Entrepreneurial Nuggets | Adirondack Jack | Wave Extinguisher at Ripley’s | Cheap Lego Drones | Warby Parker Makes Public School Hip

Alibaba founder Jack Ma bought 28,000 acres of forestland in the Adirondacks for conservation purposes… While billionaire founders and CEOs conserving land in NY is not new, the fact that a Chinese innovators is there too is interesting. Read the story about Jack and his $23 million dollar buy.

Warby Parker, the hip, social impact oriented eye glass firm founded by Wharton

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Cartoon of the day 6/26/15.

students has partnered with New York City Public Schools and will provide up to 20,000 pairs of glasses to kids in need.

GMU’s Seth Robertson and Viet Tran were feature in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Cartoon of the Day for their Wave Extinguisher — it puts out fire with sound waves!

We love Parrot drones at Mason — they are fun for students to learn on. The company announced 13 new drones this week for less than $189! One with a Lego attachment!

Commonbond, an innovative student loan company started at Wharton in 2012, sold its first bonds to Wall Street investors. By targeting specific students and graduates (originally Wharton grads), the firm offers lower rates to lender and loan products with specific attributes to investors.

The Delusions of Entrepreneurs Matter | Virginia Postrel

Not only did I find an incredibly interesting piece by Virginia Postrel, In Praise of Irrational Exuberance, but it turns out that another GMU economist, John V.C. Nye, has some fascinating research and thoughts on how our modern, innovative economy can thrive, or not. (Thanks to Tim Kane at Growthology for the find). From Postrel:

Nye, now at George Mason University, argues that countries become economically stagnant when their business people become too mature and rational.

That’s what happened to Victorian Britain, he suggests, when it was surpassed by the United States and Germany. Britain had capable businessmen and good financial markets to support them. There’s no evidence that Victorian businessmen failed to invest wisely. The problem, argues Nye, is that they didn’t invest unwisely.

The odds of any given venture succeeding are, of course, low. But it’s rational to invest $1 million in a business that will fail nine out of ten times, as long as the tenth time will earn least $10 million. Nye is talking about irrational bets: investing $1 million on a one in 50 shot of $10 million. An entrepreneurial culture encourages those crazy bets as well, and a few startups get lucky. We should, Nye suggests, think of “the entrepreneur as the valiant, but overoptimistic investor rather than the heroic seer.”

Entrepreneurship is not, in this view, a rational risk calculation. It is, as critics of capitalism sometimes charge, a bit like gambling. The few big winners are usually people who shouldn’t have bet their time, money, and ideas. They overestimated their chances of striking it rich. But they beat the odds — to everyone’s benefit. These “lucky fools” create new sources of wealth, new jobs, new industries offering less-risky opportunities, and new technologies that improve life. Society plays the role of the casino, enjoying the spillover benefits from foolish bets.

Good stuff. The entire piece is well worth reading and cites some interesting sounding work from Sociologist Colin Campbell.

via In Praise of Irrational Exuberance | Big Questions Online.

Startup Scramble DC University Challenge

Found out about this great opportunity from some of the people working on social entrepreneurship at GMU and Ashoka (read about the Campus Changemakers program at GMU here). The StartUp Scramble D.C. University Challenge takes place Jan 29th- 31st. According to the event site, “Entrepreneurial college students together in a weekend-long start-up event, work to pitch, plan, and launch sustainable ventures to improve society, which they will lead over the next year and beyond. ”

There will be great speakers, working sessions, and a pitch contest and it will likely be a pretty intense entrepreneurial experience as the participants look to get something on the up and running and making a social impact within a year. Winners receive funding and incubation services. Great networking is likely to take place. Looking forward to learning more and seeing what comes out of this.

Luxury Dorms Selling Out

Read anyone covering the state of higher education (or emails like those I receive from administrators at

Image property/courtesy of the Chicago Tribune Company

major schools) and you will hear about soaring costs and dwindling budgets. Much of it is true (though its a continual storyline in higher education), but there are always pockets of demand, growth and expansion to be found on the college campus.

Came across an article from the Chicago Tribune (via @SusanBeacham ) highlighting the growth of luxury dorms (often including maid service, tanning beds, and flat screens) and the huge demand that is meeting their high prices. The piece, by Sara Olkon, highlights dorms coming online across the country (BU and Purdue to ASU).

Tom Cheesman, architect of Purdue’s $52 million First Street Towers, said the residence hall is “essentially a hotel.” He said it is especially attractive to “helicopter parents who want to send their son or daughter to college campus but give them all the luxuries of home.”

The demand for more posh undergraduate housing is growing across college campuses, contradicting general economic trends toward simplifying and cutting back.

