Campus Entrepreneurship

Nice article at the Rapid Growth site profiling campus entrepreneur and Grand Valley State University student Joe Pohlen. According to the article by Angela Harris,

He eagerly participated in the first-ever Elevator Pitch Competition sponsored by the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization.

Pohlen pitched the idea of purchasing residential single homes and renting them out to college students in front of 13,000 people in attendance, including the founders of Jimmy Johns, Ubid.com, and Overstock.com. He had 90 seconds to pitch the idea, similar to getting in the elevator with someone important and having that brief time to plead your case.

The performance impressed the judges. Pohlen took fourth place and $1,000. At the time, he had already established Valley Properties LLC and owned one house. So he invested the winnings in the real estate business. Today, he owns and rents a total of seven houses.

Sam Zell, aka The Grave Dancer, started buying and managing homes in Ann Arbor while he was a student and went on to become the greatest real estate investor in America (not some PR stuntman like Trump). Heres a bit of info on the Grave Dancer.

Shelly Banjo of the WSJ offers a nice piece on choosing partners for your new business. It is something many of us go through (I am just finalizing terms with a partner in my new venture). This article doesn’t answer all the questions and there are a million permutations, but it has some solids. Think Gates-Ballmer, Brin-Page, Cuban-Wagner, Hewlett-Packard, Yang-Filo, etc.

Sign an Agreement
Once the decision is made to start a business together, it’s vital to create a partnership agreement with help from a lawyer and an accountant. “Any partnership that operates without a written agreement is simply playing Russian roulette,” says Leslie D. Corwin, chairman of the litigation business disputes group at international law firm Greenberg Traurig, based in Miami.

Shane’s research (which was highlighted here) shows that firms founded by partners have higher rates of survivorship (meaning success), so having a partner appears to bring benefits. Moreover, there are a lot of difficult times during the launch of a new firm and having someone else battling by your side is a good thing.

In my work with Richard Florida we often discuss the fact that all human beings are creative. The trick is finding the right environment and tools to free their creativity; this benefits that person, society, and the economy.

I found an interesting post over at the Freakonomics Blog that touches on the above concept. Its tells of a the guy who stocks soda in the cafeteria at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. From the post by Stephen J. Dubner:

(picture from Dubner — likely taken with an iPhone)

As it turned out, the man responsible for the display was standing nearby, and we fell to chatting. His name is Derek (if I remember correctly). He is in late middle age, grew up in Hyde Park, and is himself an artist. When I mentioned Mondrian, he smiled, but said it was really Warhol that he was going for with the soda display.

It was fun to talk with someone who took such pride and interest in a work task that many people would not consider worthy of pride and interest. (Alas, Derek wasn’t interested in being photographed with his work.)

When I attended the U of C, the school was in a set of gorgeous, but old buildings in the center of campus — our cafeteria couldn’t have held Sierra Mist, Sprite, and Sprite Zero (is that what that middle beverage is?). (Here is a tour of the new buildings — which I have not yet visited)

The author and many of the people who make comments on the Freakonimics blog talked about pride as the motivator of this act. Perhaps it is not so much pride as the creative person being selfish and proactive and using their environment (with its constraints and assets) to flex their creativity. This to me, this is the bigger story here: any person can be creative within their environment. Entrepreneurs, who are often resource constrained, should remember this as they face challenges both big and small.