Fostering Student Innovation

By Tiffany Pang

Picture courtesy of Yale Entrepreneurial Society.

At the end of April, the Yale Entrepreneurial Society hosted its annual Yale Venture Challenge Innovation Summit at The Bourse, celebrating innovation by bringing together Yale student entrepreneurs, alumni, and industry professionals. 

Five Yale student ventures were selected among a competitive application pool as finalists to pitch to a panel of judges, including entrepreneurs, investors, and members in the investment community. The five ventures chosen to pitch were:

• Blacktop Bloom (VCP ’12-13) – Rewon Child (YC ’13)
• Dextro (YEI ’13/VCP ’12-13) – David Luan (YC ’13)
• Electric Currency (VCP ’12-13) – Jeff Woodward (SOM ’14)
• Panorama Education (YEI ’12) – Aaron Feuer (YC ’13)
• SolGen – Mitchell Bauer (FES ’13)

At the end of the evening, the panel of judges awarded the first place prize of $12,000 to Panorama Education, a 2012 YEI Fellowship team that helps K-12 schools and districts to easily collect student feedback and offer teachers clear reports with actionable insights.

“I was just really excited. Panorama has had a really busy couple of weeks,” said Panorama Education cofounder Xan Tanner (YC ’13).

The skyrocketing venture has indeed had a busy few weeks indeed. Along with their Yale Venture Challenge win, Panorama Education was also recently accepted to the YCombinator’s Summer ’13 class. With their winnings from the competition, Tanner hopes to “add team members on the tech side.  The YVC money will be used, along with our profits from this past year, to help build out our team.”

The second-place $7,000 prize went to Dextro, a software company for computerized object detection and recognition in images that is participating in this summer’s YEI Fellowship.

“I was definitely happy. Because Dextro has been bootstrapped so far, we have basically never pitched it in an investment/competition setting,” said Dextro founder David Luan (YC ’13), who was impressed by the line-up of pitches and entrepreneurs at the Summit. “Yale entrepreneurship has really taken off in the past two years, as compared to when I was an underclassman. Interest here is at great levels.”

Electric Currency, a Texas-based retail energy reseller in YEI’s 2012-2013 Venture Creation Program, placed third and won the $1,000 prize. And along with the other winners, Electric Currency cofounder Jeff Woodward (FES ’14) echoed the positivity about Yale’s entrepreneurship spirit.

“I think that a lot of Yale’s entrepreneurial community is driven by a desire to good for the world.  Four of the five finalists for YVC were social ventures,” said Woodward. “It’s a wonderful group of people to be part of.”

“I think that the entrepreneurial spirit at Yale has never been better,” said Tanner, who was impressed by the teams and competition at the Yale Venture Challenge. “It’s just an exciting time for entrepreneurship at Yale.”

By Claire Zhang

PaperG, an advertising technology startup co-founded by Victor Wong (YC ’11), Ka Mo Lau (YC ’09), Victor Cheng (YC ’08), and Roger Lee, has partnered with some big names since its early days, including Hearst Corporation, Boston.com, the LATimes, AOL, and the New York Times, just to name a few. PaperG has designed a technology called “PlaceLocal” that uses the Internet to create custom, localized display advertisements in seconds. A company types their company name and location into a software, which then scours the web for relevant text and images, such as Google or Yelp reviews, and uses what it finds to make the ads.

In 2010, PaperG was described by the New York Times as “An Ad Engine to Put ‘Mad Men’ Out of Business” and Victor was deemed a young genius by the Nieman Journalism Lab. In 2011, Paper G made Forbes’ top 100 promising companies. Victor has also been featured in Forbes as one of “30 under 30” “Brightest Minds Rocking the Marketing World.” 

The company first began with a technology called “the Flyerboard.” This product took print ads and digitized them for online sharing. In the process, PaperG also learned that “there was a need for building digital ads from scratch and that it was incredibly hard and costly for most advertisers,” said Victor. Thus the current product, PlaceLocal was born, making ad building “incredibly easy.”

Of course, start-ups are never smooth sailing, especially in these economic times. Victor said that the financial crises were one of the toughest challenges the company faced on the road to the company’s success.

"Money dried up overnight, and it was really hard for most companies to raise enough money to survive or thrive,” said Victor.

To overcome this hurdle, PaperG closed a round of financing immediately on terms offered at the time instead of waiting too long while the market got worse. Flyerboard was kept alive as a source of revenue as the team worked on developing the new platform, PlaceLocal.

Victor knew the company was taking off when they started getting big name customers calling them instead of the other way around.  Since then, the company has moved into and outgrown seven offices – each with bigger leases and more space.

"Moving into new offices always gets me sentimental. Our newest office, perched slightly above San Francisco’s financial district, is my favorite one. There was a moment as we finished moving in and stood out on the balcony that I realized we’ve really made a place in the world for us and our ideas,” said Victor.           

