Campus Entrepreneurship

Found out about this company on the Style page of the WSJ. Storeadore.com is a website that will help people find great shopping when they are visiting other cities. According to the Ins and Outs column by Jennifer Sarnow and Ray Smith,

The site, launched earlier this year by avid shoppers Meredith Barnett and Cristina Miller, who roomed together at Harvard Business School, profiles boutiques in New York City, the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as online stores. San Francisco will be added in August and Miami, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta in the fall.

Here is their website and here is a little bit about them.

Fascinating article by Jonathan Cheng about a Hong Kong based entrepreneur, Lam Sai-wing, in the gold business who created a gold toilet and scored a marketing coup for this business. Something outrageous like a gold toilet (and an entire golden palace) helped grow Lams business by differentiating it from others in the retail jewelry market.

Those odd prices (ie $3.6 at Wal-Mart (which they may be dumping) were created by Sam Walton to grab attention — as did the elephants and other things that Walton used to build the base of small town Wal-Marts that would eventually become the world’s largest retailer. Walton had to do something drastic as he entered the retail market full of new competitors. Wal-Mart, Target, and KMart were all founded in 1959 — and these are just the large, successes that prospered.

I believe that any business, regardless of industry or customer base, can use a golden toilet.

From the article,

He has spent the past decade constructing a palace of gold, decked out in six tons of the precious metal. In recent years, the palace has become an attraction mainland Chinese tour groups couldn’t miss, and a boon for Mr. Lam’s retail jewelry business…

As far as Mr. Lam is concerned, the golden toilet is more than a Guinness World Record-certified, 24-karat, fully functional flushable throne.

Mr. Lam, a former goldsmith, came up with the toilet gimmick in 2001 as he was pushing his jewelry-manufacturing business into a fierce retail market…

As a boy growing up in Cultural Revolution-era China, Mr. Lam, now 53 years old, was obsessed with gold. He says he found himself transfixed with one sentence in Vladimir Lenin’s writing: “When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.”

Lenin’s words alluded to a socialist utopia with no need for money, but Mr. Lam read them as an indictment of the poverty-stricken existence he found himself in. He rarely had meat to eat, and after he turned 7, Mr. Lam struggled to help his single mother and six siblings sell bananas and peanuts.

Just found out about The Next Tycoon — a reality show business competition that will be filming in Atlanta in August and will air in September. (the name is a little ‘Trumpish’ for me, but I am just one)

The show/contest is being produced by an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, W. Cliff Oxford whose firm spent three years on the Inc. 500 list. (he also endows the Executive MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business.) From the article at Marketwatch.com:

The Next Tycoon is a new reality show that will give entrepreneurs from all ages and backgrounds a chance to present their business ideas to key decision makers and outstanding business and media leaders. The show will be a valuable educational resource as well as a fun opportunity for all participants to share and discuss new, exciting business plans…

While the competition is based and will be filmed in Atlanta, it isn’t limited to the region. Anyone who applies through the Web site, www.thenexttycoon.biz, is eligible as long as he or she has a plan for a viable business venture to present onsite.

It appears there is an $85 fee to apply, but that sounds more like a weeder fee more than anything else. This is another example of the various models and actors experimenting and extending the business plan competition.

Check out the site, there are some interesting things in there. For example, there will be at least 100 people presenting in preliminary rounds and they are not allowed to use ppt. Information on participating can be found here. Let us know if you apply.

Just received an email from the NDE (National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship) and they have a great 2008 reading list on entrepreneurship. They did include Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City; a book whose entire life-cycle I witnessed up close while I worked with Richard. It was an amazing process. Here are some (4) reviews from NDE’s list — which is well worth checking out:

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury Press, 2007)

You may be wondering how a book about Vermeer makes it on a listing of books about innovation and entrepreneurship. In this fascinating book, Brook uses the subjects and objects of Vermeer’s paintings to provide history of the development of global capitalism. Vermeer’s rise paralleled the Netherlands’ rise as a major economic force, and Brook tells these stories by tracing the emergence of trade in new products like tobacco, porcelain, and furs.

Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital

Spencer E. Ante (Harvard Business School Press, 200

It often seems like the venture capital industry has been around forever, but, in reality, someone had to invent it. That someone was French business professor and investor Georges Doriot, and his achievement occurred not too long ago. Beginning in 1946, Doriot and his firm, American Research and Development Corporation, virtually created the modern model of the venture capital firm. This well-written biography examines Doriot’s life and his impact on the world of business finance. (more…)

Yes. This campus venture is my startup! The one I have blogged about periodically. This week, we officially launched our new site:

FamilyFantasySports.com, the first fantasy sports site dedicated to family play.

Our inaugural, free leagues will coincide with the NFL’s 2008 regular season. Our leagues will be powered by STATS LLC, the world leader in sports information.

I have been working on this new venture over the past 6 months and am happy to have reached this milestone. Here is our press release (via Yahoo! news) and below is a blurb about us from Rotonation.com (a leading fantasy sports news blog).

With fantasy sports becoming more and more part of the mainstream, it is only logical for a family-orientated fantasy sports site to creep onto the horizon. Family Fantasy Sports launched today hoping to corner this new niche in the fantasy sports industry.

Further, the site puts a strong emphasis on education, health, and wellness: All prizes are orientated towards these goals. They also have a kids’ corner and grown-ups’ blog geared toward these topics.

Feel free to check out the site, sign up for our newsletter, and send me any and all feedback. I will share some of our successes and struggles on this blog as we ramp up over the next few months and execute on our strategy. Thanks.

