Posts Tagged ‘seattle entrepreneurship’

Angel Eyes: MBAs view entrepreneurship through an angel investor lens

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Entrepreneurs count on angel investors to provide seed-stage start-up funding, but very few entrepreneurship students ever get to set foot in an angel group as a member.

Enter CIE’s new MBA course: Angel Investing. Taught by Rob Wiltbank, the Foster School’s Neal Dempsey Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship and associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Willamette University, Angel Investing is a year-long course in which second-year MBAs learn about investing by participating as members in Seattle angel groups and making actual investments.

Wiltbank launched the course at Willamette University three years ago, and the class was recently included in Inc. Magazine’s list of the top 10 entrepreneurship courses in the country. But Wiltbank has long-standing ties to the University of Washington and Seattle. He earned his PhD in strategic management from the UW Foster School in 2005 and is a partner at Montlake Capital.

The class is clearly a departure from other MBA courses. “One of the good things about being in school is that you learn how things should be done. One of the bad things is that you don’t get to do them,” says Mark Partridge, a second-year MBA in the class.  “It’s rare that you get actual experience doing something as extraordinary as angel investing.”

“It’s a great integration program,” says Wiltbank, who has students in Seattle’s Alliance of Angels, Puget Sound Venture Club, Northwest Energy Angels, Seraph, WINGS, and Keiretsu Forum. “Students watch and evaluate pitches, identify potential investment opportunities, and perform extensive due diligence.” Ultimately, the class will make two or three $25,000 to $50,000 investments in promising start-ups.

Sound exciting? Definitely! Sound easy? Definitely not. “There’s a vertical learning curve,” admits Wiltbank. “Much of the content is unfamiliar, and students who excel in this course must be true entrepreneurs—self-motivated, with a willingness to put themselves out there.”

Students spend the year with a group of intelligent, savvy investors. After the course, they will know a great pitch when they see one, and those who become entrepreneurs will know what investors are looking for. “Their ability to pitch is dramatically enhanced,” says Wiltbank, adding that having this experience on their resume will make graduates very desirable to future employers. In an interview, he insists, “it’s the ultimate closer.”

Mark Partridge is just one quarter into the course, but he agrees that the experience he is gaining is an investment in his future. As for whether it will help him close on a future job, he smiles. “I’ll let you know.”

Tags: ,
Posted in Entrepreneurship, MBA | No Comments »

Keep it rolling: adventures in food truck entrepreneurship

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

Ice cream lovers line up for a taste of Molly Moon’s Ice Cream

You’ve seen the magazine covers (“Seattle’s Best Food Trucks 2012”) and read the headlines (“the mobile revolution has begun!”), but you need only look both ways on a busy Seattle street to see that we’ve got food truck fever.

In 2007 just a handful of sometimes-questionable mobile eateries roamed Seattle’s roads. Five years later, city regulations have changed, opening the door for a flood of high-quality food truck entrepreneurs. Food truck “pods” are popping up all over town – there’s one in South Lake Union, home to Amazon and its throngs of employees, and another recently opened downtown at Second and Pike. The food truck trend might lead you to think that food truck entrepreneurship is easy – roll out a truck, and watch the money roll in.

Not so fast, said Molly Neitzel, owner of Molly Moon’s Ice Cream. Neitzel, along with Josh Henderson of Skillet, Marshall Jett of Veraci Pizza, and Danielle Custer of Monte Cristo, were part of a panel on food truck entrepreneurship that took place during CIE’s annual ENTREWeek in October. Food trucks turned out to be one of the most popular features of the nine events offered during Entreweek 2012. Why so popular? CIE not only hosted foodie entrepreneurs, but their trucks as well. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to forgo the usual campus fare for wood-fired pizza from a clay oven on wheels or salted caramel ice cream from a gourmet ice cream truck?

Neitzel went on to say that after opening two successful ice cream stores in Seattle’s Wallingford and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, she thought it would be fun to add an ice cream truck to the family. It turned out to be a logistical nightmare. “Since the launch of the truck, I’ve opened three more shops,” she said, adding, “I’ll never open a truck again.”

Running a food truck is demanding, and owners face financial and logistical issues that don’t come up in a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Custer, the newest owner on the food truck panel, had opened her gourmet grilled cheese truck, Monte Cristo, just a week earlier. “We’ve had four lunch services,” she said, “and the truck has been in the shop four times.”

