WBEZ | startups

Venture: A business school shark tank for aspiring CEOs

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:11:00 -0500

It’s graduation season – and lots of grads are hitting the job market. But some are choosing an opposite direction - they're hatching their own companies – hoping to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a course on how to do exactly that is now one of the hottest things on campus.

Michael Toporek is trying to be kind. He's an investment manager helping judge an early round of the New Venture Challenge. That’s a competition and a class at the Booth School of Business. Teams of students present their ideas to investors, and the winners take home thousands of dollars to help run their companies.

Toporek is telling a team they're kind of lacking gumption.

MICHAEL TOPOREK: if you really think that those numbers are true, I would shake your hand, thank you, think you were intelligent and wish you the best of luck.

Rafi Aviav is one of the students explaining their idea for investment strategy software. He tries to defend his team's financial projections but then commits a cardinal sin – he admits they lowballed the numbers.

AVIAV: We're always encouraged to be ambitious and accurate, I think, but we really were quite conservative.
STEVE KAPLAN: You guys have to leave.
WAVERLY DEUTSCH: You're not allowed to use that word.

It's early April, and the teams are still a bit rough around the edges. And the stakes are high – By the end of May, when the top 10 teams go to the finals, $75,000 in prize money hangs in the balance.

Aviav originally came to Booth from Israel to study finance but contracted startup fever.

AVIAV: I have a good friend, who's Uzi Shmilovici, who started PipeJump and was in last year's competition and just recruited $1 million from VCs, so to me, Chicago is just an amazing place and a real hotbed for entrepreneurship.

Business plan competitions are nothing new. More than 50 universities have them, including top schools like Harvard and Wharton. But for a school like Booth that's been known for its focus on number-crunching and finance, the increasing popularity of entrepreneurship is dramatic.

More than 65 companies have emerged from the New Venture Challenge in the past 15 years. They've raised about $150 million in venture capital. A third of that has come in the past year alone.

Steve Kaplan is one of the professors who runs the course. He says it's not much like any other class.

KAPLAN: I don't really teach anything.

Instead he pushes the students to figure stuff out on their own – and not just on paper. The best companies in the class are already up and running, with students juggling tests and customers at the same time. He says the students are the ones in the driver's seat, but:

KAPLAN: We give them premium gasoline so they can go faster than they would have gone if they weren't doing the class.

That includes recruiting judges from Chicago's top venture capital firms. Lon Chow is a general partner with Apex Venture Partners, which manages a $140 million fund. He says the New Venture Challenge has opened his mind to investing in companies started by students.

CHOW: The last thing you want to do is have a bunch of newly minted MBAs learn on your dime about starting businesses, and I think they've done a phenomenal job of just improving, attracting really talented students.

And those students are going off and creating real companies.

MATT MALONEY: These are all people who are getting restaurant menus and entering them into the web site, and then behind you is some phone sales.

Matt Maloney is giving me a tour of his company – you may have heard of it – GrubHub, a web site for ordering takeout. He and co-founder Mike Evans won the New Venture Challenge in 2006. But Maloney says almost no one would have picked them as winners in the beginning.

MALONEY: When we went in, we were just two young scrappy entrepreneurs thinking we had the greatest idea ever, so we got up for our first presentation and pretty much said, here it is, isn't it great? And they all kind of resoundingly said, 'What the hell are you talking about?'

He says they needed to show how they could make money on each transaction. So they went back to the drawing board, retooled their presentation and won. Now they've raised more than $34 million in venture capital.

The GrubHub guys are legends to current Booth students like Nik Abraham.

NIK ABRAHAM: Yeah, you kick it off by saying we're Sibylus and then introduce everyone and then Ingram will start.

It's a Sunday afternoon, and Abraham and four other students are holed up in a classroom rehearsing.

MATT KOPKO: Alright, hey guys, I'm Matt, this is Ingram, this is Julian, Nik and Jason here and we're Sibylus. We're doing essentially digital coursepacks.

Their company is called Sibylus – yes, they know it sounds like syphilis and they're trying to come up with another name. But they're more certain of the concept – circumventing the expensive collections of newspaper and journal articles called coursepacks that professors make them buy for almost every class. Their company searches databases and the internet to provide students with links to the articles for much less money. And they're already in business – they sold 200 coursepacks to fellow Booth students this semester. Abraham says the idea for the company arose from a universal gripe.

ABRAHAM: Students sign up for classes, they go to the bookstore, they complain about waiting in line and paying all this money, they come back to the Winter Garden and have lunch with their friends and everyone will be complaining about it. So that's when I realized so many people are experiencing this pain, there's definitely something we can do about it.

