A Very V1 October 🎃
Even midterms couldn’t stop Michigan’s builders from shipping.
Startup Week Highlights 🎬
This year’s Startup Week brought another round of conversations between Michigan builders and top startups.
60+ chats were created between students and startup founders and 50+ companies are now recruiting through the V1 resume book.
We kicked off the week with:
A Startup Recruiting Workshop, helping students navigate early-stage hiring and pitch their skills to founders.
At the Sphinx panel, Caroline Liu and UMich alum Luke Hobeika shared what it takes to build from zero to launch.
A casual Frita’s meetup with Usul, Embedder, Equipe, and YouLearn.
Huge thanks to everyone who applied, came to events, and met with founders. We’re grateful for the energy you brought to every conversation.
And this is just the start. Ramp is visiting campus soon, and Applied Intuition is recruiting now through the resume book. 👀
Ship It Sunday 🚢
Only at Michigan do 100+ students pack a room before exams to work on ideas that have nothing to do with exams.
Missed the last two Ship-Its? Don’t worry, another one’s on the way. Bring what you’ve been building, get feedback, or just see what others are shipping.
V1 x Coinbase 🪙
Shoutout to Sriram MK and Zain Zai for helping organize an event with Coinbase as they kicked off internship recruiting. V1 members got to hear firsthand about what it’s like building at the intersection of crypto and fintech.
YC Launches 🚀
Claybird
Claybird just launched in Y Combinator F25! Congrats to Abdullah Nauman, another V1 alum building the next big thing.
It’s an AI agent for video ad creation that plans, generates, and edits your ad like a world-class creative director. Check out their launch video here:
Aspect
Also part of YC F25, Aspect is an agentic platform for post-production and in-house video teams that automates the most repetitive parts of editing.
Founded by Gurish Sharma, Edison Chiu, and Bright Xu, the team built agents that act like assistant editors: reviewing footage for errors, finding clips for storyboards, syncing updates across tools like Asana, Jira, Slack, and Notion, and handling all setup work behind every new shoot.
Congrats to both teams. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do.
It's interesting how much energy you're creating. Truly inspiring to see students so engaged with building and shipping their ideas. As a teacher, the "before exams" part of Ship It Sunday gives me a funny little shiver, but what a community! Keep up the brilliant work.