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.

consultant @ bikini bottom and associates

2024 colorized

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.