The Globe and Mail in Toronto (where my friend Richard Florida offers his blog) has a great column by Michael Parkatti and Michael Marrone, current Y Combinator participants. For a bit on Y Combinator click here.

The one of the reason’s that we follow Y Combinator is because it is on the leading edge of new funding/advising models. The column is enjoyable and provides some insights into the paths of two young entrepreneurs (which include much time on campus). They will be writing columns each week during their three months in Cambridge at Y Combinator.

From their column:

For those unfamiliar with Y Combinator, it can be roughly described as a Venture Capital firm that provides seed funding for startups. However, their obvious corollaries with the traditional venture capital industry end there.

From a first-time founder’s perspective, Y Combinator is exactly the sort of program that provides the means to achieve our ambitions. On top of the seed investment, they also provide many of the intangibles (product advice, connections, ready access to hundreds of potential investors) that first-time entrepreneurs usually lack. In exchange they receive a small percentage of equity from each founding team. For the current three-month session (June to August), 22 teams have converged on the Boston area.

For two Canadian guys from St. Albert, Alberta and Belleville, Ontario who are long on ideas and short on connections, it’s exactly the opportunity we were looking for to take our startup to the next level.

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.

A group of campus entrepreneurs that we don’t talk about very frequently are those whose product or services comes from the sector we traditionally call arts and culture. Much of my work with Richard Florida analyzes the intersection of artistic talent/institutions and sustainable economic growth.

Campuses have long been a place where artistic endeavors flourish and often lead the rest of society and the economy. From bands and fashion to food and computer design, campuses are a hotbed of innovation and activity.

I started thinking about this the other day while spending time with my brother in law, Zach. When he was at the University of Wisconsin Madison he founded a record label named Halftooth Records. He spent four years on the business and eventually sold his shares and moved to other pursuits. Here is an old school article from The Badger Herald on Zach, his partner, and their label.

Yet since the 2001 inception of the rising star label Halftooth Records, founding producers David Schrager and Zach Gordon have been attacking them all. From their first encounter in Madison, the record company was an inevitable endeavor. Gordon brought an enthusiasm for a broad range of musical genres and a concern with the current trajectory of the specific hip-hop culture. Schrager was industry-savvy from interning with the likes of Cornerstone Productions and working as a college representative with The Fader magazine.

The culmination of their abilities as producers is first demonstrated in the showcase album You Don’t Know the Half.

Do artists on campus traditionally view their craft as a business? Do they write business plans and marketing plans or raise capital?

I was fortunate to grow up in Chicago in the 80s/90s and was even more fortunate that my mom’s business partner’s husband (got that?) was an executive with the Chicago Bulls. We got to go to lots of playoffs games and see the Bull’s win 6 NBA crowns. Everyone in Chicago wanted to ‘Be Like Mike.’

According to Vauhini Vara of the WSJ, lots of people at Harvard now want to ‘Be Like Mark.’ Mark Zuckerberg that is, as in Facebook. Vara has a nice piece that explains that Harvard is new to the entrepreneurship game (compared to MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, etc.) and that Facebook’s explosion has led to a cultural change on campus.

The piece profiles a handful of Harvard campus entrepreneurs and their ventures and explains how the school has had to revisit many policies regarding student run businesses over the past few years. From the piece, (more…)

I had a great conversation with Travis May, one of the founders of StudentBusinesses.com. Travis is currently a junior at Harvard and has been involved with entrepreneurship since entering the school.

Travis and his parter, Vivek G. Ramaswamy, who graduated last June, discovered their shared interest in entrepreneurship while sitting on a bus in china during a spring break trip. (only at Harvard?)

Their site and businesses is dedicated to helping student entrepreneurs network and get feedback from one another as well as interacting with service providers such as investors and law firms.

Their site is worth checking out and joining if you are a student with a business or a service provider looking to get involved with some of the great activities taking place on campuses. From their site,

StudentBusinesses.com is a selective resource that connects the most promising student entrepreneurs in the U.S. with resources to help them succeed. By using the site, promising student entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to (1) publicize their businesses and ideas to potential advisors, investors, and professional service-providers, (2) network with other promising student entrepreneurs, (3) participate in discussions on a wide range of promising startup ideas, and (4) access valuable educational content about entrepreneurship. The site is by-invitation and by-application only in order to ensure a high standard of membership.

Broadly, there are two groups of people who will benefit from using StudentBusinesses.com: (1) entrepreneurial university students, and (2) experienced individuals who seek to access these students. Student members of the site may join “In the Game” if they currently are part of a startup, or they may join “On the Roster” if they are entrepreneurially-minded but are not currently part of a startup. Students may join the site at no cost. Customers of the site will be comprised of experienced professionals, investors, and advisors who seek to tap into the student entrepreneurship community; all customers must fulfill the criteria of accredited investor status. Both students and customers may only join the site if they are invited, or if they apply through the site and are accepted.

I will be posting more on StudentBusinesses.com and will share some of the profiles of some of their members companies. Travis is a smart guy with a great new business targeting a market (campus entrepreneurs) that is only going to continue to grow.

Years ago, after my internet experiences with RollingStone.com and Machineweb.com, I read a lot about the California Gold Rush. I remember seeing a quote somewhere that said the secret to getting rich during the Gold Rush was to “Mine the Miners.” StudentBusinesses.com looks to be doing that while making the ‘miners’ happy, just as ‘49ers’ were happy with their Levi’s jeans and other Harvard students are happy with Facebook.