Nicholas Gunn's Entrepreneurship Journey

              One of the most random and spur of the moment things that I have done during my time at the University of Florida is form the Galleon Fund. What the hell is that? I would love to fill you in on it 😊 There are a crap ton of investment clubs on campus for people that have an interest in the financial world and want to learn even more. I have had the chance to sit in on a few of their meetings and have noticed that they all have one thing in common. There is always at least one person who looks like they are drowning in the fact that they don’t know a thing about anything that anyone is talking about. It’s hard to learn a useful skill like investing when you can’t understand the acronyms or jargon that everyone is using. My goal was to start a fund that is geared towards the person who knows absolutely nothing about the finance world.

            My entrepreneurial adventure is currently taking place within the confines of my fraternity on campus. We use fake money and I have picked a few brothers who know what they are talking about in order to divvy up the work. It took me a long time to materialize my initial idea because there were so many variables that I had to decide on before I could begin marketing to my brotherhood. The reason that I think of this as an entrepreneurial endeavor is because I had to convince a group of relatively unmotivated college students to participate in something that would have probably little importance to their career or lives for that matter. BUT I WAS NOT DISCOURAGED!! I made sure to hype it up as much as possible before my first meeting, so people would get excited and decide to invest in their futures. Sadly, no one showed up to the first meeting and left me and my crew broken hearted. However, I chose to have it on a Friday afternoon during Homecoming. So, it was probably my fault. BUT WE WERE NOT DISCOURAGED!!

What I learned was that I needed to make the entire fund require as little effort from them as possible, while giving to them as much as possible. That way they would notice that they would gain a lot of cool experience without having to cram their schedule. For this reason we decided to have one introductory meeting and then have remote meetings with our respective groups. After this decision the fund began to flourish and people decided to give it a chance (also could be because I begged people). Now we have approximately 25 people in the fund and they have learned a bunch of brand new stuff. HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

The reason that I decided to take this class is because I feel that I have a few decent ideas on future business ventures and I would really like to have a little guidance in the world of entrepreneurship. There are a lot of variables in starting something brand new and I know that I don’t have all of the skills needed to succeed in the things that I want to do. So learning about the principles and foundations of entrepreneurship will hopefully aid me in taking a leap of faith later in my life.