Yale Entrepreneurial Society and co-founder of Higher One Holdings (NYSE: [[ticker:ONE]]), a $1 billion market cap technology and payment services company focused on higher education; Bob Casey, (Y 2011), founder and COO of YouRenew, a company that recycles and resells mobile phones, tablets, and laptops; and Michael Inwald, (Y MBA 2010), founder and president of Cheeseboy, a chain of grilled cheese fast food outlets backed by the Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt hotel chain.
One of the liveliest panels was moderated by Xconomist Katie Rae, (Y MBA 1997), managing director of TechStars Boston, who asked these budding entrepreneurs such intriguing questions as: “How did you and your co-founders split up the equity?” (answer: “It wasn’t easy.” And, “Were you all children of entrepreneurs?” (answer: many were, but some were children of physicians and academics as well).
A number of the young entrepreneurs had also taken time off from Yale in order to build their companies, and some wondered if and when they might finish their degrees, to the consternation of some of their parents.
Jonathan Rothberg (Y 1991 PhD), a founder of CuraGen, 454 Life Sciences, and Ion Torrent, provided attendees with a fascinating description of his own entrepreneurial journey in the genetic sequencing market, where he left two of the companies he founded and went on to found a third, selling his most recent venture to Life Technologies for $725 million in 2010.
Rothberg’s advice to entrepreneurs: “It’s good to have control of your company.” “Things always go bad at some point.” And, “I learned that not everyone has good intentions.”
John Kao (Y 1972, 1977 M.D), chairman of Institute for Large Scale Innovation, ran a Web futures panel with Marc Cenedella (Y 1992), founder and CEO of TheLadders.com; Jennifer Fleiss (Y 2005), president and co-founder of Rent the Runway; and former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt (Y 1990).
Cenedella encouraged Yale entrepreneurs to focus on finding “the unique new ways to get people to do things online,” while pointing out that “government doesn’t create jobs, anymore than museums paint masterpieces, or hospitals create children.”
Fleiss felt strongly that more basic technology should be taught at the undergraduate level to all students, who need to be more familiar with how Internet technology actually works. Rosenblatt predicts that many successful Web ventures will include advertising, commerce, and subscriptions in their business models and “preferably, all three.”
On the global entrepreneurship and investment front, Tom Barry (Y 1966), founder and CEO of Zephyr Management, talked about investment opportunities and entrepreneurship in India and Africa. He said that India presents a challenge in “transitioning family businesses to professional businesses,” and Africa, despite fewer ways to exit investments, holds great potential to “find business models that can be Pan African”.
Jimmy Liu (Y 1977), executive managing director and COO of W.I. Harper Group, presented different venture investment models working in China today, including his firm’s own strategy to invest in the Innovation Works Development Fund, a $180 million incubation fund founded by Kai-Fu Lee, the former CEO of Google China. The fund has hired over 700 engineers to work on over 34 projects in digital media, mobile, cloud computing, healthcare, and cleantech.
The final panel, appropriately titled “Extreme Entrepreneurship,” focused on the challenges and rewards of founding, operating, and financing life sciences companies.
Panelists included Xconomists Noubar Afeyan (Yale parent, Class of 2012), managing partner and CEO of Flagship Ventures, and David Kabakoff (Y 1974 PhD), executive partner, Sofinnova Ventures; and life science executives Jay Kranzler, (Y 1985 PhD, 1986 M.D.), chairman emeritus of Cypress Bioscience; and Norman Selby (Y 1974), senior advisor of Perseus Capital and former president and CEO, Transform Pharmaceuticals.
Afeyan described the challenge in founding life sciences ventures as follows: “Starting a [life sciences] company is an adaptive process. We expose our ventures to selectivity with constant experimentation”–very Darwinian indeed. Selby, one of the life science executives on the panel, put it this way: “All small businesses hit a brick wall. It’s what the CEO does after impact that really matters.”
If you think that Yale is discouraged by how hard it is to found new life sciences ventures, you need look no further than the new 136-acre West Campus, the site of the conference, a $1 billion asset value property purchased by the university from Bayer Healthcare in 2007 for $109 million—a site where at least five new multi-disciplinary biomedical institutes have been recently founded.
The Yale Entrepreneurs conference drew over 120 attendees, a good start, but many of the alumni attendees clamored for more student attendees—which would be a healthy indication of interest from the wider Yale community in supporting the best and brightest Eli entrepreneurs.
