Print this article

"Serial Entrepreneur" Jason Ma Writes About Future Business Leaders At Elite Universities

Jason Ma

ThreeEQ

18 July 2013

Jason Ma, who has written before for WealthBriefingAsia, writes about the issue of student entrepreneurship at top universities. Such people are the likely wealth management clients of the future, so getting a handle on what makes such people tick is well worth studying. While there is a strong US slant to the piece, sharp-eyed readers will note the involvement of people from Asia. Ma’s article originally appeared in Forbes, and is reprinted by this publication with Ma’s permission. Ma is founder, chief executive and chief mentor at ThreeEQ. He calls himself a “serial entrepreneur and global education leader” with a passion for mentoring and transforming young leaders (from ages 10 to 39) worldwide.

To view a previous guest article by Ma, click here.

Student Entrepreneurship Is Humming At Elite Universities

“I am young, have time and am willing to take the risk. We want to innovate and deliver awesome engineering products.” This is Timothy Lee, a mechanical engineering major at UC Berkeley, singing the gospel of Silicon Valley. He’s an engineering project manager at VIRES Engineering, a thriving tech start-up with a novel engine transmission founded by Cal students. Tim is unpaid, but doesn’t mind the lack of a salary. “I’ve got no kids, no mortgage and no family responsibility. I’m not interested in being just a dot in a large workforce, a huge bureaucratic structure. I want to apply what I’ve learned directly from classes to something I’m passionate about,” he said.

UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology recently brought together a bunch of start-ups, including VIRES, for a pitch contest before a panel of judges comprised of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs (myself included) and university faculty. Also in the mix were Chinese teams from the Tsinghua-Berkeley Global Technology Entrepreneurship Program. Tsinghua alums include a range of top Chinese government officials and industry captains.

After seeing all of the pitches, the one thing that shook me was the passion these young entrepreneurs have. Only a small fraction of working folks tend to be this missionary, a bit bull-headed but open-minded. Silicon Valley is culturally unlike many parts of the world in that we tolerate failure, accept calculated risks and acknowledge mistakes as long as we learn from them and become stronger. “Fail often and fail fast (and hopefully cheaply)” is the motto–just don’t make the same mistake three or more times.

What if university-age entrepreneurs are psychologically more scalable or flexible than mid-aged counterparts? On average, I think so. A general partner at an elite venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road noted: “I need to (virtually) use a two-by-four to whack these 40-year-old CEOs on the head a couple of dozen times until they get it.” Having invested in a range of start-up companies and sitting on their boards, this VC blurted that out of perhaps some frustration. Being permeable or effective in listening in the right contexts is a critical success factor, especially during times of need or pivot.

I am enchanted by Kairos Society‘s driven fellows and leaders, one of whom is its regional president of Northern California, Jeremy Fiance. A UC Berkeley junior majoring in entrepreneurship and technology innovation, Jeremy is co-founder at Givair (a social micro-gifting platform being incubated at Cal), co-founder at Dropsense (developing a low blood sugar alert system being incubated at The Foundry @ CITRIS, a UC institution that creates IT solutions for pressing social, environmental and health care problems) and a partner at VC firm First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund. Along with schoolwork, Jeremy is busy but manages.

Jeremy comments: “Students at Cal have traditionally been risk-averse because of academic rigour and a feeling of being silo’ed in their majors. The missing link was alumni engagement and Cal has had no epicentre for entrepreneurs thus far. The entrepreneurial ecosystem has begun forming and is at the tipping point. Both Berkeley Engineering and B-School have been supportive. SkyDeck is becoming more mature and useful (to qualified startups at Cal). Examples are Kloudless and VIRES. The campus has the most untapped talent pool in elite universities.”

Jeremy was inspired by the Innovation and Entrepreneurship curriculum at the Haas School of Business’ Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, highly successful serial entrepreneur-turned-professor and author Steve Blank, other professors and industry execs, as well as fellow high-achieving students. He adds: “Here at Cal, we tend to ask what is the real-world problem that we are trying to solve. We aren’t interested in just an app or another Instagram. ‘What’s the high impact?’ Start-ups that will become successful will give back to Cal.”

Cal is fostering more start-ups on campus with its SkyDeck, which occupies the penthouse at the city of Berkeley’s tallest building right by the university campus. It’s a relatively new accelerator jointly created by UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, Haas School of Business and Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. Run by executive director Jeff Burton, SkyDeck aims to combine and leverage on the vast resources of this elite public university.