It’s clear that food truck ownership is not for the faint of heart. So why are so many jumping on the food truck bandwagon? Perhaps because mobile food entrepreneurs know that a food truck can place them on the road to success. Food entrepreneurs see opportunity in using trucks as PR vehicles:  develop a fan base with mobile food and those fans will follow once you find a permanent home.

Skillet is a great example. Henderson began serving burgers and poutine out of his silver airstream trailer in August 2007. By the time he opened Skillet Diner in 2011, the Skillet brand was hugely popular. Further success followed, and the brand now boasts a second location, Skillet Counter, plus a cookbook, a second food truck for catering, and products like Bacon Jam. Skillet’s success can be attributed in large part to the dedicated following of devotees who got their first taste of Skillet’s food when it was only served street-side.

Like Henderson, Marshall Jett opened his brick-and-mortar pizzeria five years after introducing his mobile Veraci pizza oven to Seattle farmer’s markets. “By the time we built Veraci in Ballard, we had a huge following,” he said. He added that the pizzeria’s opening coincided with the financial crisis in 2008, and remarked, “If we hadn’t established our business the way that we did and developed the momentum  we had with our customers and our product, we probably would’ve gone out of business.”

All this transitioning from mobile to mortar may make food entrepreneurs feel a bit more stable, but it doesn’t mean the food truck trend is going away anytime soon. Even those with restaurants still keep their trucks running. Sure, owning a food truck can be a headache, and it’s probably not the key to riches, but they’re a great way to test a concept, build an audience, and be part of Seattle’s rolling food revolution.

Watch the ENTREweek 2012 Food Truck Panel video
Read another food truck blog post: Apricots, creativity, and food trucks.

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Entrepreneurship | No Comments »

Standing room only: celebrating “entrepreneurial speed”

Friday, June 15th, 2012

Outside the sun set gloriously over Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains.  Inside, even the sky couldn’t distract the entrepreneurs, student teams, judges, press and guests in Seattle’s Pier 66 ballroom from the excitement of the main event—the 15th annual University of Washington Business Plan Competition (BPC) awards.  Having no idea how the finalists had placed for the $68,000 in prizes, the crowd listened with rapt attention to each team’s one-minute pitch.

The diversity of the four finalist start-ups made it difficult for audience members to venture a guess who would take grand prize. Would it be Xylemed or Joey Bra? Bicycle Billboards or Urban Harvest? As each student ended his or her team pitch minute, you could almost hear guests thinking, “Fantastic idea!”

What Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens then shared during his keynote speech was how to get such fantastic ideas to market by leveraging what he calls “Zulily time.” Called “an entrepreneurial speed freak if there ever was one” by Geekwire, Cavens emphasized not only the importance of “going fast” but of using the Internet as a tool to tweak the offering, making it better each day along the way. “Don’t spend five months on your business plan—apologies to the professors in the room! Put that plan together, and try it, innovate on it, adjust it, move forward.”  Now launching 1,400 new styles of kid products a day, Zulily focuses on beating rivals to the punch while delivering exceptional customer service. “It’s what we do every single day,” Cavens explained.

The BPC prize winners are now putting that sentiment into practice.

The $25,000 WRF Capital Grand Prize winner, Urban Harvest, will soon convert one of Microsoft’s Redmond parking garage rooftops into an active garden, allowing them to “grow their own” lettuce and herbs rather than continue to truck their food service salad fixings from the Salinas Valley. The team of two Foster School of Business MBAs, Chris Sheppard (MBA/JD)  and Chris Bajuk (MBA/MS real estate), intend to put many more  commercial rooftops to better use as hydroponic gardens that serve building owners as well as the local community. In addition to delivering the benefits of local agriculture, the Urban Harvest co-founders, both former military, have made hiring fellow veterans a priority.

Xylemed, the winner of the $10,000 Jones Foundation second-place prize, provides cloud-based electronic patient tracking and operations management system for hospitals. Their  goal is to eliminate patient care white boards used in surgery departments and replace them with 60-inch screens that can be updated with current information from any hospital computer. Ben Andersen and Marc Brown led the team of Foster School Technology Management MBAs that designed the system.  Xylemed’s product is already used in several of Seattle’s top hospitals—including Harborview Medical Center and the UW Medical Center—to improve safety and communications while reducing costs and administrative headaches.

After gaining incredible national press coverage with their initial product launch, Joey Bra’s fashion- forward bra with a discreet cell-phone pocket garnered the team one of the BPC’s $5,000 finalist prizes. Marketed initially to female college students who need a place to stow their phone and keys while out on the town, the two Foster School undergraduate co-founders, Kyle Bartlow and Mariah Gentry, are now working quickly to introduce a sports bra version to market.

