Why Tight-Knit University Communities Move Faster

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

Lovable launched a competition to see which universities can best activate their communities. After the first full day, WHU is the 1 university worldwide. That made me smile. And I genuinely love seeing TUM right there with us in the top 3. Different profiles, same energy. Tools like Lovable are a quiet game changer for the startup world. Entrepreneurial talent can just… start. Build something simple, test a hypothesis, get feedback, iterate - even if you are a business major.

But a bit of context: The competition runs until the end of the month and counts absolute votes, not votes per student. WHU has roughly 2,000 students. At this very moment, TUM has around four to five times more enrolled students than WHU has produced alumni in the last 40 years… So let’s see whether we can defend a top-3 position until the end. No illusions, just curiosity.

But what this first day really shows to me is something else. The WHU community is incredibly tight-knit. We can reach each other. And we can mobilize. We’ve seen this before. About ten years ago, the community managed to vote our university town onto the official German Monopoly board via a public wildcard vote. Berlin, Munich, Hamburg... Vallendar. That same closeness creates speed. Speed in voting competitions, yes. But much more importantly, speed when it comes to founding and scaling startups.

When you know whom to call. When people actually respond. When you just write into a WhatsApp group and receive instant support from multiple peers. That’s hard to replicate. And very easy to underestimate from the outside. Props to Anton Osika, Sophia Nabil Gustafsson, Felix Haas, and team for running this format. Let’s see where this ends up.

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