, track how many student ventures reach first revenue within 12 months, sign enterprise pilots, or achieve founder-employability through the venture-building process itself. This shift changes how innovation offices allocate resources and with whom they partner.
This isn’t theoretical. We’ve seen it work with European founders we’ve helped scale into the GCC.
From a broader perspective, how must the global education ecosystem evolve to move beyond inspiration-driven entrepreneurship toward outcome-oriented venture creation and employability pathways?
The education ecosystem needs to fundamentally redefine what “entrepreneurship education” means. Right now, it’s treated as a sandbox: a place to experiment, fail safely, and learn resilience. That’s valuable, but insufficient. We need to treat entrepreneurship as a high-stakes employability pathway, not just an extracurricular enrichment activity.
Governments and accreditation bodies must recognise venture-building as a legitimate alternative to traditional internships or capstone projects. India’s NEP 2020 is making progress here by embedding startup participation into credit frameworks. The UAE, with its ambitious goal to create 10 unicorns from local talent by 2035, has a similar opportunity to formalise entrepreneurship as a structured career path.
We also need better bridges between universities and industry. Right now, most university-industry partnerships are transactional: sponsor a hackathon, give a guest lecture, offer internships. Real partnerships should involve co-creating curriculum, co-investing in student ventures, and co-owning placement outcomes for founders who choose the startup path.
Additionally, investors and corporations must stop seeing “student founders” as a separate, less-serious category. The best student ventures coming out of Imperial, MBZUAI, or HEC Paris
are solving real problems with technical depth and market validation. They deserve the same scrutiny and support as any early-stage company.
Based on your collaborations with institutions like HEC Paris, Imperial College London, and universities across the UAE, how can academia better align student innovation activity with real market expectations and investor readiness?
The misalignment between academic innovation programs and market reality comes down to incentives and timelines. Universities reward novelty and intellectual rigor. Markets reward repeatability and profitability. Bridging this gap requires deliberate structural design.
One approach that’s worked well is what I call “market-validated milestones.” Instead of judging student ventures on pitch quality or prototype sophistication, innovation offices should require founders to achieve specific commercial milestones: three signed letters of intent, ten customer discovery calls with decision-makers, or a pricing model stress-tested with finance teams. We implemented this framework with a European university cohort entering the UAE market, and the quality of ventures improved dramatically because founders were forced to confront real buyer objections early.
Universities need to bring investors and commercial buyers into the program from Day 1, not just at Demo Day. At Imperial and HEC Paris, the best programs embed VCs, corporate innovation leads as active advisors throughout the accelerator. This means feedback loops are faster, and reality-checks happen before founders get emotionally attached to unviable ideas.
Finally, academia must accept that not every student venture should scale. Some should pivot into employment opportunities. Some should become consulting projects. The goal isn’t to manufacture unicorns; it’s to produce employable, execution-ready graduates who understand how markets work.
Also Read: Growth Must Feel Personal: How STEMROBO Is Redefining Future-Ready Learning for 2026 and Beyond
For student founders unsure whether to pursue fundraising, pivot, seek employment, or continue building, what practical decision-making frameworks do you recommend to ensure clarity and long-term employability outcomes?
I recommend a simple but rigorous framework I call the “Three Traction Tests.” If a student founder can’t pass at least two of these within 12 months of graduating, they should seriously consider employment or pivoting.
Test 1: Revenue Traction. Are you generating consistent, repeatable revenue? Not one-off pilots or grants, but customers renewing, referring others, or expanding contracts. If you’ve been building for 12+ months and haven’t signed a single paying customer, that’s a signal the market isn’t ready or your solution isn’t solving an urgent enough pain point.
Test 2: Founder-Market Fit. Do you genuinely have unique insight, access, or capability in this space? Many student founders chase problems they read about in TechCrunch but have no lived experience with. If you’re not the best person to solve this problem, employment at a company in that space will teach you more than struggling as a founder.
Test 3: Emotional Sustainability. Can you sustain this for three more years? Fundraising, scaling, and market entry are brutal. If you’re already burned out, resentful, or questioning your commitment, that’s data.
Importantly, choosing employment after a failed or pivoted venture isn’t failure. The execution skills, resilience, and market knowledge you’ve built make you far more employable than peers who only did internships.
Source link
