Why There's No Better Time to Start a Company Than in College
What founder Keith Corso learned as a college student building BusRight, a venture-backed school bus technology startup
Keith Corso started building BusRight in high school. By the time he graduated from Northeastern University, he had a venture-backed company, a team, and paying customers.
BusRight modernizes school bus routing and tracking for districts across the country, and Keith built the first version of it while sitting in class, competing in pitch competitions, and recruiting teammates from the students around him. More recently, he raised $30 million of new financing to build on his unheard of level of product market fit (including a customer getting a tattoo of the BusRight logo).
In our latest Ubiquity University video, Keith walks through exactly why college is the best time to start: access, resources, and upside you’ll never have stacked together like this again.
1. Access opens differently when you’re a student
Keith raised over a million dollars from founders and angel investors he met through campus events, mostly by staying in touch after they came to speak. There was no deck and no warm intro, just follow-up emails after talks. When a founder or investor shows up on campus, they came to be helpful, and they’ll remember the one student who followed up.
Many VCs, myself included, actively scout universities looking for capable founders before anyone else has found them.
The same asymmetry worked with customers. Keith walked up to the front doors of schools in the Boston area, introduced himself as a student doing research on transportation, and got the meeting. “Asking someone for a 30-minute coffee is way easier when you are a college student than at almost any other point in your life,” Keith says. “That goodwill just exists because you’re a student, and it won’t last forever.”
People like talking about what they’ve built, and when you show up young, curious, and clearly not selling anything, doors open. In college, people already know what you want: to learn.
2. Resources that disappear after graduation
College has two things most founders don’t fully account for: non-dilutive capital and free labor.
Keith raised more than $75,000 from pitch competitions across four years at Northeastern, with zero equity attached. “Free money is pretty hard to come by in the real world,” he says. In the professional world, that same $75,000 costs you cap table.
Universities also build infrastructure for student founders. At Northeastern, student studios like Scout (design) and Generate (engineering) pair founders with the best designers and engineers on campus, for free.
The free labor piece is the one most founders underestimate. More than 40 students helped build BusRight at virtually no cost, including the marketing website, the first driver app, and core product infrastructure. Several became early employees, and some are still at the company. In the real world, a first hire costs money and carries real risk. In college, you get a semester-long trial.
3. Your potential looks different when everyone else is on the same track
The college schedule is remarkably uniform. Class, another class, dinner, repeat. When everyone runs the same loop, stepping outside it gets noticed in a way it never is after graduation. Universities want examples of success, and a student building a real company is exactly the story they want to tell donors, alumni, and prospective students. Keith’s advice is to “put yourself in a position where it is easy to show that you are standing out and not following the herd.”
Keith won Northeastern’s Husky Startup Challenge in his first semester. The prize was $2,500, but that stage put BusRight in front of the broader Boston startup community, which led to a summer accelerator with Underscore VC, which is how Keith and I met and how Ubiquity came to lead his seed round. That kind of network takes years to build after graduation.
There’s one more thing nobody says plainly: the safety net in college is real. There’s no mortgage, no one else depending on your income, and no career you’d be walking away from. The real risk is waiting until the safety net is gone.
The fallacy of sacrifice
The most common reason students don’t start something is the feeling that they’d be giving something up. Keith’s argument is the opposite: the sacrifice is not starting. The longer you wait, the more obligations stack up: a mortgage, a family, a career with real exit costs.
College is the perfect environment to constantly ask people for advice, Keith says, and sometimes that advice turns into paying customers, mentors, or investors.
BusRight is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen of what’s possible when a founder treats college as a starting point rather than a waiting room.
Watch the full conversation on Ubiquity University
This is a preview. In the full video, Keith gets into the tactics: how he actually ran fundraising, recruiting, and customer development from a dorm room, and what he’d tell a student sitting on the fence right now.
Ubiquity Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm investing in software beyond the screen. We back founders building AI, software, and smart hardware for the physical world — technology you can touch, hear, and feel.
If you know a founder working on something nerdy and early, we’d love an introduction.