Hesam Panahi has spent nearly all his academic life at the University of Houston. As both an undergrad and graduate management and information systems student, he attended classes in the same building that housed the school’s entrepreneurship program—and still never knew it existed.
“We’ve had this program since ’94 and I just found out about it two or three years ago,” says Panahi, who is now a clinical assistant professor at the university’s C.T. Bauer School of Business. It’s a startling piece of information to know about the guy whose idea it was to open the university’s first startup accelerator, Red Labs.
However surprising, it does speak to the silos prevalent in academia in general and, more specifically, to Houston’s reputation as a commuter school. “U of H has 40,000 students,” he says. “I didn’t talk to anyone outside my class until senior year.”
Certainly, the presence of Red Labs, which hosted its first class of student-entrepreneurs this past spring, is an indication that things are evolving. Its Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship was ranked third among the nation’s undergraduate entrepreneurship programs by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine last year.
Panahi says he realized there was an opportunity to leverage that recognition. “We have 3-Day Startup, which is great,” he says, of the program he founded where groups of students get mentoring and assistance to create tech startups in one weekend. “But what happens Monday morning? How do we kick-start that energy; how do you keep that momentum going?”
He added: “I would have students coming into my office, saying, ‘I have this idea. I don’t know what to do.’ ”
When Panahi started having that conversation 10 times in a week—and most often with students who were not entrepreneurship majors—he came up with Red Labs. He laughs, saying, “The whole accelerator trend is … trendy.”
But his boss, Latha Ramchand, the Bauer school dean, signed off and gave the fledgling accelerator funds and support. Last year, an underused MBA lounge became the accelerator’s physical home on campus and, by this past February, a dozen student-founders had joined the accelerator.
Among the six startups are Flinger.co, a Web service that enables users to control the TV remote from laptops, smartphones, or tablets, and VocaLesson, which aims to connect voice teachers with students for lessons over the Internet.
Panahi’s hunch that a wider group of students was hungry to be part of a startup seems to have panned out. Only three of the dozen students in Red Labs’ inaugural class are enrolled in entrepreneurship as a major.
