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Going Solo
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Going Solo
Wharton BPC participants choose singular path for learning.
Aviator Charles Lindbergh, mountaineer Reinhold Messner, guitarist Jimmie Hendrix. Each is revered is his field because he ventured alone where others wouldn't — or couldn't — go.
Lindbergh, of course, piloted the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic. Messner climbed Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen. Hendrix reinvented guitar-playing. They were soloists. They succeeded with little help from others and, when they failed, had no one with whom to share the shame.
Eliot Jarrett and YanPei Chao know the feeling. Though neither would claim kinship with Lindbergh, Messner or Hendrix, they too have felt the pressure of performing alone. Both made the finals of the annual Wharton Business Plan Competition — Jarrett last year, Chao this year — without any Wharton teammates, or for that matter, any official teammates at all.
Sure, they had help; both have buddies who helped out with the technical details of their plans. A friend of Jarrett's in Penn's engineering school acted as his technology guru. And a programmer buddy of Chao's provided technical expertise on mission-critical computing; if his plan becomes a business, they'll pursue it together.
But when they gave their presentations in front of the panel of judges and an audience of their Wharton peers and professors at the Venture Finals, they were on their own.
Jarrett, who's slated to graduate in May, was a junior when he entered Distributed Resource Imaging in the Wharton BPC. The company would rent time on Internet-linked PCs when they're idle, tie them together to form a virtual network and lease the network to Hollywood studios for rendering animated movies. Animators such as Pixar spend tens of millions of dollars a year on "render farms," rooms full of computers for creating their cartoons.
Jarrett thought up the idea as a sophomore and was reluctant to recruit someone else. "I wanted to do it on my own," he says. "Based on my experience with group projects, a lot of time gets wasted in meetings. So maybe I had an advantage."
For Jarrett, soloing meant not just writing his business plan and making the financial projections but also conducting a survey of 150 of his fellow students. A mentor had told him that he needed to show that people would be willing to share — for a price, of course — their PCs. "I worked about 17 hours a day during spring break last year," he says.
Even so, he realized as he refined his plan that he didn't have all the knowledge of computing and networks that he needed. He recruited a friend, Josh Gilper, a graduate of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, to help out. Gilper helped him build a network prototype and fleshed out the technical specifications.
When it came time for the presentations at the Venture Finals, Jarrett was once again on his own. Worse, he had to go first.
Where other speakers typically take the podium surrounded by their teammates, he sidled up alone. He wasn't worried about the 10-minute presentation itself — "I'm comfortable speaking in front of groups," he says — but was concerned about the subsequent 10 minutes of judges' questions. He fared well. Distributed Resource Imagery ended up winning the Frederick H. Gloeckner Award as the best undergraduate team in the 2004 competition.
In some ways, YanPei Chao faced even greater obstacles. His proposed company, Valverde Computing, would bring servers and open software systems to the world of mission-critical computing. "These are the systems that are used to run stock exchanges, railroad switching, online retailers — places where you can't afford a second of downtime," he explains. Today, these sorts of applications typically run on costly mainframe computers.
As a second-year student in the Wharton West executive MBA program in San Francisco, Chao couldn't attend the on-campus seminars that are a key part of the yearlong Wharton BPC. Instead, he gathered information via Wharton's websites and improvised.
"I relied on my classmates. I had some VCs and serial entrepreneurs among my classmates. In between classes and over lunch, I'd ask, ‘How does this work and how does that work?' I can go through a whole document on how to write a business plan, or I can sit down with one my VC friends and he'll say, ‘Forget that section. No one reads that.' Or, ‘If you can't get this down to two pages, no one's going to look at it.'"
Adding to the Wharton West camaraderie is the fact that the students reside in a hotel during the periods that they meet — every other week, typically Friday and Saturday. In the evenings, they'll gather in the hotel lounge, swapping stories and sharing ideas. "I helped a friend get started with his business plan by mapping it out on a cocktail napkin," Chao says.
Like Jarrett, Chao got aid from a friend with his plan. He and Charlie Johnson met through a Bay Area Buddhist group. Valverde sprang from their casual conversations about computing — Chao works for a broadband company; Johnson is a programmer. "Charlie is the tech mastermind," Chao says. "I put together the business plan, did the market research and figured out that the financial industry was the best place to start."
Johnson also came to the Venture Finals in Philadelphia. But Chao did the 10-minute presentation on his own. He wasn't intimidated by facing the judges and the crowd alone. He was used to "soloing"; he has done it since he was a teenager.
He grew up Argentina, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. His father owned and edited a Chinese language newspaper there. (The name of his proposed company is taken from Spanish, which he speaks fluently, and means "Green Valley.") For high school, his parents sent him to the United States.
"The idea was that the rest of my family would come soon, but that didn't happen for another 10 years," he says. After high school came college and a master's at Cornell University.
Even with that background, the combination of working full-time, doing an executive MBA and soloing in the Wharton BPC posed a challenge.
"You don't have any downtime," he says. "You become really good at prioritizing and time management. I hang out with my friends a lot less and don't watch TV. You know how sometimes you'll come home from work and just sit down on the couch for ten minutes to chill out. I never do that anymore."
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