Recently, Brandon King ‘26 and Chris Dech ‘26, two members of the Brandeis Entrepeneurship and Tech Association (BETA), sat down with The Hoot to discuss their newly launched publication, BETA Magazine. King and Dech are the two co-chairs of the magazine, which began publication at the end of the Spring 2024 semester.

According to King, BETA is “a group of like minded students, and we sort of form a little bit of a think tank. We have a lot of people who are interested in engineering technology. We host a lot of speakers in that space, and we host a lot of other no things for the community in that realm.” Dech added, “We’re trying to get people more comfortable with talking about business and being involved in business, but not feeling exclusive.”

BETA became interested in publishing a magazine because, according to King, “we basically wanted a platform where we could learn about, write about and share about the things that are happening in tech and business. This magazine was formed to be that avenue so people in our community could learn about, write about and express their interest in the world of entrepreneurship and tech through writing.” 

“There is sort of a missing niche for this sort of content on campus,” said Dech. “We have The Hoot, we have The Justice, but there’s not really anything dedicated towards business events, talking about highlighting things like startups, highlighting certain people’s stories, certain diverse experiences in business.”

When publishing their inaugural issue, BETA members had to deal with the various amounts of work that goes into creating a magazine. “There’s a lot of different things that go into writing, there’s publishing, there’s graphic design … a lot of stuff that the readers don’t see has to go into it,” said King. “So it takes a lot of time and funding to do that. It takes a lot of people. We’re all college students, so everyone has different schedules. It’s hard to meet, but it’s definitely worth it.” 

Dech added, “​​It really is sort of a trial and error sort of thing, but it’s something that’s very rewarding because you learn how to do things like interview people, schedule things with people both in and outside of campus and you just learn more about time management, even though it can be very difficult just to how to connect with something that feels rewarding, not just for you, but for other people as well.”

Ultimately, interviewing was something that King and Dech enjoyed about the magazine. “I was able to interview a lot of very senior people, very interesting people for my stories,” said King. These included Dipro Prattoy, “the CEO of a major South Asian educational technology company,” as well as the president of BETA, Debbie, who was an analyst at JP Morgan Chase. “You get to hear things like student startups that might be more relevant to people today, or at least more clickable and relatable, than just interviewing like a Fortune 500 CEO,” added Dech.

After this issue, King and Dech are looking to expand the magazine’s publication further. “This year and last year, it was really an experiment, and we’re working more on that, just to expand that concept and to give people a platform to just read about these sort of things,” said Dech. “We’re in our startup phase. We’re still growing. It’s our second year, so there’s a lot more room to grow, but so far, it’s been a great experience.”

“Last year, it was one issue that was done at the end of the year,” said King. “We are looking to change that with the goal of eventually getting to bimonthly, so once every two weeks, once a week, if we can. That’s still on the TBD, trying to get our staff together, figure out a lot of the logistical side of things, but we are going to eventually be more of a routine type of magazine.”

Based on their experiences with the inaugural issue, King and Dech are considering some improvements to the magazine’s content and format. King stated that, “We want to kind of move to more consistent issues, so the format might change a bit, but it’s [still] just going to be stories about tech, business, what’s going on in the world, as well as any events on Brandeis.” Dech added, “We also want to make sure that we highlight the technology part of the magazine, to really try to make sure that we can reach people through technology, through things like emails, through things like building a website that we’re planning on doing.”

“There are lots of business newsletters, and we don’t want to exactly copy those. We want to make sure that we have the same reach and feel that they do when it comes towards innovation and entrepreneurship. So we’re just trying to make sure we highlight that in our format,” said Dech.

Currently, King and Dech are actively recruiting within the BETA club for more writers and contributors to the magazine. “There’s hundreds of members of BETA. It’s one of the biggest [clubs] in Brandeis,” said King. “A lot of our recruitment is tailored at people who are currently in BETA, people who are trying to join BETA in terms of freshmen and new people from the career fair. So we’ve sent out emails, we’ve had coffee chats. It’s still a rolling admissions process. So if someone wants to join BETA magazine throughout the year, we are happy to take on new people. And as long as you are a member of BETA, or at least planning to be a member of BETA, you are welcome to join the magazine.”

“Many people don’t feel like they’re very involved in the activities of BETA and very in touch with what’s going on”, added Dech. “A lot of BETA events are more passive participation. What we really want for the magazine is that this is a way to be actively involved in BETA, not just going to events, going to speaker events, going into coffee chats and round tables, but actually being involved in the business side.”

Overall, both King and Dech are very positive about the magazine’s future and have ambitious goals for its further development. “Our main goal is to have a weekly issue or two week issue with amazing stories, talking about business in the world as well as on our campus. We would like it to be, obviously, highly read and we want to get paid advertisers,” says King.

And according to Dech, “What we really want is just to become something that’s visible off campus for things like paid advertising and just being taken seriously as a business publication, written by students, not just for students but for people who are in the general business and entrepreneurship sphere as well.”

The inaugural issue of the magazine can be found at https://issuu.com/beta.magazine/docs/beta. BETA Magazine’s next issue is scheduled for release on Oct. 31 or Nov. 1.