From Yale to Entrepreneur

At Yale, Victor was involved in the Elmseed Enterprise Fund, which exposed him to the excitement of running a business. It was this that led him to entrepreneurship instead of pursuing medicine, like his father, or finance, which he had considered at the end of his freshman year. 

Victor credits the YEI for its community of mentors and peers for helping to develop the idea for PaperG, as well as providing many key hires and “even a key customer.” Victor was also able to speak with industry experts, such as Yale professors, through the Yale School of Management.

“Nothing could overstate the contribution though of the Yale alumni community which has made invaluable connections for us,” said Victor.

Looking to the Future

PaperG is currently working on expanding their company and bringing their product to not only local advertisers, but also online businesses and even national advertisers. 

From cellphones, to iPads and tablets, laptops, and even television monitors, these days, we have seemingly unlimited ways to access the media we want. Because of this, Victor says that “running a simple display ad campaign is now incredibly hard. 

“Our technology will make it easy to build and edit ads across all the necessary platforms,” said Victor.           

A key component of this growth is hiring a strong team.  However, Victor says, “We’ve found many new [college] graduates to be lacking in critical skills but full of eager attitudes. It’s been challenging as a result to hire someone with the perfect skill set for the job.”

So they’ve beefed up their own training and education programs, providing unlimited resources, offline courses, and books. The company has been working with other new startups to tackle the problem too.  

As for new entrepreneurs, Victor believes that it is important to realize that the process of building a startup is not easy, and never gets easier.

“You shouldn’t be doing startups because they are easy,” he said. “You should be doing it because you find them exciting and challenging. You should assume it will be a marathon, not a short sprint. You will be going at this for longer than you think and you’ll need to pour your life into this endeavor or you’ll never even have a chance at succeeding. Everyday you are hustling and busting you chops to make your dream happen.”

By Claire Zhang

Michael Inwald, SOM’10, has taken one of everybody’s favorite comfort foods – grilled cheese – and turned it into a burgeoning quick food service restaurant chain called Cheeseboy, though he doesn’t exactly like the term ‘success.’

“We’re still growing,” said Michael. “I would say it’s too early to say [we’re successful]. We’ve done a great job in a number of areas. We have a lot of stores that are doing well,” said Michael.

Yet, Michael has been named one of “10 Generation Next entrepreneurs to watch” by CNN Money. Cheeseboy made #13 on Nation’s Restaurant News’s list of 50 “Breakout Brands of 2013," and the restaurant currently has eight locations in the Northeast including Boston, Providence, and Milford. Even if not a “success,” Cheeseboy certainly seems to be thriving.

Though Michael was uncomfortable responding to the idea of “success,” he was able to name many things that Cheeseboy has done well.

“We have built a strong brand image, even though we’re still being discovered every day by customers,” said Michael.

Part of this image is demonstrating that quick service does not mean cutting back on quality. Cheeseboy restaurants use “all natural bread, premium cheese, [and] fresh toppings.” Their website boasts bread without “artificial preservatives, flavorings, or dough conditioners”; cheeses that include “Alpine Light Swiss, sharp cheddar and creamy white American”; and vegetable toppings that are hand-picked and cut every morning.

High-level quality translates to the atmosphere of the restaurants as well. With their fun fonts and slogans and bright colors, the restaurants seem comforting, friendly, inviting and modern. They are currently located in high traffic areas like food courts, but the company is planning to open a brick and mortar shop in Boston this spring.

“When you go to a Cheeseboy restaurant, you should feel like you are in an A+ class restaurant, everything from customer service to quality of food to the efficiency of operation,” said Michael.

Additionally, Cheeseboy seeks to cultivate a culture beyond profit driven business, supporting an organization called Serious Fun Camps, which provides year-round camp experiences to children with chronic and life-threatening conditions. They have pledged to donate “100% of sales on one full, busy day at each new Cheeseboy location” they open. Donation boxes are also located at every register.

An Entrepreneurial Obsession

Michael attended the Yale School of Management when he was 29 years old. By then, he already had extensive business experience, having run two companies and working in marketing and business management for large companies. Entrepreneurship had been his goal since he was 17, and he never pursued any other career path. The first thing he did after graduating from Cornell was to start a company.

The idea for Cheeseboy originated from his personal experiences cooking grilled cheese for friends who would visit his apartment, and his own obsession with cheese in general. Friends suggested he do something entrepreneurial with the obsession.  So he began to look into it.

“I did the research, what kind of model it would be, whether it would be successful based on what other companies had or hadn’t done, then I looked into real estate to open up. I really needed a lot of capital to get a new brand off the ground, so I put it on the backburner.”

