University partners
Your most ambitious students may be capable of much more than they realise.
Universities already do an excellent job of giving students knowledge and developing their intellectual capabilities.
The challenge is creating enough opportunities for the most ambitious students to apply those capabilities to something genuinely difficult and commercially meaningful.
That’s where Sky High can help.
Our six-month founder programme allows exceptional students to continue their degree while simultaneously building a real company.
Different by design
This isn't another entrepreneurship course.
Students don’t need to arrive with an idea or an existing company.
Sky High identifies commercial opportunities, selects the students and forms the founding teams. The students then work through an intensive programme combining practical education, strategic guidance and the experience of actually building and selling something. A truly experiential experience.
The programme requires at least 20 hours a week alongside university. That is demanding, but deliberately so.
We aren’t trying to create better entrepreneurship students. We’re trying to create a new global class of founders.
Ambition
This is designed for students who think bigger.
Sky High isn’t designed to produce a collection of small student businesses. The ventures we develop are selected for their potential to become significant companies, including businesses capable of reaching £100m+ in annual turnover.
That means we’re looking for students who are comfortable with ambition at that scale.
They don’t need to understand how to build a £100m company when they join us. That’s what the programme is there to help them learn. But they need to have the appetite to try.
The starting point may be a student. The end point could be a major company.
Outcomes
What students gain.
The education covers the practical areas that founders need to understand: strategy, customer discovery, business models, product development, sales, marketing, finance, operations, leadership, growth and fundraising.
More importantly, students have to apply those concepts to their own venture. They will speak to customers, make decisions with incomplete information, test assumptions, deal with setbacks and learn how to respond when the market doesn’t behave as expected.
The aim is for each team to reach its first customer within six months.
Partnership
What a partnership can provide.
For universities, Sky High offers a way to give exceptional students an experience that is difficult to replicate within a traditional academic structure.
It can complement existing entrepreneurship and enterprise activity rather than replace it.
We are particularly interested in universities that want to identify their most entrepreneurial students early and give them access to a serious venture-building environment.
The university develops the talent. Sky High gives that talent the opportunity to build.
Interested in working with us?
We’re looking to work with universities that share our belief that exceptional students should have the opportunity to build something meaningful before they graduate.