Since they launched in March, Abraham says running the business has eclipsed everything in their lives. His team is part of a trend toward entrepreneurship that accelerated as the economy worsened. According to the Kauffman Foundation, last year the percentage of people who started businesses was at its highest in 15 years. As for the New Venture Challenge, Abraham says they'd love to win, but what they really want is a successful company.

ABRAHAM: It would not be a good outcome if we won the NVC and flopped.
Turns out, they cross the first hurdle and make it to the finals.

There, they face some stiff competition.

SWINGBYTE INTRO: Good afternoon, thank you for your time and for the opportunity to introduce you to Swingbyte, a revolutionary golf training device using your smartphone, tablet and computer,
LINEJUMP: We are LineJump – a mobile application that allows you to open and close a tab from your smartphone.
AGILE DIAGNOSIS: Good afternoon, we are Agile Diagnosis and we develop web and mobile applications that help doctors and nurses more accurately and efficiently diagnose their patients.

After each presentation, judges mingle with students, swapping business cards and maybe sowing the seeds for potential investments. I chat with the folks behind Agile Diagnosis, the company that makes medical software. Jon Lee is studying to become a doctor and get his MBA, but he plans to take a leave of absence to work on the company. His parents are not happy.

LEE: My mom was just saying I don't understand over and over in Korean.
GROSS: What was it in Korean?
LEE: Actually that part was in English, but it was in a Korean accent, so it was like Konglish. 'I don't understand. I don't understand.’

But maybe this will help her come around – Agile Diagnosis won first place and took home $25,000. It's a little reassurance as her son rolls the dice on his dreams of building a company. And the Sibylus guys? They won second place. They admit first place would have been nice, but they're happy to get this stamp of approval as they set out to woo investors.

Chicago's startup scene: The one that got away

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:00:00 -0600

You’ve heard of Groupon. How about Bump Technologies? For Chicago, Bump is an example of the one that got away.

David Lieb and his friend Jake Mintz hatched the company at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when they discovered in that flurry of the first few weeks of school that they really, really hated manually typing all their new friends’ contact information into their phones.

So, along with their friend Andy Huibers, they figured out a way to “bump” two phones together to transmit that contact info. And their new smartphone application was born on March 27th, 2009. Things moved fast from there - they won the school’s New Venture Challenge business plan competition and in the summer of 2009, just like Gold Rush era miners of yore, they packed up and headed to California.

They didn’t go with the intention of staying. After all, Lieb and Mintz still had another year of B-School ahead of them. But like lots of good tech companies, the train barreled down the tracks at breakneck speed.

They took part in a summer business incubator program run by Y Combinator. By the end, they got a big, fat $3 million check from the venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital and some Valley angel investors.

But just because they got the money there didn’t mean they had to stay. They could have come back to Chicago. But they didn’t. They opened their headquarters in Mountain View, California, and now have 15 employees there and are “aggressively hiring.”

Lieb says the main reason was because Huibers lived in California already. But there was another reason that speaks to Silicon Valley’s dominance.

“We knew we needed to hire a bunch of people, and being here in the Valley is really where all that technical talent is,” Lieb said in an interview.

And even though they did talk with venture capitalists in Chicago, there aren’t as many of them and they’re more cautious, Lieb says.

“Here in the Valley, firms are okay with putting in $3 million to $5 million to $7 million in a Series A deal for a completely unproven company with some idea they want to build,” he said. “Whereas in Chicago, you have to convince people a bit more about what’s your business model, how are you going to make money. Those things aren’t as big a deal here in the Valley.”

These are the things that have perennially kept Chicago as an also-ran instead of a tech heavyweight. But big changes are afoot.

All of a sudden, business incubator programs are popping up here. This year, Excelerate Labs launched in Chicago, mentoring 10 startups over the summer and providing them seed money in exchange for an equity stake.

Mad-dash weekend-long incubator programs like Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine and SocialDevCamp have also arrived. They throw developers together with the hope of hatching viable business ideas by the end. And in September, 1,500 people attended the first-ever midVentures Launch conference, at which 35 startups presented their ideas to investors.

“We don’t have a lot of places where startups can go to get information on raising funds and developing their technology,” says Jon Pasky, senior vice president at MidVentures.

But increasingly, there are more places like that. This summer, a space in the West Loop called the Syncubator opened up. It provides desk space and advice to budding entrepreneurs. And its founder, Mike Rhodes, is launching a $5 million early-stage investment fund.

Groupon, of course, though, is the big kahuna. Groupon founders and serial entrepreneurs Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell started a $100 million investment fund called LightBank earlier this year and have invested in eight startups so far. They’ve become evangelists for Chicago as a rival to Silicon Valley.

“Eric and I are outspoken about the awesomeness of Chicago and of the ability to do great things right here and continue the heritage of our city, which is make no small plans,” Keywell said in an interview.