SkyDeck plus contests such as the UC Berkeley Startup Competition, Big Ideas and Peter Haas Public Service Leaders Program are helping students turn their ideas into real companies. “Opportunities my own venture, ServFund, is grateful to have,” says Ngan Pham, a senior at UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science, its sizeable liberal arts school. Passionate about social causes, Ngan reflects: “We may not get as much limelight as Stanford, but the entrepreneurial scene at Cal is alive and well.” Her friend, Sabrina Atienza, compared UC Berkeley’s and Stanford’s start-up scene in this Women 2.0 article from April 2012.

Ngan adds: “Cal’s infrastructure to support the students is still fragmented, which can be good or bad. The good is that it forces students to take action on their own, which is very much like the real world. The bad is that we lose out on talent and good ideas if students don’t have the emotional support. Many aspiring social entrepreneurs’ talent goes untapped because they don’t even know how to begin.” Her ideal entrepreneurship scene at Cal would be a co-working space that is inviting to all majors and students. Ngan went on to start a Facebook group, “Cal’s Aspiring Entrepreneurs and Friends,” as a collaborative community of UC Berkeley students and alumni.

Ken Singer, managing director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, offers his perspective: “Unique among university programmes, CET is part of the engineering school and not the business school. Business schools tend to be oriented towards the study of ‘making money.’ The discipline of engineering is oriented towards ‘building’ or ‘creating’ something tangible. This informs the way CET educates its students–practical, experiential, applied. The result: a proven pedagogy called ‘The Berkeley Method’ that has attracted students from around the world and has been successfully syndicated to China.”

Ken adds: “Signature elements of the CET program: (1) All instructors are practitioners (not just academics). (2) Classes are open to students of ALL academic backgrounds. CET believes entrepreneurship is a multi-disciplinary sport. (3) We are competition-driven: All advanced courses require students to form teams to compete for highly coveted rewards–trips to Barcelona, office space, investment money.”

Berkeley has both tremendous opportunities and challenges as it is the flagship of the venerable, colossal but public University of California system. It is advantaged for having a tremendous student and faculty talent pool and more top graduate programs than Harvard or Stanford (according to the National Research Council) and being right by the San Francisco side of Silicon Valley. It is disadvantaged for being weighed down by large public university bureaucracy and having to deal with the financially challenged State of California.

Across the Bay

Across the Bay and down the peninsula, Stanford University has continued to be the elite of elite universities when it comes to tech entrepreneurship. At Stanford, I have participated as a new mentor at StartX (including the last two StartX Demo Day events), an observer at the Startup Weekend at Stanford, a judge at the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students’ BASES 150k Challenge and a guest speaker at other occasions.

What strikes me are the consistency and cohesiveness of the high energies, enthusiasm and innovative ideas of the student teams, as well as the enthused staff everywhere I go. These typically reflect cultures and leadership that have been working. Or could this partially reflect the Stanford Duck Syndrome - students appearing to glide easily above water but beneath the surface they are paddling like hell to stay afloat? I contend that at all reputable elite universities, it takes focused and sustained hard work–whether gracious on the surface or not - for students, including entrepreneurial souls, to do well.

StartX is a Stanford-affiliated non-profit that accelerates the development of Stanford’s top entrepreneurs through experiential education and collective intelligence. Based on research of hundreds of Stanford alumni entrepreneurs whose companies are able to deliver nearly $3 trillion of economic impact every year, StartX has built an organised ecosystem and training program to create highly effective entrepreneurs. Their model focuses on developing start-up founders’ core skills while building their companies and providing them access to key people including mentors, industry experts and Silicon Valley’s top investors.

StartX founder and CEO Cameron Teitelman comments: “To date, StartX-backed founders have raised over $100 million, with an average funding rate of $1.5 million. Over 85 per cent of our companies have raised money and we have four acquisitions to date. For all of this, StartX charges nothing and takes no equity. We are able to support founders in every industry.” I have learned that over 50 per cent of the entrepreneurs at StartX have PhDs, with the rest being a mix of medical, business and engineering masters and undergrads, and that 10 per cent of the founders are current and former professors.

At the recent BASES E-Challenge competition, a team reports that 10-40 per cent of all food purchased by a restaurant ends up getting dumped at the end of the day. Their idea is to connect the excess supply of wasted but still good food at restaurants with the demand of hungry consumers interested in discounts, like some college students. The idea is extremely hard to execute and scale (i.e. unfundable) unless there will be a convincing story on how to sustainably and cost-effectively incentivise and perfect setups and execution on the supply and demand sides. Unlike two of my fellow judges who were VCs assigned with metrics from their firms, I praised the kids on their genuinely good thought in trying to solve a real problem and thanked them for not presenting another try-to-get-rich-quick-but-not-much-substance Web service firm.

Other Stanford entrepreneurship programs and initiatives include the mature Stanford Technology Ventures Program (which has attracted a wide spectrum of the most successful founders, CEOs, venture capitalists and other industry luminaries as guest speakers), the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network (SEN) and the Stanford GSB Entrepreneur Club (E-Club). Stanford enjoys a sustainable competitive advantage–location at the epicentre of global Silicon Valley.

