Campus Entrepreneurship

A few months ago I was eating lunch with an entrepreneur/friend and he told me his friend just bought a small candy company in Colorado. A short discussion ensued and we decided that energy candy or caffeinated candy would be a good product. Think of all the energy drinks out there, starbucks and other coffee shops, etc. I even remember a product called Water Joe.

Well, last week, while watching the Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, I met Jason Kensey — the founder of Vroom Foods. Vroom makes caffeinated candies (Buzz Bites) and mints (Foosh Mints). Jason came up with the idea while working late nights as an MBA student at Babson College. He wasn’t a big coffee drinker and needed a more effective means of getting his caffeine. Vroom was born.

BTW, it turns out that Water Joe was also created by a campus entrepreneur, this one @ Arizona State University.

Intuit, the maker of Quickbooks, has a great interest in supporting startups. Check out this community site, Jump Up, they are building and calling ‘the place to start a business.’ Of course, I happen to think a campus might be the place…. Found this while surfing over at Small Business Trends.

The Kauffman Foundation recently sponsored research that found that 25% of tech firms launched in the US are launched by immigrants. What this means is all those Chinese, India, Taiwanese, South Korean, Russia, etc. grad students over in the sciences are researching some cool stuff. The report was authored by Annalee Saxenian (whose earlier research on immigrants in Silicon Valley inspired this new study) of UC Berkeley and Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University.

Start roaming the halls of the engineering departments looking for researchers and you just might have yourself the makings of a new high tech venture on campus.

Conducted by researchers at Duke University and the University of California, at Berkeley, the study is a follow-up to a report released in January that showed that in 25.3 percent of technology and engineering companies started in the United States from 1995 to 2005, at least one key founder was foreign-born. Nationwide, these immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005. The majority of these immigrant entrepreneurs came from India, United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany.

Are you becoming an entrepreneur to make money, build something great, achieve independence, or some other reason? Interesting insights into capital and viewpoints on entrepreneurship classes and programs. According to a the Young Money survey,

According to a recent YOUNG MONEY® magazine survey entitled “Legacy in the Making”, two- thirds of young adults with an interest in entrepreneurship are focused on becoming business owners to fulfill a personal goal or to enjoy a sense of independence and accomplishment. Only 15 percent of those surveyed are motivated by higher earnings potential.

The Global Security Challenge is a business plan competition focused on homeland security technologies. The sponsors of this cool, niche competition include London School of Business, Accenture, The US Dept. of Homeland Security, and Smiths Detection. Here are the details — one of which is the entry date, June 30, 2007.

No doubt there is big money in security; campus entrepreneur Sean Gorman of George Mason’s School of Public policy was able to launch his mapping firm, FortiusOne, by initially focusing on the security market.  BTW, his dissertation eventually led to $5.4 million in VC funding.

Stanford startups, engineers, etc.. continue to come up as I do research on campus entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship programs. Here is an article from 1999 (a steep rising part of the internet boom) from BusinessWeek about Stanford undergrads being hunted by venture capitalists. Here is a nice snippet.

More recently, Stanford has supported all kinds of entrepreneurial initiatives, from classes to internships. Now in its third year, the spring ”Entrepreneur’s Challenge” business-plan contest, run by a student group, has taken on the drama of National Football League draft day. Students are invited to submit startup ideas and have them critiqued by some of the biggest venture backers in the Valley. The nominal prize is $25,000, provided by a local VC firm. But venture capitalists routinely push business cards at students whose ideas don’t even make the final cut. ”If you have a good idea, you have money available,” says Kristen D. Growney, a business school student whose ”Summit” team came up with a women-oriented E-commerce site idea that was a recent winner. She subsequently discussed financing ranging from $250,000 to $1 million with Valley venture capitalists.

Old Skool, right? Time to check out the engineering labs huh?

Check out this story on a really cool e-commerce security  startup that won the University of Wisconsin’s, G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition. The company basically gives you a fake credit card number to use online — pretty sneaky.

The business school, law school, school of engineering, and school of agriculture are all involved in this competition that has been around since 1998. Go Badgers!

Good feature on young entrepreneurs over at BusinessWeek that discusses Michael Dell, Richard Branson, and others who  were struck early by the startup bug. There is also a mention of the University of Maryland’s 5 year old Hinman Program.

While just surfing through some tags on wordpress I found Dave Fowler’s ThingsILearned.com. Seems he is helping launch a startup in Silicon Valley before heading off to work for IBM in the fall. Check out this entry that comments on using Stanford’s talented people and resource rich eco-system. From the entry

I’ve also been to Stanford twice where we recruited our friend Zain for the team. Zain is a super bright guy who’s in the middle of his PhD at Stanford under Mark Horowitz, a founder of Rambus. Zain’s hooking us up with a server on the insanely fast stanford network, the original ISP for google! Stanford is an awesome awesome place. They get tons of money from wealthy alumni and venture capital. Their president is an EE professor supposedly worth over a billion dollars. There are startup clubs, classes, and recruitment posters all over. Its an incredibly exciting place. I’m glad I decided to take my summer course there instead of online.

Drink, smoke, eat late night, don’t sleep, remain inactive… Ah, a few of the joys of being in college right? Well, according to a new study from the University of New Hampshire, college students are really unhealthy. This sounds like an opportunity to me… Perhaps offering healthy late night food or perhaps offering some consulting services to colleges and universities worried about the health of the primary customers. Or, sell lots of tasty bad food! Read the article and decide if this is an opportunity to exploit.