Entrepreneurship and the University; reflections and observations on the campus frontier
Saw a tweet today regarding the relaunch of the Dingman Center Website. Check out their calendar, they have a lot going on.
Also, noticed that they released a Cupid’s Cup video about one month ago. Of course it features Maryland Alumn / Under Armour founder Kevin Plank.
Cupid’s Cup from University of Maryland on Vimeo.
My regular readers know that I have been research student entrepreneurs and various other elements of entrepreneurship on campus for a number of years. Often times looking at cases of students and their firms.
I am pleased to let you all know that I have a new blog focused on one particular case of a student launching a high impact, high growth venture from the campus. The case is Kevin Plank, his company is
Under Armour, and he conceived of, launched, and initially funded the firm while he was a student-athlete at the University of Maryland. I sometimes like to refer to Under Armour as Plank’s House.
The new blog is called Under Armour Files and it is dedicated to exploring and understanding the story of Kevin Plank, the University of Maryland and Under Armour Inc. Hope you all check it out and let me know what you think. All feedback will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Great news continuing to come out of Legal River, a firm launched by MBA students at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. This past week in partnership with General Counsel, P.C., Legal River released two new products for entrepreneurs: a Terms of Service Generator and a Privacy Policy Generator. From the entry by NY Times and Venture Beat contributor Nadia Majid:
Legal River’s tools are meant to keep costs low for entrepreneurs as they set up a business; typical terms of service documents can otherwise cost thousands of dollars. An entrepreneur only needs to fill in some basic information, such as the name of the company, information the company receives from a customer (for the privacy policy), and business structure (for the terms of service). The appropriate document is returned to the user online almost immediately, along with a version in HTML code, and the relevant policy is also emailed to the email address provided. Both tools are hosted on Legal River’s site and were developed by General Counsel, P.C.
“Calling all University of Maryland student entrepreneurs and recent graduates! Do you own and run your own business? Do you think YOU are one of the best UM entrepreneurs? Tell your story to the whole 
University and to one of UM’s most successful entrepreneurs, Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour. If you convince Kevin that you are the best, in addition to a great connection to Kevin and other prominent alums, you will take home the Cupid’s Cup, an annual award to the best UM student entrepreneur, and $15K in cash!” — from UMD.
I am fortunate to live near UMD and visit their great b-school periodically. I recently attended one of their Pitch Dingman contests (a weekly event for students to pitch new ventures; the end of month session awards $2500) and will be posting on the event later this week. They have put a lot of thought and time into building an entrepreneurial eco-system and there is much to gain for campus entrepreneurs in College Park, MD.
Check out the Cupid’s Cup Website to see how an entrepreneurial business school puts it together.
Professional football startup league UFL, has announced that the owner of the NY franchise is Bill Mayer, former Professor and Dean of the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
According to the email I received from the UFL yesterday:
With over 35 years in private equity investing, Mayer has spent over 20 years at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse). While with First Boston, he held numerous management positions including President and Chief Executive Officer and served as Chairman of First Boston’s Investment Committee for eight years. Mayer was a Professor and Dean of the College of Business at the University of Maryland from 1992 through 1996.
As we have discussed in the past, the Smith School is one of the most entrepreneurial business schools out there so it is not a surprising to see a former Professor/Dean taking a leadership role in the startup UFL — especially in the very important NY market.
BTW, my football startup, FamilyFantasySports.com, has just relaunched its site. Check it out and let me know what you think — you can follow us @familyfantasy.
Double BTW, the UFL is teaming up with fast growing cable channel Versus (h/t BizofFootball).
A few weeks back I was fortunate enough to meet Ben Hatten, one of the founders of LegalRiver.com, a marketplace for lawyers and small businesses. The three founders met at the Maryland’s Smith School of
Business. Not only have they taken great advantage of what Smith offers (from business planning courses to a winter break accelerator program at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship).
Legal River is currently participating in the Launchbox Digital accelerator in Washington DC. Today Legal River issued press release introducing their services to the marketplace. For any small business or new venture, finding a lawyer that can complete non-standard request is difficult to say the least. We have run into the problem often with FamilyFantasySports.com. BTW, you can follow LegalRiver.com on Twitter.com/legalriver. Here is the Press Release:
“Washington D.C. — June 1, 2009 — This morning Legal River launched an online marketplace where small and medium sized businesses can find lawyers to meet all of their legal needs. Legal River was conceived in 2008 when three MBA students at Smith School of Business were trading war stories about some of the challenges they faced in their previous jobs. “One issue that kept coming up was how difficult and time consuming it was to find lawyers for unique, long-tail problems.” said Co-Founder Ben Hatten, one of the company’s founders. The three identified a problem, and then they set out to create a solution.
We wanted to create a solution that would empower businesses to find
the right lawyers and empower lawyers to reach out to clients they
wanted to help,” commented Co-Founder Zach Girod. “To make our
service effective we know it has to be a win-win scenario” Continue reading “Smith School Grads Launch LegalRiver.com”
Writing a business plan is something virtually every entrepreneur and entrepreneurship student does. A new study out of U of Maryland, authored by my friend David Kirsch and co-authors Brent Goldfarb and Azi Gera). From the NYTimes article by Brent Bowers:
Researchers found that venture capitalists, who screen hundreds or thousands of solicitations each year, pay little or no heed to the content of business plans. Instead, the study said, because they make decisions “under conditions of high uncertainty,” venture capitalists rely on instinct and their expertise in ferreting out information by other means to evaluate the prospects of a business.
That means, the study said, that they pay little attention to the documentation from entrepreneurs about their academic credentials, work or start-up experience, previous success in raising equity capital, ability to form a top-notch management team or even how much money they want.
“In general, business plans don’t matter,” said Brent Goldfarb, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, who wrote the study with David A, Kirsch, also an associate professor at the school, and Azi Gera, a doctoral student. “Nobody is going to read them.”
That assertion flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that writing a business plan is one of the first and most essential tasks an entrepreneur should undertake, Mr. Goldfarb acknowledged. But, he says, the report’s conclusions jibe with the feedback he gets from venture capitalists.
Last week’s Potomac Techwire highlighted (see image) just how entrepreneurial business schools themselves are. In the face of the financial
crisis and the shift in financial power from NY to DC, the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland is now offering a Masters of Science in Business: Finance.
This MS in Finance is beginning in the Fall of 2009. The page describing the program notes: “Classes are held at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, D.C., within walking distance of the White House, U.S. Department of Treasury headquarters, and other important Washington landmarks.”
I guess it makes sense for those who are taking over the economy to learn something about finance! Maybe Geithner’s bad bank will eventually come out of a class project .
Good on you UMD for being entrepreneurial at a time when we are being told that only the Federal Government can save us.
Probably one of my favorite campus entrepreneur’s of all time is Kevin Plank (founder and CEO of Under Armour. He was a football player at the Univ of Maryland and student at the Smith School of Business when he came up with the idea for Under Armour.) He and fellow Smith School alumn, Carly Fiorina, have ponied up some cash for a student entrepreneurship fund at Smith.
Smith always seems to have a lot going on with entrepreneurship and was the launchpad of Dana Lande, a campus entrepreneur I profiled awhile back.
Campus Entrepreneurship 