More and more top colleges and universities are working hard on providing entrepreneurship education, if not also incubation or acceleration of actual start-up ideas and companies. This includes some of the small liberal arts colleges. The STEM-focused Harvey Mudd College in Southern California has been all over it, including the HMC Entrepreneurial Network (HMCEN). And my recent visit to The Juilliard School in New York City shows that even this elite performance arts school has actively begun offering entrepreneurship education.

Big Apple

At Juilliard’s Ivy League neighbour on the Upper West Side, Columbia University sophomore Emily Hsia recently received a promotion to VP of Engineering, and her fully college student-run tech start-up, TappMob, has been acquired. Now she and her founders own stock at the acquiring parent company. Emily reminisces: “It’s been a whirlwind. I got the internship via a referral while taking my first Intro to CS class. Collaborative learning. Super fast-paced overall.”

South of the Big Apple, entrepreneurship is indeed humming at the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy. “Wharton Entrepreneurship is a hub that engages students across Penn’s entire campus,” says Emily Cieri, managing director of Wharton Entrepreneurship. “We support majors/concentrations at the PhD, MBA and undergraduate levels. Roughly 20 per cent of the MBAs majors in entrepreneurship. Our venture development programmes include the Wharton Business Plan Competition and Wharton Venture Initiation Program (our educational incubator). We have seen a dramatic growth of students interning and working at early-stage companies over the past few years.”

Emily credits the strength of UPenn’s entrepreneurial student body to the diversity of support that students receive: “Students successfully move from idea generation, through market validation, to launch. Some examples of business built by Wharton students include Warby Parker, Baby.com.br, Milo and Invite Media. This past fall, Wharton launched a Semester in San Francisco that allowed 55 MBA students to study at the Wharton San Francisco campus. This provided a full slate of elective courses focused on technology and entrepreneurship, with immersion in the Valley.”

Perhaps the most tech entrepreneurship-astute elite university other than Stanford lies further up Northeast. An earlier study by MIT faculty estimated that all active companies worldwide formed by MIT graduates surpassed $2 trillion a year–which is more than the GDP of all but the 10 largest nations. MIT has the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as the main hub, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition, the globally renowned and more research-focused Media Lab and other initiatives.

Youyang Gu, an MIT sophomore majoring in computer science, is heads-down in his studies, reflecting MIT students’ famously high standards in academic rigour. He is temporarily putting his entrepreneurial pursuit on hold until his junior year. “Work, sleep or play. Pick 2.”

Youyang adds: “What differentiates MIT on entrepreneurship is that we strive for perfection. We do not have the luxury of just churning out products and hoping that one will work. Everything we do must be (close to) perfect because we want that one pitch to count.” Boston is a large market for entrepreneurs and start-ups but is not Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs there get less interaction with angel investors and VCs.

“We are more focused on goals and checkpoints, developing products like Dropbox that have a high rate of success right after launch. We learn to be exceptional problem solvers who are excellent at managing our time and balancing our work. Sometimes, that comes at the expense of the broad vision that is critical as a quality of CEOs.”

A recent Boston Magazine article about entrepreneurship at MIT describes that even its globally famous neighbour and top Ivy, Harvard University, is on a catch-up mode on tech entrepreneurship, “the new sexy.” This was a reason that would-be college junior, hardcore entrepreneur and Thiel Fellow Tony Ho is on leave from school. Tony is having a blast at the Thiel Fellowship but plans to eventually go back to Harvard and “take liberal arts classes to get more well-rounded.”

Speaking of hardcore MIT entrepreneurs, Quizlet founder Andrew Sutherland is leading his team towards their product and technology vision, including mobile. He founded Quizlet while a high school sophomore and is currently on leave from MIT. My own high school junior daughter and students and teachers all over have found Quizlet a very useful learning tool.

Student entrepreneurship can begin at an early age, especially with expert guidance or mentoring and parental support. Sameer Vij, a high school junior at The Harker School, Silicon Valley’s top prep school, is founder and chair of TiE Youth Forum. The event will be held on Saturday, May 18th, as part of the upcoming TiEcon 2013, historically attracting 3,000-plus attendees. Sameer notes: “TiE Youth is a great opportunity for high school and college students to listen to world famous entrepreneurs’ stories of successes, failures and lessons learned, to connect with other curious students and to experience the world’s largest entrepreneurship conference.”

As Sameer seems to understand, student entrepreneurship is on the rise and becoming ever more important, both for students as they develop long-term leadership skills, and for society as it benefits from the explosive creativity and energy of young men and women.