This fall, Boston University unveiled a 960-bed luxury dorm overlooking the Charles River that comes with walk-in closets, large private bathrooms and washers and dryers programmed to alert students via computer when their sheets are dry. Rooms in the elegant tower also run about $5,000 more than a traditional room.

“Students want beauty, and they should have beauty,” Kenneth Elmore, BU’s dean of students, told the Boston Globe.

Sounds like there ripe opportunities for many to be found in campus housing and services. In the four years that I have been on the George Mason University campus I have seen countless dorms being built and lots of amenities (from coffee shops and health club like facilities) spring up. The on campus population continue to rise.

FamilyFantasySports.com — GMU

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.

Samee Desai’s Dissertation Defense: Destructive Entrepreneurship

Today I hauled myself out to the main campus of George Mason (in Fairfax Virginia). What got me to battle the beltway? My friend and colleague Sameeksha Desai was defending her dissertation.

She is a serious and innovative researcher who I have blogged about in the the past. Her work covers post conflict entrepreneurship (think Rwanda, etc) and begins to define/explore a concept called ‘destructive entrepreneurship.’

This term appears to come from Baumol’s 1990 work, Good Entrepreneurship, Bad Entrepreneurship, and Destructive Entrepreneurship. While Baumol didn’t delve to deeply into the destructive, Samee has!

Destructive entrepreneurship is anything that destroys economic capacity; whether it be land, labor, or capital.

So, for example, in an unstable post-conflict environment entrepreneurs will make decisions that are often short-term in nature (b/c the future is very unclear) but cost the economy greatly in the long run. The policy implications of this were discussed in Samee’s work.

While her work focuses on post-conflict entrepreneurship, the destructive nature of much of it is similar to what we see in many urban cores in the US. This idea was discussed extensively after Samee’s presentation and its clear that her work can shed a lot of light on traditional urban issues.

Her work is fascinating and I am trying to find some things to post.

Mining ‘Me Too’ Univ. Admins for Green

After the internet collapsed in 2001, I returned to b-school at U of C and started reading about the CA gold rush; trying to make sense of the bust. One lesson I learned was that when rushes/booms are on, a sure fire way of making money was ‘mining the miners.’ My favorite from the gold rush days is Levi Strauss and his jeans for miners.

‘Mining the miners’ is still a great strategy and is a mainstay in the campus market. Today I received an email that reminded me of that. George Mason University (where I am completing a PhD part time) sent me, and I assume, the entire gmu.edu list, an email that says the following:

Mason’s President Alan Merten has joined together with several hundred other college and university presidents in signing a commitment to reduce university emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. With the goal of achieving climate neutrality, this pledge means that Mason will be taking steps to ultimately eliminate or offset CO2 emissions from all sources associated with university operations including electricity, heating, commuting, and air travel.

Please click on this link to take a 5-7 minute survey that will help focus this initiative.

To access the survey please click here. If the survey does not open automatically, please copy and paste the following link to your internet browser’s address bar:

http://studentvoice.com/p/?uuid=62fdba8142a24371b8d14a37231777b1

“Several Hundred”!!! Clearly, College & University Presidents are joining the ‘green rush’ and about to spend billions on all kinds of ‘green’ products. Above is a simple survey that someone is getting paid on, but think of all the other opportunities; lightbulbs, recycling bins, packaging products, heating/electrical systems, educational modules, marketing campaigns, construction materials, local/organic food services, etc…..

So, not only is it the idealistic youth who can be mined in this green rush (see here and here), but also the big wigs controlling mountains of money around campus. So go out and get some of that green cheddar!

Social Venture Campus Entrepreneur — UVA, George Mason

Received this email from a social venture campus entrepreneur, Dean Davastar:

I’m an MBA student myself at Mason and I’ve been running a social entrepreneurship firm for about two years and am about to officially finalize opening a branch at George Mason University. We started at UVA and we work towards global prosperity and multicultural understanding. We’re called Komak. You can find us at komakus.com.

BTW, komak means ‘help’ in Farsi.

My New Startup…

I am not ready provide details, but I plan on launching a new company this year in late Q1 or early Q2… It will be an online based business and is not directly related to my research or what I have found on campus over the past 3 years of part-time enrollment in the PhD program at GMU. That said, the campus and its ecosystem have played a role in my work since spotting this new opportunity — ie meeting with other students and profs for feedback.

I will be blogging about the new company on this site and sharing some of the challenges I am facing and may even ask for some help from time to time. Moreover, I will highlight what role the campus (and any campuses) play in the development of this new firm.

Finally, I admit, it is a probably a bit self-centered to study yourself (ie I study campus entrepreneurship and am a campus entrepreneur), but I am not the first (ie every psychologist I have ever met, people who study their own religious or ethnic group or country or state, etc.) and will not be the last. I just hope others can learn from my efforts.