BETA Academy is for young leaders who want to learn how to solve the world's most pressing problems and get real-world experience today. Students get hands-on experience working in teams and building a real business - not a business plan.
BETA Academy helps you build the skills you need to succeed like no other education experience through world-class instructors, in-depth curriculum with tactical hands-on learning, and a powerful community.
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of live sessions of interactive workshops led by our team of professionals
of on-demand lecture content inspired by startup incubators and top MBA programs
of 1:1 startup team mentorship with experienced entrepreneurs and alumni mentors
asynchronous support through Discord
young leaders in our network to work and build lifelong relationships with
Our proprietary curriculum is based on top MBA classes (at Harvard, Stanford and Wharton) and Silicon Valley incubators (at Google and Y-Combinator). Lectures are delivered in byte sized 2 to 10 min videos tailored for the GenZ learner.
Practice the lessons you learned from the student portal in company challenges where you work on problems that real companies are currently facing. We've worked with organizations like Skip the Dishes and Copy.Ai
We teach HOW to think not WHAT to think. Our leadership workshops for high school students are focused on growing your success toolkit and cover impactful topics like negotiations, money management and problem solving with data —skills you’ll use repeatedly during the course of your career.
Connect with inspiring founders who have built their startups from the ground up and ask them all your burning questions.
Attend intimate, small group Q&A discussions with professionals from a wide array of careers. From traditional corporate paths to startup roles to freelancing remote workers and unconventional career paths, we cover everything that’s out there so you can have a better understanding of the possibilities in your future.
We learn what we do, not what we're told. This is why BETA Camp emphasizes "doing".
By the end of the program, students will have built a working business that solves a problem for real customers. Throughout this journey, students learn to:
◘ Solve interesting problems
◘ Find and curate information
◘ Connect unrelated ideas
◘ Ask good questions
◘ Lead, negotiate, and communicate
◘ Employ a variety of mental models
◘ Fail and pivot
◘ Face unpredictability and uncertainty when there are no right answers
Students learn from industry experts and real-world experience instead of through textbooks and theory. Instead of passively listening to lectures, you'll get more interactive experiences, small group discussions, hands-on projects, feedback & mentorship, Q&A, role-playing, and a lot of community & networking.
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Design Thinking Workshop
Analyzing Data
Critical Thinking
Networking
Delivering Results
Self-Directed Learning
Sales and Negotiations
Building a website or app as an MVP
Building workflows and operations
Decisions making with consequences
"BETA Camp emphasized problem-oriented outlooks and made sure that we had the skill set to succeed in the future. The best part was working on our idea and seeing the traction for our business. It was a unique way to learn about entrepreneurship."
Learn the fundamentals of business, technology, and entrepreneurship. This includes exploring up and coming technologies and industries that will drive innovation, the risks and rewards of different types of entrepreneurship, and ways to differentiate from competition.
Live workshops in this phase are focused on helping students break down big problems into actionable steps, recognize pain points they experience themselves, and discover how to work on a team with peers with different opinions and skillsets.
Career Exploration: See how core positions at startups and businesses look day-to-day and identify the skills it takes to break in. Learn why that role is important to the business and what pathways there are to get to that position.
Learn multiple methods of ideation and how to evaluate whether a business is worth building. Students will learn about finding a niche in a big market, where to look for unique insights, hypothesis testing, and conducting user research.
Live workshops will include design thinking for high school students and Company Challenges on conducting experiments to determine whether a new product or service is worth building and collecting user insights and information.
Career Exploration: Get to know the innovation arm of a company and discover careers related to user experience. We'll bring in a founder to answer your burning questions about the mechanics of starting a startup, debunk myths to entrepreneurship and inspire action. Understand your own strengths and skills that you can double-down on to grow into a competitive advantage.
Learn how to build a minimal viable product within 2 weeks with or without code so that you can get your startup off the ground. For the rest of the program, students will focus on iterating the business, get comfortable in making consequences decisions with incomplete information, collect, read, and understand data, and build out operations and workflows.
