On September 12, 2025, Transcend UW hosted over 250 attendees at their inaugural UW Entrepreneurship Kickoff event. Transcend is a student organization and hub for innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship at UW–Madison. The org encourages interdisciplinary collaboration across majors or specialties and hosts one of the largest student-led pitch competitions in the state.
Transcend is open to any student, undergraduate or graduate, who wants to gain holistic professionalization experience and get started in entrepreneurship. Members learn leadership and collaborative team building, develop communication and fundraising skills, get hands-on negotiation and succession planning experience, and see behind-the-scenes administrative planning in action—all of which prepare them for future jobs or endeavors.
“Our goal is to help students either explore entrepreneurship as a field or accelerate their journey if they know they want to be entrepreneurs,” said Transcend president Siddharth Singh.
The aim of this event, and of Transcend more broadly, was to bring together many of the amazing entrepreneurial programs at UW into one common space. Singh hoped to draw awareness to the many ways to be an early entrepreneur on campus and be the introduction to everything entrepreneurial at the university, so that students can leverage it as early as possible. The Kickoff drew both students and community entrepreneurs as well as 19 different on- and off-campus organizations like Discovery to Product (D2P), Wednesday Nite @ The Lab (WN@TL), Starting Block, and Cloud Native Madison (CNCF).
“The org leaders felt that this initiative was good for them because they got a lot of student engagement. It shows that UW is hungry for entrepreneurship,” said Singh.
TEO Director Bonnie Bachman agreed. “The excitement was palpable, with a high level of noise due to the intense interaction. The evident engagement showed that people were genuinely interested in what they were learning. This was further demonstrated by the follow-up questions from the participants, which focused on how to learn more and get involved,” she said.
The event also announced Transcend’s three new initiatives for the 2025-26 school year. The first is UW Entrepreneur Meetups, which are bi-weekly community gatherings for students to meet, connect, and discuss ideas. These meetings are new to Transcend, but are an extension of Ramp100 community meetups that were held last year.
Immediately following these bi-weekly meetups is the second new initiative: Build Nights with the UW Tech Exploration Lab. Build Nights are a student-led effort for those who want a focused, collaborative space to work on ventures. Mentors with technical or practical experience will be available to guide students during these sessions.
The final new Transcend initiative is a podcast called The Foundry, out now. The first episode features Transcend’s former VP Ben Lukszys, who now has his own startup, and the second episode highlights UW junior Trinity Krohn’s lessons from launching three businesses.
Transcend would like to thank the entire TEO and Grainger Institute for Engineering (GIE) teams for their work in making the Kickoff happen, but especially Director Bachman and GIE Assistant Director Ting-Ray Chang, who are the organization’s advisors. Bachman says that adding Transcend to TEO’s portfolio increases the office’s entrepreneurial reach to include undergraduates. As a result, one of TEO’s 2026 goals will be to promote and add entrepreneurial mindset programs and events for undergraduate students.
Singh would additionally like to acknowledge the Transcend board and all other attendees who took the time to organize and show up.
“I was really proud of this event,” he said. “After last year’s pitch competition, I grabbed a coffee with a bunch of competitors and all of them kept saying the same thing: I wish we had known about this resource sooner. And some of them were graduating in a month! I thought, how is it possible you spent four years at a place without knowing what exists in the ecosystem? The whole objective was tying it in together so students know what’s available for them.”
Transcend will host their eleventh annual pitch competition in spring 2026. Details will be announced soon on their website.
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Feature image: A bird’s eye view of the Transcend UW Kickoff Event in the Engineering Centers Building on September 12, 2025. Photo by Ting-Ray Chang.
Written by: Bri Meyer