American Magazine, July 2015

More documents

Info

Virtual reality meetings and lectures Jason Ganz, Kogod/BA ’14 Matthias McCoy-Thompson, SIS/BA ’14 Collin Korandovich, CAS/BS ’15 Josh Mahan, CAS/BA ’14 BEST AND WORST MOMENTS: Worst: Our demo wasn’t working right before an important meeting. Best: We fixed it with one minute to spare and pulled off a successful pitch to a potential client. KEY TO SUCCESS: Our drive. We might not have the pedigree or expertise of longtime founders, but we will not give up. FUNDING: Entirely bootstrapped. Most of our founders are in school or have day jobs. This has taught us to operate in a truly lean fashion. WHY ENTREPRENEURSHIP: It is by far the best way for a small group of people to have a large impact on the world. Online/mobile platform that leverages data analytics to enhance campus fitness facility usage Rachel Koretsky, Kogod/BA ’14 KEY TO SUCCESS: Persistence ROLE MODEL: Kip Tindell, The Container Store founder and CEO BEST ADVICE: You’re going to receive the answer “no” a lot in business, but always remember it is the few times you hear the word “yes” that truly matter, so don’t let the “no” get you down. BUSINESS VALUES: Boldness, passion, trust, and work-life balance Media production company connecting runners to professional athletes and coaches Ian Lutz, Kogod/BS ’14 QUICK PITCH: Inspire people to run faster BEST AND WORST MOMENTS: Best: Every week when a podcast or blog is released and I can take a breather! Worst: Working really hard to get zero views on the web page. BEST ADVICE: Failure is an important element of success. IDEA GENERATION: Often I am racing home or trying to keep a list together to remember my ideas. I have started running with a tape recorder. BEST BUSINESS BOOK: inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity by Tina Seelig Educational nonprofit providing life skills and arts education to at-risk women and LGBT+ youth in DC Sarah Jack Voelker, Kogod/BS ’16 FIRST ENTREPRENEURIAL VENTURE: I started a charity in high school to raise money for humanitarian relief in Darfur. BUSINESS VALUES: Treat people right at every level of a business, allow people to express themselves, and listen to them when they do. DESIRED IMPACT: I want a world where all people have the opportunity to build safe, healthy, and happy lives. WHY ENTREPRENEURSHIP: Entrepreneurship is like art: you create something from nothing to make the world better. January—and did not go as planned. By mid- February, Eng was describing the past four weeks as “a lot of huge wins and some decentsized setbacks.” One advantage of a startup is that a glitch, even a big one, doesn’t necessarily mean Game Over. Savvy entrepreneurs can turn a failure into a pivot: moving the business in a new direction based on new information or changing circumstances. The first setback happened at the New York Boys and Girls Club, which didn’t get its new computers. That meant 130 kids couldn’t receive tutoring. Next, Horton’s Kids fell through: spotty Internet at the community center thwarted tutoring sessions, and a spate of violence in Ward 8 in mid-January led the center to close for a few weeks. “The puzzle is three pieces—technology, tutors, and students—and at each point in the development of this company, we’ve had a problem with one of them,” Iaffaldano says. “For the first time, we started this semester with two pieces in, the tutors and the web part, and now we missed the student part.” The tutoring sessions that happened went well, but with far more IU tutors than kids, the roll out was rocky. After a few weeks, IU pulled the plug on the program until all of its students could participate. “It’s one of the single most upsetting things I’ve experienced at Unfused, the fact that we weren’t able to deliver as promised,” Eng says. Meanwhile, the team scrambled to salvage the partnership: refunding IU’s fees, securing an agreement to try again next year. Like most of the organization’s ups and downs, the experience delivered valuable lessons. “Some things are out of your control,” Iaffaldano says, sitting in the incubator with Eng. “I can’t control Horton’s Kids’ Internet and I can’t control when they get their computers at the Boys and Girls Club.” “But we can control getting more partners, so that if one goes down, we’ve got other ones,” Eng replies. “Scale reduces problems.” According to Holmberg, trial-and-error is at the heart of building a new enterprise: “Entrepreneurs learn very quickly that failure is not necessarily a totally bad thing, but it can be an incredible learning opportunity.” Rahaman Kilpatrick, a youth manager at Horton’s Kids, says that after a new teen center is built this summer, he hopes to work with Unfused again. During Horton’s first pilot with the startup, tutors helped 28 AMERICAN MAGAZINE JULY 2015
approximately 15 Horton’s teenagers with math, a tough subject for many. “They really filled a gap for us,” Kilpatrick says. “We didn’t know how we were going to get these kids to start taking math seriously.” The technology itself was a novelty at first—many kids at the center don’t have computer access at home, and they aren’t on FaceTime or Skype. But quickly, what intrigued them was the idea of chatting online with college students. That mentorship is an unexpected outcome of the tutoring, but may be its most significant benefit. “A lot of our kids drop out in the eighth and ninth grade,” Kilpatrick says. “It was like, “Wow, that’s your dorm room? Tell me about college.’ It gave them some hope to want to do more than just graduate high school.” Cultivating Innovation The incubator is just part of a broad push to grow entrepreneurship at AU. In 2012, Kogod launched the Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative, which interim dean Erran Carmel calls “one of the most important and successful things we’ve done in Kogod in recent years.” The initiative includes the incubator, a 17-member advisory council, and a venture fund that has raised approximately $233,000 from Kogod and donors. Startups accepted to the incubator (roughly 40 percent of applicants) receive $1,500 in seed capital. Advisory council member Mark Bucher, Kogod/BS ’90, BGR: The Burger Joint founder and Medium Rare cofounder, helped fund the renovation and furnishing of the incubator space. He believes the faculty is one of its strongest components. “It takes one professor to believe in a kid for the kid’s spark to get lit, and I think the three of those guys—Stevan, Tommy, and Bill—have reached so many students this year,” Bucher says. “They’re making magic. These students are having a better undergraduate experience and doing great things.” Debra Moser and her husband, Mitchell Berliner, Kogod/BS ’70, cofounders of Central Farm Markets, also serve on the council. Moser predicts students with incubator experience will be miles ahead of their peers. “These students are going to think differently,” Moser says. “They’re really going to look at problem solving in a very unique way.” In 2012, Kogod partnered with the School of Communication to debut a master’s in media entrepreneurship. Two years later, it launched an entrepreneurship minor for all AU students. In all, more than 300 AU students took entrepreneurship classes in 2014–2015. “It’s very exciting because you think about anybody at SIS, any student at SOC, any student in arts management—ultimately, they’re all entrepreneurs,” Holmberg says. “If I want to do economic development in Africa . . . if I want to be a documentary journalist, I’m an entrepreneur.” Kogod hosted its first Global Entrepreneurship Week last November, drawing 435 attendees and 35 submissions to a “What’s the Big Idea Pitch Competition.” AU’s Board of Trustees in May approved a new modular master’s— customizable curricula that students can adapt to individual goals—that will include an entrepreneurship track. Within five years, a soft target established by Carmel, every Kogod student will have some type of startup experience. All these initiatives are driven by the conviction that no matter what careers students pursue, an entrepreneurial mindset will pay off. “The incubator teaches our students how to design products that customers want to buy,” Bellows says. “That learning is highly valuable and transferrable.” The incubator’s new home will house an Incubator Design Lab, an instructional lab with whiteboards and videoconferencing, conference rooms, faculty offices, and, of course, a refreshment center with a refrigerator and coffeepot for those all-nighters. “it takes one professor to believe in a kid for the kid’s spark to get lit, and I think the three of those guys—Stevan, Tommy, and Bill—have reached so many students this year. They’re making magic.” –Mark Bucher, Kogod/BS ’90 Unfused: May Some of entrepreneurship’s richest lessons have little to do with business itself. Eng and Iaffaldano, asked what they gained from spending their undergraduate years on a startup, talked about leadership, management skills, and learning to work smarter, not harder. After the IU deal stumbled, Unfused got busy lining up new partnerships to make sure that wouldn’t happen again. They finalized The Kogod School of Business is interested an agreement with in hearing from alumni Montgomery County entrepreneurs. To add your entrepreneurial Public Schools and, affiliation to our in March, launched a alum database, email pilot program at Seneca startup@american.edu Valley High School, with 11 AU and IU tutors helping 30 students. Meanwhile, they have secured interest from the School District of Philadelphia and Drexel University, and plan to reconfigure their website for their newest pivot: creating an in-house video platform to replace the Google Hangouts. Ultimately, belief in their mission is what pushed the team forward for four years, despite the false starts, lack of money, lack of knowledge, and—until the incubator came along—lack of support. “I know that my time at two in the morning is wellspent, because it might help someone have a better life or get a better grade or feel like someone cares about them,” Iaffaldano says. “You can’t quantify those things, but sometimes those have the biggest impact.” By early May, Eng and Iaffaldano were getting ready for their next big transition: graduation. He’ll stay in DC to work in commercial real estate banking at Capital One, and she took a consulting job with EY in New York. (Iaffaldano credits her startup experience with helping her sail through job interviews.) Both will stay involved in Unfused, but for the past several months, they’ve been grooming new leaders: Myles Mora, Kogod/BSBA ’17, the new executive director, and Jordan Hansen, Kogod/BS ’17, director of development. Mission aside, building a business has been an adventure. Eng once compared the upsand-downs to being strapped to a rocket going to the moon, or being stuck on the Titanic—or both at the same time. “I have asked myself, was this the best thing to do for me as a person?” Eng says. “There’s always that part of you that says, ‘I should have had a normal college experience,’ but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. It made me who I am now, and I’m happy with where I am.” DOWNLOAD the American magazine app for interviews with Bucher and Moser. FOLLOW US @AU_AMERICANMAG 29
Page 1: AN ARTIST IN RESIDENCE IN ANNAPOLIS
Page 4 and 5: Few Washingtonians have a more AWE-
Page 6 and 7: syllabus JUSTICE, LAW, AND CRIMINOL
Page 8 and 9: Former first lady Laura Bush, cofou
Page 10 and 11: on campus OVER THE LAST 60 YEARS, A
Page 12 and 13: play empty, humid gyms. The result?
Page 14 and 15: YUUKI KPA ’18 NATSUKI KATO JASMIN
Page 17 and 18: wonk Q. Why is equitable, close-to-
Page 19: Meagan Carney, Kogod/BSBA ’12 Liv
Page 22 and 23: Regal portraits of Queen Henrietta
Page 24 and 25: BY BRAD SCRIBER, CAS/BA ’97 The R
Page 26: 24 AMERICAN MAGAZINE JULY 2015
Page 29: they’re going to pay somebody, th
Page 33 and 34: TOBACCONIST’S SHOP FIGURE, 1870-1
Page 35 and 36: AMERICAN ENTERPRISE TRACES NEARLY 2
Page 37 and 38: PHOTO BY HILARY SCHWAB 1960s Jon Ho
Page 39 and 40: Business North Carolina’s “Lega
Page 41 and 42: giving ENGAGING ALUMNI IN THE LIFE
Page 43 and 44: teamwork POWER PLAYERS Asher Raphae
Page 45 and 46: memories 1925 After the football te
Page 47 and 48: where we are Samuel Olens SIS/BA
Page 49 and 50: top picks David Pattison isn’t a
Page 51 and 52: THIS YEAR WE WILL CELEBRATE CLASSES

American Magazine, July 2015

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?