Students
Become a Founder Before You Graduate
What could you build if you started now?
There is a conventional path through university. Study, graduate, find a job and perhaps think about starting a company somewhere down the line.
Sky High is for people who aren’t sure they want to wait.
We believe university can be an extraordinary time to build a company. You have access to talented people, enormous amounts of knowledge and an environment where you can learn quickly. What is often missing is the opportunity to put all of that into practice.
We want to give exceptional students that opportunity.
No idea required
You don't need an idea.
This is one of the things that makes Sky High different.
You can apply without a business idea, without a company and without a co-founder. We identify commercial opportunities that have the potential to become significant businesses and select people to build them.
That might be an opportunity we have identified ourselves, something that comes through our network or a problem identified by one of our corporate partners.
You can apply on your own or with people you already know. We actively encourage individual applications because we will form the final teams ourselves during induction.
So don’t spend the next six months trying to invent a startup idea just so you can apply.
We have the opportunities. We’re looking for the people who can turn them into companies.
Scale of ambition
How big are you thinking?
This programme is not for everyone.
We’re not looking for people whose ambition is simply to run a small business alongside university. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t what Sky High is designed to do.
We are looking to build companies with the potential to become £100m+ turnover businesses.
You don’t need to know how to get there yet. Nobody does at the beginning. But you do need to be comfortable thinking about the possibility that the company you’re building could eventually employ hundreds of people, operate internationally and generate hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue.
You don’t have to know how to build a £100m company. You have to believe you can, and have to work hard enough to deserve it.
Who we're looking for
We're not looking for a particular degree or background.
We are looking for evidence that you are capable of achieving something difficult and learning quickly. You might have achieved something academically, built something yourself, led a society, competed at a high level, started something, solved an unusual problem or simply demonstrated a level of drive that stands out from the people around you.
We want people who are curious and ambitious, but also practical. People who think strategically and are practical too. People who are already doing more than their peers in everyway.
Most importantly, we want people who take ownership.
Being ambitious is easy. Turning ambition into results is much harder.
Reality check
You will have to work.
The programme requires a minimum of 20 hours a week on top of your university studies.
We want to be honest about that before you apply. Building a company while completing a degree will require planning, discipline and a willingness to give up some things you might otherwise be doing.
There will be weeks when the work is exciting and weeks when it isn’t. There will be rejection. There will be uncertainty. Sometimes you’ll work hard on something and discover that you were wrong.
You create your own luck by working hard and we need people who don’t get discouraged by setbacks, as success is always only a few corrections away.
Our side
What you can expect from us.
You will receive a genuine commercial opportunity, a founding team, a structured education programme and ongoing strategic support from people with significant experience of business, entrepreneurship and education.
There is an in-house build, structured and comprehensive 30 step proprietary program of learning accompanied by workbooks/worksheets to give you an intense but ultra practical guide to making key decisions, with every step being directly implementable in your business. You will be educated but you will be putting that into practice too.
We will challenge you and expect you to justify your decisions. We won’t simply tell you what to do. Our aim is to help you develop the judgement and capability to make those decisions yourself.
By the end of the programme, we want you to understand what it feels like to be responsible for a company.
And if you prove yourself?
You earn the next opportunity.
The strongest teams may be invited to continue with Sky High after the initial six months. That next stage is selective. It is for founders who have demonstrated that their venture has real potential and that they have the ability to take it further.
We’ll help those teams prepare for investment, develop their pitch and get in front of investors.
Ready to see what you can build?