As college students become
more venturesome, the schools adapt By Staff Writer Steve Bills
NEW
YORK (CNNfn) - When John Chuang and a group of friends started a
desktop publishing company while they were students at Harvard
University in the mid-1980s, their friends thought they were crazy,
trying to run a business between classes.
"Harvard didn't
know, and we liked it that way," recalled Chuang, whose company, now
called Aquent, is today a talent agency for graphic designers and
other creative professionals. "It was illegal to run a business out
of our dorm rooms at the time."
Such an attitude seems
utterly alien to Nick Downey, a Georgia Tech senior who is working
with a group of current and former students to develop a
collaborative Web-browsing tool called TogetherWeb, operating out of
the school's business incubator, the Advanced Technology Development
Center.
"We've gotten nothing but encouragement and good
will," said Downey. "I can't imagine an environment where they would
try to stifle that."
A 'revolution' in campus
attitudes
The change in mood is "a
revolutionary thing," said Judith Cone, executive producer of
EntreWorld, an online resource for small business. "I don't know if
that's too strong a word, but it has really caught on."
Go
back 15 years, and only a handful of schools offered courses in
entrepreneurship, but today more than 1,500 colleges and
universities have such training in some form, according to the
Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, the sponsor of the
nonprofit EntreWorld site. More than 100 entrepreneurship centers
operate out of college settings today and the number of endowed
positions devoted to entrepreneurship has more than doubled in the
last five years, to more than 270.
In light of "this major insurgence of
entrepreneurship in colleges," Cone said, "it seems inevitable to me
that they are going to apply it."
Entreworld has dedicated
itself to documenting this transformation, devoting the September
"cover story" on its site to the phenomenon of "dorm-room
entrepreneurs."
Why the change? Kids coming of age in the
1980s and 1990s may have had something to do with it, Cone
suggested. Seeing parents lose jobs through corporate re-engineering
or hostile takeovers may well have convinced them to take charge of
their own business lives from the start.
Those youngsters
certainly had the role models to emulate, with success stories like
Michael Dell, who started building PCs in his dorm room while a
freshman at the University of Texas, or Jerry Yang, a Ph.D.
candidate at Stanford whose personal guide to the budding Internet
grew up to become Yahoo! (YHOO: Research,
Estimates).
Then
there was the Internet, today's ubiquitous communications medium,
which a decade ago was only a way for researchers to share their
results. And there was the boom in business formation -- and capital
financing -- as business people began to recognize the commercial
potential of the Net, and the land grab to stake claims on this new
frontier.
"I don't think it was any one factor," Cone said.
But with the combination of influences, "it was inevitable that this
was going to happen."
Facing their entrepreneurial
urges
To be
sure, some students showed the entrepreneurial urge long before the
Internet surge. Augie Nieto, one of the EntreWorld case studies,
launched a company called Life Fitness while an undergraduate at
Claremont McKenna in California.
A player on the school's
Division III football team and son of a successful entrepreneur,
Nieto staged a fundraiser that brought in $46,000 to equip an
exercise room. As a result, he said, when he started his business,
"I really had a tremendous amount of freedom because I had already
given back to the school more than most alumni."
One of the
most taxing aspects of his multi-sided life as a student in the late
1970s, he said, involved the costume changes. He work Birkenstocks
and shorts to class, coat and tie to work, and pads and cleats to
football practice. "Unless you were wearing a coat and tie, you
weren't accepted" by business people, Nieto said. "It was really a
game of charades."
Nieto graduated in 3-1/2 years with an
economics degree (emphasis on financial accounting), a B-plus
average and 1 $1.5 million business. Today, Life Fitness is the
largest provider of workout equipment to gyms and spas and is a
subsidiary of Brunswick
Corp. (BC:
Research,
Estimates).
Chuang,
the Harvard student from the mid-1980s, not only earned his
economics degree while building Aquent with his partners, but
continued work while he earned his MBA.
"That was really a
good experience. I could apply the lessons from the case studies
directly when I came back to the office," he recalled. "It was
certainly a lot of work, but it was a great way to get a lot of
experience."
As the world has changed, so has Harvard. The
university no longer bans businesses from its dorms -- even in the
past, the intent was to avoid the disruption that could come from
deliveries and commercial activity, a spokeswoman said. And although
it has not invoked the rule, Harvard still has the right to limit
students' use of university facilities for business
ventures.
In search of a balance for
students
"Part
of what we're here for is to nurture all the talents of the
students. And they come here very accomplished," said spokeswoman
Sally Baker. "We want them to keep a balance between that kind of
(business) activity and their school work."
The practice at
Harvard is to informally encourage student entrepreneurs to
take time off from school if their business is that important,
although there is no academic mandate, Baker said: "It's a balance
they have to achieve."
That's what Ashley Keller did when he
and two friends decided to launch a Web portal featuring user
ratings of Internet destinations. He dropped out of school after his
sophomore year.
The partners want to develop
essentially a Zagat guide to the Web, and six months after its
launch in March, the group's Why.com has 1.3 million sites in its
index, 350,000 ratings and reviews, 200,000 registered users and a
growth rate topping 100 percent a month, Keller said. The founders
hope to break even by the fourth quarter of 2001.
"Being
profitable in two years is pretty quick work. There are a lot of
20-hour days," the 21-year-old Keller said. "That's one area where
I've got youth on my side."
He still wants to return to
finish his degree, but not until the business is established and
running successfully. "It's a pretty rigorous academic environment
at Harvard," Keller said. "It wouldn't be fair to our
shareholders."
Academic rigor in business
pursuits
Even
the strongest backers of campus entrepreneurs want to apply academic
discipline to the endeavor.
"We try to make them go through
the process of developing the idea from a technical viewpoint and
developing a business plan around it," said Jean-Lou Chameau, dean
of the college of engineering at Georgia Tech. "It's a fine line we
have to walk. We want to be supportive, but at the same time, we
want them to receive an education."
That's why Downey, a
senior at the Atlanta school, dropped back to five hours a semester
of course load when he joined the fledgling TogetherWeb as "minister
of creativity." He said he finds the campus incubator a stimulating
environment.
"You can feel the energy of everything that is
happening here. The place is full of life and intellectual prowess.
You don't have to ask real hard to get something done," he
said.
The startup, meanwhile, benefits from "the creativity,
drive and enthusiasm that you don't find in middle-aged folks," he
said. "There's not a day I get up that I'm not absolutely
charged."
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In light of "this major insurgence of
entrepreneurship in colleges," Cone said, "it seems inevitable to me
that they are going to apply it."
The partners want to develop
essentially a Zagat guide to the Web, and six months after its
launch in March, the group's Why.com has 1.3 million sites in its
index, 350,000 ratings and reviews, 200,000 registered users and a
growth rate topping 100 percent a month, Keller said. The founders
hope to break even by the fourth quarter of 2001.