During this time, every live workshop will help students practice skills they need to build their startups. This learning how to handle rejection, how to write enticing copy, how to launch fast and iterate faster, and how to leverage tech to accelerate.
Career Exploration: Based on students interest in the problems they chose to pursue, we bring in professionals that work in social impact, higher education (MD, JD, PhD), digital nomads (remote work), or disruptive tech careers for Q&A.
Initial traction is hard to get and involves a lot of trial and error as well as pure hustle. While continuing to build and improve the product, students will learn about best practices for cold outreach, strategizing and creating the marketing funnel, and selling.
Students will get to practice creating viral content with entrepreneurs that have leveraged media like TikTok and Youtube to distribute their products/services in live workshops as well as experience real-world negotiations and sales practice.
Career exploration: Founders come in to share how they navigated the early stages of their business.
BETA Camp concludes with a Demo Day where students share the achievements of their business in just a few short weeks. To prepare, students learn the elements of a good pitch, how to plan for future expansion and growth, and performative speaking skills.
Live workshops in this final phase include a growth and scaling Company Challenge, presentation skills practice, and analyzing market size and financial projections.
Career exploration: Hear from VCs who come in for Q&A as well as investors who are judges at Demo Day on what they look for in a successful startup and how students can start generating value today.
Learn the fundamentals of business, technology, and entrepreneurship. This includes exploring up and coming technologies and industries that will drive innovation, the risks and rewards of different types of entrepreneurship, and ways to differentiate from competition.
Live workshops in this phase are focused on helping students break down big problems into actionable steps, recognize pain points they experience themselves, and discover how to work on a team with peers with different opinions and skillsets.
Career Exploration: See how core positions at startups and businesses look day-to-day and identify the skills it takes to break in. Learn why that role is important to the business and what pathways there are to get to that position.
Learn multiple methods of ideation and how to evaluate whether a business is worth building. Students will learn about finding a niche in a big market, where to look for unique insights, hypothesis testing, and conducting user research.
Live workshops include design thinking for high school students and Company Challenges on conducting experiments to determine whether a new product or service is worth building and collecting user insights and information.
Career Exploration: Get to know the innovation arm of a company and discover careers related to user experience. We'll bring in a founder to answer your burning questions about the mechanics of starting a startup, debunk myths to entrepreneurship and inspire action. Understand your own strengths and skills that you can double-down on to grow into a competitive advantage.
Learn how to build a minimal viable product within 2 weeks with or without code so that you can get your startup off the ground. For the rest of the program, students will focus on iterating the business, get comfortable in making consequences decisions with incomplete information, collect, read, and understand data, and build out operations and workflows.
During this time, every live workshop will help students practice skills they need to build their startups. This learning how to handle rejection, how to write enticing copy, how to launch fast and iterate faster, and how to leverage tech to accelerate.
Career Exploration: Based on students interest in the problems they chose to pursue, we bring in professionals that work in social impact, higher education (MD, JD, PhD), digital nomads (remote work), or disruptive tech careers for Q&A.
Initial traction is hard to get and involves a lot of trial and error as well as pure hustle. While continuing to build and improve the product, students will learn about best practices for cold outreach, strategizing and creating the marketing funnel, and selling.
Students will get to practice creating viral content with entrepreneurs that have leveraged media like TikTok and Youtube to distribute their products/services in live workshops as well as experience real-world negotiations and sales practice.
Career exploration: Founders come in to share how they navigated the early stages of their business.
BETA Camp concludes with a Demo Day where students share the achievements of their business in just a few short weeks. To prepare, students learn the elements of a good pitch, how to plan for future expansion and growth, and performative speaking skills.
Live workshops in this final phase include a growth and scaling Company Challenge, presentation skills practice, and analyzing market size and financial projections.
Career exploration: Hear from VCs who come in for Q&A as well as investors who are judges at Demo Day on what they look for in a successful startup and how students can start generating value today.
"Robots and computers will own any clearly bounded job, skill, or game. Humans should focus on creative work." - Naval
Jobs of the future will value skills like problem solving, creativity, and empathy. These skills are not taught in textbooks or classrooms and will apply even if you would like to pursue science, literature, or medicine.
