Shea Center Executive Director Aims to Help Students Become “Startup Ready"

Not every Boston College graduate is going to start a company. But any BC grad could consider working for an entrepreneurial venture, says Jere Doyle ’87, P’15, executive director of the Shea Center for Entrepreneurship.

One of Doyle’s goals in his new job—the center was launched earlier this year—is to make startups one of the possibilities BC students ponder as they’re searching for their first jobs. “My philosophy is most students shouldn’t start their own company—but they should go and work at a startup,” Doyle says. “You learn a ton that way.”

“When you go to a startup, you’re not given a single role. You have to do lots of different things. That’s what we’re trying to prepare our students to be able to do—we’re trying to get them startup ready.”

Doyle knows students face plenty of pressures not to follow the startup path, like parents worrying about the risks and peers heading off to work for established outfits. He faced the same sorts of pressures when he was a BC student in the ’80s.

He wanted to join a new startup travel company, called Global Marketing, in Europe. “My father spent 35 years at one company,” he says. “I told my dad I was willing to take this risk and was going to take this job, and he said, ‘Absolutely not.’” His dad, BC ’51, worked for Rohm and Haas. But he persuaded his father and plunged in. After graduation in 1987, he moved to Spain. Later, the job took him to the UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands—“I opened little satellite offices around Europe.” He ended up overseeing Global Marketing’s sale in 1997.

Those experiences gave him the confidence to start his own venture, Prospectiv, an online marketing service, when he returned to the United States in the late ’90s. He sold Prospectiv in 2011 and has since launched Jere Doyle Enterprises and the Oyster Angel Fund, a seed-stage investment fund.

“The center itself is an entrepreneurial venture,” Doyle adds. “We’re learning as we go and trying to cultivate innovation at the Carroll School and throughout BC. And we’ve got a great team of students, staff, and faculty leading the way. It’s a very exciting time for entrepreneurial spirit at Boston College.”

Creating that culture will mean instilling a tolerance not only for risk taking but also for failure—not every startup or entrepreneurial idea works out, Doyle says. “We’re trying to show our students it’s OK to take a risk and fail. You can make mistakes—just be sure you learn from them.”