Finally, Biking Billboards, which brings mobile marketing focused on building strong, personal customer connections, won the second $5,000 finalist prize.  The company, whose founding team includes Foster undergraduates Curtis Howell and Claire Koerner as well as two non-students, is now expanding to Los Angeles. As existing clients T-Mobile and PEMCO can attest, Biking Billboard “brand ambassadors” are able to more authentically engage with micro-targeted consumers on specialized routes.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Entrepreneurship, MBA, University of Washington | No Comments »

Lacing together the business of NanoString

Friday, July 31st, 2009

Amber Ratcliffe (MBA 2003)—Seattle entrepreneur—arrived at the Foster School’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) with the high energy and laser focus of a creative student about to start something big, and by all accounts she had come to the right place.

CIE’s core mission is to inspire, inform and empower entrepreneurship for undergraduates and graduate students across the University of Washington through course work in finance, strategy and marketing as well as with internships and mentoring.

“She was engaged the whole way and she was a rock star the whole way,” said Connie Bourassa-Shaw, CIE’s director. “She was one of those students you knew would make things happen.”

The first thing Ratcliffe and fellow MBA student Aaron Coe made happen was to take first place in one of the Foster School’s premier and most rigorous events – CIE’s Business Plan Competition. The plan they submitted was to create a company called NanoString Technologies based on molecule tracking technology developed by Dr. Krassen Dimitrov.

The next thing Ratcliffe made happen was to secure $8 million to build a marketable prototype of that technology, which essentially barcodes an individual molecule in a biological sample so it can be tracked, characterized and counted.

Now, with $30 million in Series C venture capital financing added in June 2009 to $11 million in earlier total investments, it’s clear that Ratcliffe had, in fact, started something big.

Idea turns business + action plan

Ratcliffe recently shared her role in building NanoString at the CIE seminar series “From Invention to Start-up.”

In her lecture, she detailed NanoString’s evolution from a scientific idea, developed at Seattle’s seminal Institute for Systems Biology, into a complex business and how that success challenged her to grow into new responsibilities as well as to let go of many key company decisions.

The idea, she said, came to life in the lab. Ratcliffe, then a research scientist at the institute, realized that she simply didn’t know enough business for NanoString to survive in the turbulent waters of start-ups. So, she enrolled in the Foster MBA program looking for answers to one simple question: “What’s every single thing I’m going to need to know to run a small business?”

CIE was the key program she found at Foster for not only helping her build that fundamental business understanding, but also supercharge her ability to write an effect business plan, get that plan exposed to critical eyes and expand her network of go-to people.

Winning CIE’s Business Plan Competition was her first big break – the money NanoString won became the seed money for Ratcliffe to begin building the business. In fact, CIE has awarded $812,000 to student companies in the past 12 years as well as involved more than 300 judges, mentors, sponsors and supporters each year from the alumni and business community.

“I feel really fortunate because we had a lot of exposure during the Business Plan Competition,” she said. “So, I felt like I had people that I could call and ask questions. CIE is a very good resource for those kinds of things.”

Founder turns team member

In addition to the Business Plan Competition, the broad business education Ratcliffe sought at Foster paid off. From her role as a founder seeking friends and investors, she went on to file patents, spend time in the lab, write protocols that robots could follow, brand the company, market it and even write press releases.

As the company grew, she and her team had to bring in more people with more experience in each of these areas, including a CEO who had the A-level contacts to put them in front of A-level investors.

“As a founder,” she told a lecture hall nearly full of UW students, faculty and staff who were either interested in starting a company or simply curious about the process, “it can be really difficult to step back and let somebody else own those areas and to give up some decision-making ability.”

That is a necessary evolution of the company and the founder’s career because, Ratcliffe said, the company’s success comes before the founder’s own personal goals.

“Hiring those people really helped accelerate the rapid pace of decision making you have to have in order to get a product developed and out the door before you run out of money,” she said.

Exemplifying one of CIE’s key attributes – alumni coming back on campus, sharing their experience and dolling out healthy doses of advice – Ratcliffe ended her lecture with these thoughts:

“I’ve been working on this nine years and we have not all become millionaires and we might not ever have that happen,” she said. “My take away is that you should be really clear about what the opportunities are. … You really need to look at the market, the application of your technology, the freedom to operate.”

“Most importantly, I think you need to do it because you are passionate about the technology, you are passionate about your idea.”

Tags: ,
Posted in Entrepreneurship | No Comments »