Lots of people are paying attention to this activity – including startup entrepreneurs who are weighing whether to stay here or tread down the well-worn path to California. Chiara Piccinotti cofounded her company, Apply in the Sky, with a friend last year when they were both applying to business school. They created software that manages that process for you – keeping track of deadlines and application requirements. Piccinotti now goes to business school at the University of Chicago and is running her company at the same time.

Their office is in San Francisco, where Piccinotti’s cofounder, Emily Chiu, lives. So will they stay in California? Is there any chance they’d move the company here?

“What we’ve found so far is the resources at this point are much greater in the Valley, especially for a web venture of this sort,” Piccinotti says.

But she acknowledges the environment in Chicago is abuzz.

“Chicago’s an exciting place to be in right now because it does feel like there’s this excitement around Groupon,” Piccinotti says. “Things are changing. But to say that it’s the same as the Valley now – it’s a bit premature. When you move out to San Francisco, you see friends around you starting companies and you just feel it everywhere. You want to go out on your own and start something innovative. Here, it’s great, but it doesn’t sweep you like the Valley.”

Groupon ignites Chicago startup boom

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 06:01:00 -0600

Now that the dust has settled and it’s clear the online discount company Groupon has reportedly walked away from six billion bucks from Google, we wanted to find out what else is going on in Chicago’s tech scene. Turns out, the hog butcher for the world may in fact be moving toward a cyber future.

Ashish Rangnekar unlocks a door in Groupon's sprawling headquarters in the old Montgomery Ward building.

He’s leading me to the office of Watermelon Express, his test-prep software company.

RANGNEKAR: And then we are here.

In this building, Watermelon Express is like a tiny barnacle stuck to the side of the Groupon battleship.

It’s an example of how Groupon is transforming the culture of Chicago, creating the right atmosphere for small companies like this one to get a start.

RANGNEKAR: I would say the last nine months have been phenomenal. I would not want to be in any other city but Chicago right now.

And here’s the lineage to Groupon.

Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell are serial entrepreneurs who bankrolled Groupon.

They discovered Rangnekar at the University of Chicago business school and funded his company in July.

It’s one of eight startups they’ve invested in this year out of a new $100 million dollar fund.

Keywell says Chicago's tech scene is starting to get the ego it needs to rival Silicon Valley.

KEYWELL: There are enough successes now in our community that young entrepreneurs can look at those successes and say to themselves I can absolutely do it here, I can do it here in a unique way that I probably couldn't do it on the West Coast, and time to go, let's do it.

And that's a big change.

This city has long trailed Silicon Valley, New York, DC, even Dallas-Fort Worth in tech jobs.

And get a load of this – Netscape, PayPal, YouTube – those could have been Chicago companies.

Their founders studied at the University of Illinois but then quickly left for Silicon Valley.

Groupon founder Andrew Mason says Chicago lacks a kind of entrepreneurial savvy and he says that even applies to himself.

MASON: It didn't even really occur to me that there were people out there who would give you money on the promise that maybe someday it would turn into more money. I just was lucky enough to work for Eric Lefkofsky, who heard about one of my ideas and said hey, stupid, why don't you drop out of school and we can turn this into a company together?

There are lots of theories about why the city’s lacked that entrepreneurial spark… everything from an aversion to risk to a fear of failure.

But now long-time observers like Steve Kaplan say Chicago is becoming more of a place to launch great business ideas.

He's a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago.

KAPLAN: I've had in my office a couple of East Coast venture capital firms saying we now view Chicago as a place to look for businesses – that didn't happen, that hasn't happened in my memory.

Chicago investors are also getting in on the action.

INVESTOR: I may have blanked out but did you say how much money you're looking for and what you're going to do with it?
BUSINESS OWNER: Yeah, we'll be looking for approximately $500,000.

At this event called the Funding Feeding Frenzy, CEOs pitched their ideas to investors.

Scenes like this have been taking place a lot this year in Chicago.

As for what it would take for Chicago to become the next Silicon Valley, Andrew Mason of Groupon has this characteristically goofy take.

Remember, he’s the kind of CEO who once hired a man to walk around the office in a tutu just for laughs.

MASON: What’s made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is the fact that there have been a lot of great companies that start there and then they get big and they get too big and they become a sucky place to work and then all those really smart people that learned so much go off to start their own things. So I think for Chicago to really develop a strong technology community, we need companies like Groupon to get really big and then start to suck and then for all our people to go off and do other things. So I'm actually against the idea of Chicago becoming a technology hub. I just want everybody to work for us and never leave.

He’s mostly joking, but he has hired almost 900 people in Chicago this year.

That alone isn’t enough to create another Silicon Valley, but with other new companies cropping up, it’s a good start.