Babson College Demo Day: Entrepreneurs, Startups, & Pitches

We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of ‘success’ from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Randy Komisar

As we profiled before, Babson's Summer Venture Program produced 17 undergrad startups and 6 MBA startups. With the growing trend of college startups and entrepreneurs, it begs the question; why are these students starting companies?

It seems there are two ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, you have a group of entrepreneurs who are simply pursueing the experience itself. Classes aren't enough, and certainly don't provide enough real life business experience. So, they satisfy their desire to learn by starting a company and view it as a way to accelerate their career. These entrepreneurs are pursuing their interests simply because they're passionate and believe they can change the world. This is distinctly different from those who simply seek to make a quick buck as the end all game. These entrepreneurs value success in the most traditional sense of the word – money, influence, and fame. I'm not sure if one extreme makes for a more successful entrepreneur than the other. But, it does seem that all of the startups and entrepreneurs from the Babson Demo Day fall in all varying degrees.

Alight Learning, a K-12 education software company, is probably one of my favorite student startups, even outside Babson’s Demo Day.  I’ve in fact, I've even told co-founders, Evan Morikawa and Christina Nguyen, that if I wasn’t at Blank Label, I would be applying for a job at their company. My love of Alight Learning mostly has to do with the fact that they do what they do for the reasons that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and coining a Kawasakism, Making Meaning. They do not over-extend themselves on unrealistic five-year DCF forecasts. And as far as I’m aware, they don’t bother with R, still using Excel. The driving force at Alight is fundamentally for the love of their customer, school administrators and teachers. The other thing I really like about Alight, and something fairly typical of Olin students is that they really enjoy the experience of creating something really meaningful together. Although self-confident, they aren’t arrogant and still appreciate that they are learning through all of this.

This is fairly different to IVD Media and its founders Nick Horvath and Marc Mallegni.

IVD Media is about putting informational videos in hotel rooms for local vendors which is a huge opportunity if the execution and sales pipelines are done properly. However when you compare Nick and Marc’s vernacular with Evan’s, it’s almost amusing how different it is. Nick and Marc are all about traveling between Boston and New York City on a funding marathon. They talk all day about funding valuations, their network of institutional investors, and dollar signs. IVD Media comes from an idea that could make boatloads of money, which is worlds apart from the idea of making education meaningful for millions of students.

Thinking back to genesis of Blank Label, it very much started out with an opportunistic spot of arbitrage in the market. It wasn’t founded upon a passionate need to solve a great problem. I originally aimed to receive financing, validation and wide acclaim for the company. However, the company has evolved and I've developed as an entrepreneur. We've come to realize that Blank Label will create more value in the long run if we focus on the customer first and then expanding, rather then searching for funding upfront.

Our goal is to change the way young men buy clothes and express themselves by offering personalized apparel. To do this, we're first targeting guys who like to shop, care about the way they look, and who aim to be trend setters. Initially, its a smaller market opportunity. However, it'll enable us to better connect with customers and build a stronger base for future growth. Likewise, we believe its a good way to capture those early adopters.