Campus Entrepreneurship

The textbook market on campuses has always appeared distorted. Hundreds of dollars on books that students often barely touch. Frequent new editions, ‘forcing’ waves of students to purchase new, rather than used, books.

John Hechinger of the WSJ has an interesting article on the rise of custom textbooks and the toll it is taking on students/parents. Basically, specific departments at specific schools are having custom versions of ’standard’ books printed and assigning them to their students (keeping them out of the increasingly global market in textbooks). Moreover, in many cases, the books cannot be sold back and resold on the used market.

The point of sharing the article is to highlight a truth about campus entrepreneurship: EVERYONE IS DOING IT. The article highlights english and other social science departments following this strategy. So students should always keep an entrepreneurial perspective when on campus.

Read below for some excerpts from the article. (more…)

Our friends over at StudentBusinesses.com have started a new, weekly feature on their blog — a column profiling some of the great businesses and entrepreneurs that they have as part of their site. Below is an excerpt from their inaugural column. It features two new ventures, ThinkGum LLC and EasyBib.

Founded by a PhD candidate at Stanford Medical School, Think Gum LLC has created a chewing gum that they believe can improve your energy level and enhance your memory:

Think Gum LLC is a wholesale chewing gum company that supplies its customers with chewing gum designed to boost mental performance. The candy-coated, sugar-free chewing gum is flavored and scented with rosemary, peppermint and other brain-boosting herbs and herbal extracts.

As you write your next paper with the help of some Think Gum, you may also want to turn to EasyBib, a startup founded by two students who were in high school at the time (who subsequently attended Northwestern and Brown):

EasyBib.com was developed in 2001 as a solution to expedite the bibliographic process. Students enter information and EasyBib formats that data into a works cited list ready to print. Today, EasyBib is the number one software in its niche. Searching “bibliography” in Google will return EasyBib as the number one result. EasyBib receives over 20 million page views monthly during the school year, and is used by the majority of students throughout the US.

EasyBib’s current popularity and search engine position are great, but their biggest asset is an extremely useful and simple product that caters to a large niche.

Next Saturday (April 26th) I will be attending the finals of the Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition. The event is put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington-Baltimore and Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. This competition is open to students at any university or college in DC, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware. (Pretty interesting that the Boston based MIT plays a prominent role).

The 20 semi-finalists represent an incredible cross-section of universities and students and is worth checking out. I am really excited to see some of them present this coming weekend. BTW, the finals are open to the public.

A few months ago I came across a company called FantasyCongress.com. They have taken the idea of fantasy sports and applied it to politics. Looks pretty cool. It turns out, the founders came up with the idea when they were in school at Claremont McKenna College in California studying politics. From their site,

Andrew was obsessed with politics and thought that people could play some kind of “Fantasy Congress” to compete with colleagues and friends, populating their teams with real Senators and Representatives. Combining this premise with the strategy of line-up substitutions and trades, Andrew envisioned a game of knowledge and skill that anyone could play while also participating in national politics.

Andrew Lee (referenced above) and a team from CMC have been working on this project/venture since 2006 and are now located in DC. They have mini-games and two major games out; Fantasy Congress and KingMaker (a presidential election game in partnership with Politico.com).

Quite simply, there is almost unlimited opportunity for entrepreneurship on campus. That is one of the reasons that we are seeing more and more campus entrepreneurs. From loans and housing to food and clothing, campus entrepreneurs have entered many of these markets.

The Global Higher Ed blog has a fascinating posting that explains that the campus market has kept the Washington Post (and its writers) afloat over the past 10 years. According to GlobalHigherEd the WAPO just won 6 Pulitzers, but the real story is who paid for it. From the blog

Washington Post Company is being bankrolled by Kaplan, by far the Post’s most profitable unit. Kaplan, for those of you who do not know, is a global education company, with approximately 50% of its revenue derived from the higher ed sector. It serves over 1,000,000 students per year in over 600 locations, and employs 27,000 staff according to Kaplan sources.

GlobalHigherEd also includes a powerful quote from the WAPO’s 2007 Annual Report:

Fifteen years ago we were accurately described as a media company. Over that time Kaplan has grown into a powerhouse, a multidisciplinary and increasingly international education business unlike any other education company in the world. For the last six months of the year, Kaplan’s revenue was almost half of the company’s, at 49%. Kaplan will continue to grow stronger in 2008. The Washington Post Company is now an education and media company (this isn’t “re-branding”; it’s reality), and the accent on education could get a lot stronger in the future.

