The Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES) is a student-run nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to encouraging entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which can be defined as "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response...

 and business development in the New Haven, Connecticut

New Haven, Connecticut

New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...

 area. YES was founded in 1999 by Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

 undergraduates Sean Glass and Miles Lasater. Its social entrepreneurship program—focused on not-for-profit and socially responsible organizations—was founded the same year, with efforts led by fellow student David Pozen. Today, YES members include Yale undergraduate, graduate

Graduate school

A graduate school is a school that awards advanced academic degrees with the general requirement that students must have earned a previous undergraduate degree...

, professional students, and faculty, as well as several hundred Yale alumni around the world.

Y50K

The Y50K is YES's annual business plan competition. Y50K winners have been named every year since the competition's inception in 2000. Each year, a total of $50,000 in grants

Grant (money)

Grants are funds disbursed by one party , often a Government Department, Corporation, Foundation or Trust, to a recipient, often a nonprofit entity, educational institution, business or an individual. In order to receive a grant, some form of "Grant Writing" often referred to as either a proposal...

 are given away to new businesses in the Yale community. In 2004, a biotechnology

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

 category was added to the usual two categories of competition, social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is the work of social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change . While a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a...

 and for-profit. The Y50K also has a strategic alliance with StudentBusinesses.com

StudentBusinesses.com

StudentBusinesses.com is a website that provides networking resources to university entrepreneurs. StudentBusinesses.com was acquired by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in October 2009. ....

 that allows the competition to be conducted completely online.

The Yale Entrepreneur

The Yale Entrepreneur (YE), published and supported by the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, is Yale's only magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

 of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which can be defined as "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response...

. First published in 2001, the YE went out of publication in 2003 until being redesigned and relaunched in the spring of 2006.

Regional Events

YES hosts a variety of events throughout the year to highlight entrepreneurship at Yale and in the greater New Haven and Connecticut regions. While venues vary from year to year, common events usually include YES New York, YES Boston, and the Innovation Summit (hosted in New Haven). The organization has also held events in Silicon Valley and Omaha, Nebraska, and is considering adding a third annual regional event in Hartford, Connecticut.