The Origin of DartUP: Understanding the Rise of Social Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth

During winter break of the 2020-2021 school year, Dartmouth student Vico Lee D’24 launched DartUP, an innovative social entrepreneurship program that has since grown to be one of Dartmouth’s most impactful student run programs.

Lee’s inspiration for founding DartUP was realized during his participation in a hackathon alongside future DartUP Co-Founder Liz Frey D’24. During the hackathon, Lee was tasked with building a recycling app, which allowed the user to "hover their camera over any object, and it would tell them what recycling bins to throw it into," Lee said.

But the limitations of the hackathon prompted Lee to consider how the experience of the hackathon could be improved to better encompass the entrepreneurial experience of developing a product or service. "Why isn’t there a business side of the program?” Lee questioned. “Why isn’t there a marketing component? How am I able to analyze whether my product is feasible or not?" 

In an effort to address these fundamental issues, DartUP and its flagship program, The Social Blueprint was born. The Social Blueprint aimed to be a new kind of competition “where you have to build something, you have to try and sell it…and you have to iterate through product development,” Lee said.

The Social Blueprint Challenge takes students throughout the process of developing a socially impactful startup—all the way from the inception of a product to preparing a presentation to pitch to a panel of judges.

The program consisted of multiple educational workshops, which the DartUP team decided to open to all students at Dartmouth in an effort to increase the campuses’ overall awareness towards social entrepreneurship. 

However Lee conceded that  “In an ideal scenario we wanted to host a program exclusively for people who sign[ed] up for the Social Blueprint Challenge, in which they go through the six month program themselves.”

By launching DartUP, Lee sought to broaden the horizons of Dartmouth students who were previously unfamiliar with social entrepreneurship. "We're looking to change the mindset here at Dartmouth," said Lee. "It's about showing that it's possible to build something that's not just profitable but also socially impactful." With confidence in his peers' capabilities, Lee added, "Dartmouth students are really smart. So if we get a lot of people thinking about [socially impactful startups], it’s going to be very impactful in the long run.”

Lee decided to partner with the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth, due to their entrepreneurial focus and opportunities for funding. Lee credits Magnuson for their “hands off approach”, which allowed the DartUP team to “basically run [the program] ourselves and decide what we want to do with our funding,” Lee said.

Lee described getting DartUP off the ground as the most difficult aspect of the program's journey so far, referencing the lack of other programs in the social entrepreneurship space at Dartmouth and other universities for them to emulate—everything had to be built from the ground up.

“There wasn’t a framework we could follow.” Lee said. “It all had to be done by scratch.”

In addition, spreading the word about DartUP’s initiatives proved difficult due to the novelty of the program.

“Nobody knew what social entrepreneurship was, " Lee said. “And there are people who are interested in social impact but not interested in entrepreneurship and people who are interested in entrepreneurship but not social impact.”

Lee described the early workshops DartUP threw as “a bit demoralizing,” as sometimes only 4 or 5 people would show up.”

Despite its early struggles, DartUP has grown significantly throughout the past 3 years establishing itself as a staple within the Dartmouth ecosystem of clubs and organizations.

In 2023, during his senior year at Dartmouth, Lee aimed to clear his plate of the responsibilities that came with the many commitments he held to focus on building a startup of his own. Lee and Frey stepped down as directors for the 2023-2024 school year, but still serve as program advisors.

Lee credits his ability to step away from DartUP as a testament to his faith in DartUP’s current directors Tim O’Reilly and Vania Zhao.

“I think Tim and Vania are doing a fucking amazing job,” Lee remarked.

Lee hopes that by continuing to grow and improve, DartUP fulfills its mission to inspire students to build socially impactful startups of their own.

“I recognize that it is a stretch [for Dartmouth student’s] to start building socially impactful startups at this point of their life,” Lee reflected. “But I hope that when students are older and they encounter a problem, they will draw on the skills they’ve learned through DartUP, and start building something that is actually beneficial to society.”