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Wharton's VIP program fledges de-mining firm and other aspiring entrepreneurs.
For Samuel Reeves, the Wharton Venture Initiation Program offered a chance to cultivate a business idea that he'll be the first to admit "isn't going to be the next Google." After all, its beneficiaries live in some of the poorest, most war-ravaged countries in the world. And its potential customers are nonprofits, operating under tight budgets.
Reeves, a senior in Wharton's undergrad program, and his partner, industrial designer Josh Koplin, want to sell inexpensive robots for clearing land mines. They call their company Humanistic Robotics, and their device would be used in places such as Bosnia and Afghanistan, where leftover mines routinely cripple people. Reeves was accepted into VIP last spring.
VIP, which is an educational program of the Wharton Small Business Development Center and Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, operates differently from conventional incubators, where tenants get offices and share hard assets such as labs, scientific equipment, copiers, fax machines, even coffee makers. Instead, VIP emphasizes the development of the idea behind each student-entrepreneur's business. If all goes well, students emerge from it with a polished business plan and a deep understanding of the market they aim to enter.
VIP participants do have access to voice mail, cubicles and office equipment. But far more important are the mentoring they receive and the grants for which they're eligible. "We've gotten a lot of very good advice, more even than we ever expected," says Kofi Kankam, who earned his MBA in May and co-founded an entertainment software company called QPlay Interactive.
Reeves, for his part, paired up with mentor Skip Shuda, who owns a Wayne, Pa., consultancy called Post Destiny. "We meet with Skip every two weeks or so to talk about our progress," Reeves says. "That gives us pressure to keep moving forward. We were going to try to do this on our own but having Skip is extra impetus."
Prof. Raffi Amit, academic director of the Goergen Enrepreneurial Management Program, formulated the idea for VIP. It grew out of his experience of teaching the core entrepreneurship class. "The class didn't go far enough in letting people explore their business ideas and examine their viability," he explains. "This is a way for students to learn by doing under the guidance of an experienced mentor. It's a natural extension of the coursework."
Amit also helped spearhead the creation of the Snider Seed Award program within the Venture Initiation Program. "The idea is to help students to realize the potential that their ideas have," he said. "We're careful about how we do it — we aren't taking anything in return."
Reeves received
one of the grants. "It's
really helped our efforts to get the proof of concept working," he
says.
Koplin, a student at New York's Pratt Institute, came up with the basic
design for their de-mining machine — a cheap robot pushing a big metal roller.
The weight of the roller detonates the mines. He got interested in clearing mines
when he visited Croatia.
"Before I went, I read a State Department travel advisory that said don't step off paved roads because there are half million land mines. So then I'm in Zagreb, and there are a lot of guys begging, and they're all maimed. It didn't click until I started asking around, and the answer was, ‘Land mines.'"
"So I came up with this stupid idea, which was to take a 55-gallon steel drum, fill it with water and have a robot push it around. I came back home and did a little research and realized that this could work. Then Sam and I got talking about starting a business, and this came to the forefront pretty fast."
The key
is making their machine cheap. Plenty of effective de-mining machines
exist — typically armored tractors and trucks — but
they cost from $250,000 to $1 million. As a result, they're not
as widely used as they could be.
The other challenge is getting people in the world of humanitarian
de-mining, typically engineers and former soldiers, to listen
to a pair of students. "We
initially ran into a lot of skepticism," Koplin says.
Among the skeptics was Alex Griffiths, a former British military officer who works at the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian De-mining. When Reeves called, he told him their technology wouldn't work. But three weeks later, he called back to say he'd reconsidered. He asked if Reeves and Koplin would be willing to do a study on the potential of rollers for mine clearance. His organization ended up sending them on a three-week fact-finding trip to places such as Afghanistan, Croatia, Bosnia, Thailand and Cambodia.
"We flew to Kabul on Afghan Airlines, which the FAA recommends against," Reeves recalls. "We had to corkscrew down to land to avoid surface-to-air missiles."
Reeves and Koplin have been able to incorporate what they learned on the trip — officially, they were consulting for Griffiths' group — into their work at VIP and into Humanistic Robotics' business plan.
VIP also has helped Paul Baker, a Wharton junior, refine his plan. And if his idea isn't as exotic as Reeves and Koplin's, his potential market is bigger — and far safer to access. Baker's company, College Deck, operates online exchanges for college textbooks. "It's like an online dating service for textbooks," he says. It helps students who are selling books find schoolmates who want to buy them.
After getting tired of paying a lot for books, he and two friends set up online exchanges at Penn and Virginia Tech. Baker entered VIP in the fall of 2003, and the sites went live in the spring.
For Baker, as for Reeves, the biggest benefit of VIP is the feedback he receives about his ideas and his company's progress.
"They do this ‘devil's advocate' session where they bring in several people — Wharton people and entrepreneurs — and you present the direction of your company. I portrayed my vision and got assurances from them that I was going in the right direction. What I thought was risky, they said was the right way to go."
Kofi Kankam and his partner, Kevin Cadette, who also earned his MBA in May, find the regular talks by local entrepreneurs, which are also part of VIP, just as valuable. Plus, VIP has given them continued access to experts at Wharton, despite their graduation. (They applied to the program while still students.) They return to campus regularly, even though they're also tenants of a small incubator in New Jersey.
"We're staying until they kick us out," Kankam says.
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Wharton Venture Initiation Program
Wharton Small Business Development Center
Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs
Goergen Enrepreneurial Management Program