Campus Entrepreneurship

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.

Pretty interesting piece in today’s WSJ by Riva Richmond about successful and unsuccessful Facebook applications. At this point, Zuckerberg and Facebook are the kingpins of the campus entrepreneur space. While Gates, Brin, Dell, Smith, and others have far more money and reach, Zuck/Fbook are as hot as a pistol.

Its amazing how many other businesses have formed and are forming around Facebook. A ‘new’ industry or cluster in the way that the iPod opened incredible opportunity to other firms and to customers. Clusters are huge in economic growth theory (see Porter), but they are usually geographically (and industry) centered.

The facebook and ipod clusters center around a specific product/lifestyle. I will have to think about this a bit and whether and how these types of clusters — distributed clusters if you will — differ from more traditional clusters.

From the piece (which is worth reading and is full of great cases and stats) by Richmond:

In May 2007, Facebook Inc. invited software developers to create free software programs that members of the social-networking site could use to entertain and inform each other.

A year later, it’s time to ask: What has worked and what hasn’t?

There’s plenty to pick from. So far, more than 250,000 developers have requested the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s tools for building such applications. And more than 24,000 programs have been created, allowing Facebook users to send each other virtual hugs, share movie picks and play games, among other things. (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.

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.

Nice article by Behance Network founder Scott Belsky of Harvard Business School. Its not often that we get first hand accounts from entrepreneurs like this article in the Harbus (the student weekly at Harvard Business School). There is a lot to learn from active campus entrepreneurs like Belsky. Here are some selections from his piece:

Soon after I got accepted to HBS, I left a job at Goldman Sachs with the intention to travel, write, and bask in idea-generation for a few months prior to moving to Boston. Instead, I became obsessed with one idea in particular and inadvertently started a business prior to starting business school. The two years that followed were a roller-coaster of challenges in building a start-up team, developing, launching, and marketing a series of products…and showing up to class on time.

“Behance” was founded after about 100 interviews I conducted with creative teams and individuals - people in large agencies/companies, small design firms, and talented freelancers. I was fascinated by the inefficiencies in the marketplace, notably how Creatives build professional networks and how companies find and hire creative talent. I realized that the creative community was extremely disorganized and inefficient. The problems existed both on a micro-level (low personal productivity and brainstorms were often a waste of time), and a macro-level (people relied on old rolodexes or MySpace pages, and there was no “professional” online platform for Creatives).

The summer before HBS was spent developing an outline of a company that would boost productivity and help organize the creative community. The first few hundred dollars were spent on the trademark “Make Ideas Happen,” and then it started: I was scheduling meetings, and telling enough people about the concept that I suddenly felt accountable! With a small round of funding from friends and family, I hired a Chief of Design to focus full-time on developing the business, just three weeks before I packed my bags for Boston. (more…)

I saw entrepreneur Gauri Nanda on Donny Deutsch a long time ago (maybe up to a year ago). While pursuing graduate work at the MIT media lab, Nanda created an alarm clock that would actually get the user up and out of bed.

For some people, this is not a problem, they get up with their alarm or reveille or some other standard waking instrument. For others, like me, and Nanda, perpetual snoozes or sleeping right through an alarm is more the norm.

Nanda created Clocky — an alarm clock that propels itself around room when it ‘goes off’ at the set time. It forces the users to get out of bed in order to hit the snooze button. The assumption being that if one gets out of bed they might stay out.

Watch the video below and see if you hear a little R2D2 in Clocky. Buy it from Nanda Home (her company is now making chrome Clocky’s and some pretty cool laptop bags). YouTube video below. (more…)

Given that we live in an economy driven by knowledge (see Drucker, Florida, or Bell), campuses (where knowledge is created and disseminated) have become vital nodes for economic growth and new venture development.

The actions, individuals, and companies we have seen over the past 50 years and the quickening pace of campus entrepreneurship over the past decade or so confirms this.

This is one of the core reasons that we are investigating campus entrepreneurship: there are lots of smart, talented people in and around campuses - from razor sharp 18 year olds to award winning, socially awkward professors.

A mentioned often on this blog, professors are some of the greatest storehouses of knowledge around universities/campuses and students should view them as such.

In the past 4 years I have worked with professors as advisers (at of U of C) and also as full partners (at GMU). I also have a handful of friends and talked with many research subjects who have partnered with faculty members on new ventures.

Entrepreneur.com has an interesting new piece titled ‘Teachers Pet’ (h/t Kevin Clark of GMU) that offers some insight and examples on students partnering up with professors new ventures. (btw, click the image above to watch Van Halen’s classic Hot for Teacher video) From the piece: (more…)

When I first began thinking about building my new venture, I knew I would need a basic content management system. Two open source tools were recommended by various people — Joomla and Drupal.

We ended up going with Joomla (the dev should be done soon), but I just learned today that Drupal was created by Dries Buytaert when he was in college (at Antwerp) and he continued to work on it while completing his PhD in engineering at Ghent University. His venture backed firm Acquia sells commercial products and services related to Drupal.

His blog looks pretty cool and it becomes quickly apparent that Dries (a native of Belgium) is very sharp and involved in some quite interesting things. BTW, it appears that Google is dumping some programming fellowship money into Drupal development - that must make Dries feel pretty good. (A venture launched by a group of campus entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley supporting a venture startup by a campus entrepreneur in Europe.) Nice!