The Pitch Starts Before the Diploma.

Most people meet entrepreneurship late. A first job, a side hustle, a layoff, a moment of frustration with a product that should exist and does not. By then the habits are set. You learned to wait for permission, to raise your hand, to follow the syllabus. Starting something feels like breaking a rule nobody told you was optional.

Tomorrow, Wayne State is trying to move that first meeting up a few years. The High School Entrepreneurship Forum runs Thursday, September 24, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., in person on the university's Midtown campus. High school students spend the morning in conversations and hands-on activities with business professionals, working entrepreneurs, faculty, and current Wayne State students. The framing is deliberate: entrepreneurship as a career path, and also as a way of thinking you can carry into any career.

Then comes the part that matters. Every student who attends is invited to compete in the High School Pitch Competition. Show up, and you earn a shot at standing in front of judges with your own idea. The forum also walks students through what the Mike Ilitch School of Business and the wider university have to offer, which is the quiet recruiting pitch underneath the whole day.

To see why a morning like this counts, look at what sits above it. The Ilitch School already runs a Startup Technology Pitch Competition for its college students, with $10,000 for first place, $5,000 for second, and $2,500 for third. In the 2025 inaugural round, School of Medicine students Luv Takkar and Sanjana Kumar won with Fluoroscreen, a colorectal cancer screening drug. They did not stop at the prize. Fluoroscreen went on to become one of 11 companies to receive a $15,000 award from the Detroit Startup Fund in its first year.

This spring the competition ran again. A team including business major Joseph Burton and computer science majors Joshua Vue and Tracy Hall-Petry took first in the business and consumer technology track with Barix. Three teams of medical students walked out with seed money for their ideas.

That is the ladder. A campus pitch leads to a prize, the prize leads to city capital, and the capital leads to a company. What the high school forum adds is a bottom rung that a teenager can actually reach. The students in the room tomorrow will not all start companies. But the ones who do will have already stood up, said the idea out loud, and heard what judges think of it. Most founders do that for the first time years later, with far more on the line.

ANF Take: Detroit spends a lot of energy trying to keep founders from leaving. Residencies, startup funds, relocation packages. All of it matters, and all of it goes after people who already decided to build. A high school forum goes after the decision itself. It is the cheapest, earliest, least glamorous intervention in the whole pipeline, and it may be the one with the longest reach. A sixteen-year-old who pitches once and survives it has learned the thing no grant can teach: that the room is not as scary as it looked. We will be watching who takes the stage when the pitch round comes, because some of those names are going to show up on this site again.

The forum is tomorrow morning. If you know a student with an idea they will not stop talking about, send them this.