When was the last time you worked on a problem that didn't have an answer or played a game where you had to figure out the rules and goal as you played?
The real world is not like case competitions or theoretical simulations. Only through building a real business will you experience the hiccups and uncertainty of whether you will succeed with every small decision. A entrepreneurial mind ready to question everything, connect insights, experiment, and continue iterating and tweaking will never fail.
Our founders and staff run information sessions often. Sign up to receive an invite!
Sign Up NowIf you can't find the answer to your question, please contact us at hello@beta.camp
Not at all! Students are not expected to have a startup idea or a team upon joining. BETA Camp guides you through the process of ideation and using design thinking principles to narrow down the opportunity area and problem you want to tackle. Teams will be formed during the program. Students choose their teams and / or based are matched with a team based on personality, skillset, and interest by BETA Camp staff.
Students ages 13-18 may apply for an upcoming cohort at https://app.beta.camp/join
The application includes answering 3 questions and submitting your most recent school transcript. You learn more about what we look for in an application here.
BETA Camp's Summer program is $3,750 USD for the 4-week program. We offer financial aid that covers up to 80% of the fees for students whose family or caregivers earn a combined income of less than $100,000 (USD equivalent) per year. Families may apply for financial bursaries after completing the application and being accepted to the program.
Yes.
BETA Camp is fully online and conducted through live interactive workshops with our mentors and instructors.
From the start, we intentionally designed BETA Camp to be fully virtual for 3 reasons:
1. You can work with instructors from the world’s top companies to get exposure and discover careers outside of of your local community. For example, the Head of Innovation at IKEA based at IKEA headquarters in Sweden has taught our Design Thinking workshop. We’ve had exceptional instructors like senior engineers at Waymo, Google’s self driving car unit, to CEOs of billion dollar companies come in to run workshops. You can’t find that at your locally based extracurricular program.
2. Students meet and work with likeminded peers from around North America and the world. Being able to work across cultures with people from different backgrounds is a skill all employers look for. Our students love that they can be in Toronto and work with team members in California, Ecuador or England!
3. Tech-enabled learning is better than offline learning. With the internet, the world is at your fingertips. We use remote work tools instead of what's available for their online school. For example, we use https://miro.com/app/ for collaborating. It's so much better than pen and paper or a whiteboard. Students can use templates, color code, set timers to vote for the best ideas, paste in information from elsewhere on the internet. When used properly, an online environment is more engaging and effective for learning.
You can read about students' experience with online learning program on our Success Stories page.
BETA Camp is a 4-week program with cohorts this July and August.
July: June 28 - July 28
August: July 31 - August 25.
During both cohorts, live interactive sessions are held Monday-Friday, 12 - 3 pm EST.
Applications close June 4, 2023. Students may complete an application here.
BETA Camp Fellowship
After BETA Camp, students may be invited to continue their startup and entrepreneurship journey with BETA Camp's Fellowship program, an invite-only opportunity for students who have shown dedication and effort during the BETA Camp experience.During the Fellowship, students take deeper dives into different fields and career paths within tech and entrepreneurship with guidance and 1:1 support from industry mentors and coaches. The goal is to continue to develop real-life skills & assist with securing internships early.
Alumni Network & Beyond
All students are invited to our alumni community where students have the opportunity to remain connected with our vast network. Staff host bi-monthly events including networking opportunities. Some teams choose to continue with their startups (BETA Camp takes no equity or ownership with their startups). Others move to build new startups or non-profits with either the same team, their friends, or solo.We also see many students land internships through the network they built at BETA Camp with the Camp Counselors.
Students must be 13-18 years old during the program. Gap year students are also able to apply. Our ideal candidate is a high school student (or rising high school student) who is ambitious, driven and curious. They are forever learning and keen on taking action within their circle of influence.We accept students globally, as long as you are able to attend the majority of our live workshops, which occur 12 - 3 pm EST (Eastern Time US).We do not require any previous knowledge in business, technology, or entrepreneurship - only an open mind and demonstrated passion.
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