In the University of Washington’s Creating a Company entrepreneurship class, students learn how to create a business, from idea to selling a product. And thanks to a collaboration with Amazon, they learn how to build brands across channels that didn’t exist when their textbooks were written. They see firsthand how they can use social to test products, run ads from their phones, and scale businesses before they ever graduate.
This new class is a year in the making. When Amazon became a sponsor of the University of Washington’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, they went above and beyond a typical sponsorship, growing into a collaboration that’s putting independent small business owners, Amazon tools, and real-world selling experience directly in front of students building businesses of their own.
Alli Auldridge is a program manager on Amazon’s Seller External Relations team helping drive the Sellers in Your Community (SIYC) initiative, which works to support the success of independent small businesses who sell in the Amazon store. She leads the partnership with UW’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship in the Foster School of Business.
“We wanted to bring that mission into the classroom, to connect the tools, the programs, and the real entrepreneurs behind them with the students who are building the businesses of the future,” Auldridge said.
From sponsorship to partnership
It began with Rising Tide, the Buerk Center’s annual celebration of entrepreneurial women across the Pacific Northwest. SIYC small business owners joined entrepreneurs, investors, students, and faculty for the first time, and the connection was immediate. Sellers went on to mentor and judge student teams at the Dempsey Startup Competition. Each touchpoint deepened the relationship. Auldridge began engaging directly with the Creating a Company class. An introduction to instructor Val Trask led to sellers guest lecturing in her classroom.
“Students leaned in,” explained Aldridge. “They wanted to hear from entrepreneurs who had built real businesses and could talk honestly about what that takes. And those visits opened a conversation about what else the partnership could bring into the curriculum.”
This fall, Amazon and the Buerk Center are launching a dedicated session in the Creating a Company class on how to set up a business for selling online, from logistics and marketing to building a cohesive brand voice across channels and stores.
For Amy Sallin, Director of the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, the partnership has felt different from a typical corporate sponsorship. That matters, because the Buerk Center is entirely self-funded through donors and sponsors.
“It really felt like a collaboration and a partnership,” Sallin said. " They were a genuine part of what we were doing. They were engaging as mentors, speakers, and coaches. This whole year has really felt like this wonderful collaboration between interested parties.”
Connecting sellers to students
Max Kang, founder of Cupkin and a UW graduate, was one of the entrepreneurs who guest lectured in the Creating a Company class.
“To be back on campus as a business owner, sharing what I’ve learned with students who are just getting started, that’s the kind of thing you don’t forget,” Kang said.
Kang shared how he built Cupkin from a family kitchen project into a multimillion-dollar sticker book brand, reaching best seller status in the Amazon store in under three years. He didn’t give a polished keynote. He told his story, the pivots, the product recall, the hard lessons, and then opened the floor.
“My talk was like, ‘I’ll tell you guys my story, but I really want to know what you guys are struggling with and I want to see if I can help,’” Kang said. “The questions that were coming in, I was like, ‘Oh, you’re really thinking well about this.’”
His message to students was direct. “It’s not about TikTok, it’s not about Amazon, it’s not about Shopify. It’s about deciding on one specific strategy and just doing it better than everyone else.”
The old playbook and the new
The landscape for young entrepreneurs looks nothing like it did even a decade ago. The tools and pathways to reach customers have fundamentally changed, but most entrepreneurship curricula were written before those pathways existed.
“Students in the Creating a Company class used to focus on getting a product onto a store shelf,” Sallin said. “That was the path. The Amazon store opened up a completely different one. And having sellers come into the classroom and show our students how they actually built their businesses, that’s what turns it from an idea into something they can go do.”
According to Amazon’s Small Business Empowerment Report, more than 60% of sales in the Amazon store come from independent selling partners, most of which are small and medium-sized businesses. They operate in all 50 states, which means nearly every university community in the country already has entrepreneurs nearby with real-world experience to share.
“For us to be able to come in and connect those dots for the institution, to say, these entrepreneurs are right here in your community and they’re ready to share what they’ve learned, that’s something we can do very easily that makes a big difference,” Auldridge said.
For Kang, the value runs both ways.
“A professor can share their perspective and their learnings, and then bringing other entrepreneurs in to share, ‘This is how I did it,’ the more you can see different paths and hear different failures and learnings, the chances of succeeding are just significantly higher,” Kang said. “The fact that Amazon is investing in the next generation, I didn’t have that. I had to pay for it. The fact that these students are getting access to it now, I think that’s really cool.”
Auldridge said investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs is central to her team’s work. Independent small business owners who sell in the Amazon store already support more than 2 million jobs and contributed an estimated $183.9 billion to US GDP last year, according to a new report by Oxford Economics. That economic impact reaches communities in every state. “These businesses create jobs, support local suppliers, and strengthen the places where they operate,” Auldridge said. “The more entrepreneurs we can help get started, the more communities benefit.”
A model built to be replicated
The Amazon-UW partnership was built in Amazon’s own backyard. But it was designed to be replicated.
“Sellers and the entrepreneurship programs in their communities are natural partners, bringing them together is what drives this work,” said Aldridge. “What the UW experience showed us is that sellers are eager to give back and students are ready to learn from them. The connection was already there; it just needed a spark.”
For Sallin, the partnership has implications beyond UW. She sees it as a signal to other companies about what’s possible when corporate partnerships go beyond writing a check.
“If Amazon is the first one to the table, good for them,” Sallin said. “But I hope others follow. This is a win for the small business sellers, a win for Amazon, and a win for our students. And it’s going to just get better.”
If you lead an entrepreneurship program and want to bring this model to your students, Amazon’s Seller in Your Community team is ready to help. Start the conversation.