When Michael participated in the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship however, the idea came off the backburner. “I am forever indebted to YEI for giving me the launch pad and resources needed to get my company off the ground. I would not have this venture were it not for YEI,” said Michael.

The fellowship provided the time, resources, and training necessary for Michael to develop the venture. “It was there that I fine tuned my model. It was there that I met my investors. It was there that I met my initial mentors. It was there that I was encouraged to test [the venture] out in a real life environment, so that I could prove the model.”

“Nothing is as easy as you think it is” 

Michael’s biggest challenge in the business thus far has been building a cohesive and well functioning team. “It’s not just about hiring, it’s about retaining, letting people go – it’s a process that takes a long time. You don’t just post a job ad and hire people and all of a sudden everyone has the right skill set and works well. It takes a lot of trial and error,” said Michael. He sees building a team as the hardest part of any business, because once a good team is in place, then the daily operational challenges can be dealt with, but building the team comes first. 

In the process of building Cheeseboy, Michael has learned an extraordinary amount of things, so much that he finds them hard to pinpoint – ranging from real estate, to food production, to operations. In terms of the bigger picture, however, Michael noted that he learned “that nothing is as easy and as affordable as you might think it is. That’s probably the biggest education I had. No matter how much research you did to estimate something, how much planning goes into it, how conservative you think you might be in your budgeting, you just don’t know what you don’t know. You start learning those things as you go along in the process.”

For new startups and entrepreneurs, Michael has only one piece of advice: “Don’t start a company for the sake of starting a company. If there is no passion behind your idea and your desire to build a particular organization around a particular product or service, then it will be very difficult for you to enjoy success.”

By Claire Zhang

SilviaTerra, a forest management technology startup that participated in YEI’s 2010 Fellowship, has enjoyed its share of success. It won the $25K Sabin Environmental Business Plan Prize at Yale and was named “Most Promising Green Tech Company of the Year” in 2010 by the Connecticut Technology Council as part of their Innovation Pipeline Awards. Max Uhlenhuth (YC ’12), one of the founders of the company has been featured in Forbes as an “All-Star Entrepreneur.” Cofounder Zack Parisa (Forestry ’09) has been profiled in Bloomberg.  

Along with Chad Oliver (Pinchot Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale), Max and Zack are the cofounders of SilviaTerra, a startup whose “mission is to develop technology to enable superior forest management.” The company offers technology like “Timber Scout,” which uses satellite imagery and ground lots to accurately measure forest inventories, and “Plot Hound,” cruise software that runs on smartphones which allows users to navigate and collect data about forests in the field.

Max describes himself as “incurably optimistic,” and it comes through, even over Skype. He modestly notes that the company has made “a significant amount of money” adding that he thinks “for any startup, making any dollars is a good sign of success.                                   

According to the Forbes article, this significant amount of money totaled more than $200,000 in August 2012, and was expected to reach $1 million by the end of the year, and to triple next year. SilviaTerra is also getting ready to hire their first employee, a large step for any company.

A “MANUALLY INTENSIVE” START

The significance of the business opportunity developed organically over time.  Max came across the idea when he responded to a random email call for lab workers in the School of Forestry as an undergraduate. One of the graduate students in the lab had figured out a method of using satellites to determine species of trees in forest. 

“He was going to publish this in his master’s thesis, and I said, whoa slow down a sec. We started running the numbers and stuff, and it looked like it could really be a business,” he said.

This student was Zack. Thus, Max, Zack, and Chad, the professor running the lab, decided to start SilviaTerra and create a product based on Zack’s idea. 

“The product we came out with worked, but it wasn’t as efficient as it could be, scalable as it could be, as accurate as it could be. It was accurate enough, but we’re always trying to push the limits,” said Max. 

He emphasizes that the product was “not some magical wondrous fully-formed thing,” noting that entrepreneurship is hard. The beginning of SilviaTerra “was a manually intensive process,” requiring a month or two to set up the remote sensing technology for each new area.  “A lot of people think you can just put yourself in a garage for a year and build an amazing product and put it on the shelves and it’ll fly off – and that never happens.”

One of the biggest challenges that SilviaTerra currently faces is an industry that uneasily embraces change – after all, “trees aren’t going anywhere.” Max and Zack confronted the challenge by meeting with their customers individually to better understand their needs.

Max told the story of their “great southern road trip”: “Zack and I got into this tiny Ford Ranger truck and decided ‘We’re going to go meet anyone in the south who has more than 10,000 acres’. We had no plan besides getting in this truck. We would call people and ask if we could meet with them. We had really good meeting with all these guys, but we were ultra ultra low budget. We would stay in the most disgusting places, like the 30 dollar a night motels. It was just sometimes cleaner to not take a shower. It was a good time. We’re hoping to not ever have to do that ever again.”