The point, of all of this, is that the campus as market is incredibly profitable and big, established firms (such as WAPO) are heading there to make up for their slowing/declining businesses. Campus entrepreneurs are more agile and on campus and should have a great chance to beat out larger players.

(this post was written while sitting in a 9 person PhD seminar on qualitative research methods — sorry Prof W.)

Mizzou Tiger Cary Silverman has experienced his fair share of ups and downs in launching GradeGenie.com. The goal of the site is to provide an ‘easy way to share class notes, study guides, and other useful class information.’ Seems to make sense. (Here is a story from local Columbia, MO news station KOMU)

Some background on his first launch of GradeGenie.com:

Enlisting the help of his fraternity brothers on the campus of the University of Missouri – Columbia, they blanketed the campus with advertisements for the website designed to allow college students to post their class notes, old papers and old homework online.

“I didn’t really think much of it until I received an urgent phone call from the police chief and adjutant that morning,” noted Cary. “Apparently when the dean of students had to tear hole in the flyers covering the door to his office just to be able to unlock it, that prompted a call to the police chief.”

That was just the beginning. Covering the famous columns on campus with flyers up to 20 feet off the ground, GradeGenie got its first hard lesson in doing business with college administrators. The IT department noticed too, as visitors to the site started pushing limits on the campus servers.

After being told to shutdown or face possible expulsion or legal problems, Cary decided that he needed to learn a few things about doing business within the boundaries of college administration’s rules.

Interesting that questions of launching firms, advertising, and using school IT infrastructure is still confusing to students, administrators, and staff. Universities must get a handle on this and make it clear to campus entrepreneurs what is available to them.

Will short-sided, university administrators continue to ignore the reality of today’s entrepreneurial students and block them out of ignorance and malice?

When it comes to bplan comps, we almost always hear about the winners. This is good old selection bias. Tiffany Petrosino over at the Yale Daily News has a great piece on some Yale entrepreneurs who lost in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society Competition.

After losing in the competition,

Robert Henehan ’10 and Vincent McPhillip ’10 did not give up on their dream of building a T-shirt design company. Instead, they took their business proposal to another group — the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute — an institutional organization designed to support new student ventures and help keep them in the area. A month later, McPhillip said, they had procured a $5,000 living stipend through the YEI Summer Fellowship Program to stay in New Haven over the summer to develop the Catalyst Company, their startup T-shirt design company. (more…)

I read this post, ‘Banking off the Election: Entrepreneurs Get Creative,’ over at the WSJ’s Independent Street Blog. Its about companies producing ‘election’ specific products to try to grow. While the post focuses on high tech offerings, campus entrepreneurs have made T-Shirts, thrown parties, and formed firms in order to exploit events — from homecoming football games to traditional holidays like Valentine’s Day — for years.

There is no doubt many campus entrepreneurs are making money on the nominating process and will go after even more during the election. College students are politically passionate and they have pockets full of money and plastic. Are any of you out there taking runs at the election to make money for your campus ventures?

I found the pitch for MyFilmU.com over at Vator.tv. It is pretty interesting. It appears the company takes scripts/pitches from students at various schools. Then picks some to produce. Here is a sample of an upcoming show at Montana State University — Textbook. From their about us page.

Founded in May 2006, MyFilmU.com is an online broadcast network for college students by college students. MyFilmU will provide the next generation of filmmakers with the incentives, resources, and platform necessary to generate on-campus series’ within a large cross-section of colleges and universities, creating a rich set of programming by some of the world’s best young creative talent.

I received an email last week from a PR firm representing CollegeTonight.com. I don’t know the site, but it was started by two Emory students. From the email:

What does it take to start a business while in college? While many students are juggling social lives, parties, papers and exams (and not always in the right order), the founders of CollegeTonight.com have investors, business plans and vast marketing agendas keeping them up at night. Meet Zach Suchin and Jason Schutzbank. While still students at Emory University (Jason is a currently Junior and only 21), these two friends launched a social network that caught on fast and quickly became the must click site for what to do on campus (and off). After another two years of development, CollegeTonight is now a publicly-traded company and serves as a “social sidekick” at over 110 college campuses, encouraging its members to GET ON, GET UP, GET OUT.