STARTING A MOVEMENT

SilviaTerra is a company built on data. “Our word is our business,” Max said, promising to never overpromise and under-deliver. Max passionately believes in the strength of his product, and it is increasingly evident as the company continues to grow.

Max sees SilviaTerra as pioneering quantitative environmental management of renewable resources. Industries like oil, coal, and gas are extremely quantitatively sophisticated, but that level of rigor has - until now - been impossible for messy, vibrant, complicated things like forestry, biodiversity, and erosion control. “If you can change the way we interact with complex natural systems, that’s a huge thing for sustainability, and it’s a better quality of life for everybody,” he said. “Right now, we can give you better, next level data, and we can make more decisions with this better data.

“There was never really doubt in my mind that it wasn’t going to work,” he said. “The thing that’s different about this is that it’s a super real problem that people will pay dollars for right now. It’s just a categorically better solution that solves a real problem – it’s very tangible.” 

SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS

This theme of solving real problems runs through Max’s experience in entrepreneurship. He points out that there is much more freedom in a startup to solve problems one is interested in, as opposed to trying to turn the “cruise ship” of a large corporation. In entrepreneurship, one can work hard to solve problems that matter, instead of working hard to make someone else rich. 

For new entrepreneurs, Max encourages them to seek out older people with operating experience in industry and have them show you the challenges they're facing.  It's a great way to find real, tangible problems that other young entrepreneurs are never even aware of.

“Most startups that come out of college are limited by people’s experience as students,” he pointed out. “A lot of the startups are some sort of app, some sort of online food delivery service, some sort of dating thing. They’re all very first world problems. For another thing, every other student in the world is thinking about those kinds of companies.”

His advice to would-be changemakers? “Go out there, scout some random unconventional problems, and solve them.”

By Tiffany Pang

More than 200 students, alumni, and entrepreneurs pooled into the Yale Law School Levinson Auditorium on September 21 for the second annual Yale Entrepreneurs Conference to learn about the latest trends, news, and ventures from Yale entrepreneurs and watch five student ventures compete for the first-ever Lippman Prize awards. 

Following opening remarks from Bruce Alexander, Yale’s Vice President for New Haven & State Affairs & Campus Development, James Boyle, Director of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, introduced three panels on commercializing technology, data economy, and Internet everywhere. 

“It was interesting to get the researcher and entrepreneur – the new entrepreneurs and the veteran entrepreneurs – and venture capitalists sitting next to each other, talking about their perspectives,” Claire Henly (YC ’12), a panelist on commercializing technology who participated in the YEI summer fellowship in 2012, said in an interview. 

One of the highlights of the conference was the Lippman Pitch Prize Competition. Five pre-selected finalists gave five-minute pitches of their ventures for a chance to win one of two prizes: the $25,000 Lippman Prize award and the $5,000 people’s choice award. These student founders pitched their hearts out to a panel of investors and entrepreneurs:

• Arjun Ganesan (SOM ’12) for medical diagnostics company, Ancera (YEI ’11)
• Paul Christensen (SOM ’13) for 3D sketching application, Mental Canvas (YEI ’12)
• Claire Henly for electrochemical desalination cell company, RedOx (YEI ’12)
• Jessica Cole (YC ’12) for local event calendar app, Roammeo (YEI ’11)
• Max Uhlenhuth (YC ’12) for forest inventory surveyor, SilviaTerra (YEI ’10)

The final panel included Bob Adelson (’82, ’85 JD), Sean Glass (YC ’02), Miles Lasater (YC ’01), and Harley Lippman. More information about the finalists can be found here.

"The Yale Entrepreneurs Conference was an exciting opportunity to learn from alumni and students,” Hilary Barr (YC ’12), who participated in the YEI summer fellowship in 2012, said of the conference. “The highlight of the conference for me was hearing pitches from past YEI fellows. It was inspirational to see how much recent graduates have achieved. 

As the attendees disbanded for break, they cast their votes for their favorite student ventures and mingled with student entrepreneurs over lunch. After the judges’ deliberations and counting the attendees’ votes, Ancera and Mental Canvas both walked away with awards. Ancera was awarded the $25,000 Lippman Prize. Mental Canvas was voted for the people’s choice award, winning $5,000.

After lunch, keynote speaker Kevin Ryan ’85 of Gilt Groupe gave a stirring speech on his experience as an entrepreneur and the trials and tribulations during his journey.

Student entrepreneurs found Ryan’s talk inspiring and honest. “I loved the insights from Kevin Ryan,” said Daniel Wolchonok (SOM ’13), a participant of the 2012 YEI summer fellowship. “He talked about how Business Insider didn't do any advertising.  Make sure the quality of your content is so great that it speaks for itself.”

Last year marked the first Yale Entrepreneurs Conference with 125 attendees at the Yale West Campus.