Being Your Own Boss
While the poor state of the economy may be drying up job opportunities all over the nation, there is one potential career path that is less subject to the perils of the job market: entrepreneurship. Starting one’s own venture is becoming a more and more popular career choice among Harvard students, a trend that is likely aided by the fact that entrepreneurs are in complete control of their own employment. But while post-college entrepreneurs are able to concentrate on their ventures as their primary occupation, Harvard students face a completely different experience because of the role Harvard plays in their daily lives as well as in their budding businesses.
“I think that in some ways we are limited by the fact that we’re students, but in other ways we’re not as tied down by adult responsibilities,” says Shankar G. Ramaswamy ’11. “And I think that’s an advantage to being a student entrepreneur.” While undergraduates certainly have their fair share of academic and extracurricular responsibilities, the student lifestyle removes many of the responsibilities of adult, post-college life, such as earning a basic living or providing for a family. The security of a college environment allows students to explore their entrepreneurship interests without the added pressure of meeting these needs.
Ramaswamy and his business partner David A. Kosslyn ’11 created their own Web site called PhrazIt, a site that allows users to easily browse and share reviews on various products and services. The pair spent their entire summer last year working with an incubator program, a venture capital firm that focuses on very early stages of company development. Now that the site is up and running, Ramaswamy and Kosslyn no longer need to devote their full time to the project.
Another group of students were motivated to enter the entrepreneurial world after having worked on a Harvard student publication. Windsor G. Hanger ’10 got her start working on Freeze College Magazine and is now utilizing that experience to develop a new magazine geared toward the college crowd that extends nationwide called Her Campus. Hanger says that the success of Freeze within the Harvard community inspired the group to see national expansion as a viable next step.
While Web-based ventures are the most popular among student entrepreneurs because they are low in cost and relatively easy to develop, some entrepreneurs have dared to venture out of cyberspace. Jessica S. Lin ’09, Julia C. Silverman ’10, Hemali A. Thakkar ’11, and Jessica O. Matthews ’10 are currently working on a project called the sOccket, a soccer ball with an internal device that stores energy every time the ball is kicked. The stored energy would be used as a power source, with the target market being underprivileged communities throughout Africa. The four met while enrolled in Engineering Sciences 147: “Idea Translation Lab,” in which they were assigned to work together on a project based on a common global health interest. Rather than an initial interest in entrepreneurship, the idea behind the sOccket itself inspired the venture. “If the idea wasn’t this idea, I probably wouldn’t be spending this much time and energy making it work,” says Lin, who is also a former Crimson associate photo editor. “This idea is just what is driving me to keep going with it past the class.”
WHERE TO GO IF YOU’RE A CEO
Before the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum was founded in fall of 2006 as an undergraduate organization, there had been a string of similar organizations that disappeared after their founders graduated. “Entrepreneurs are hard people to mobilize and you have to create a lot of value to get them to come, so it’s hard to build something sustainable to serve,” says S. Travis May ’09, one of HCEF’s co-founders.
To solve this problem, May and his co-founder Michael Segal ’09 have worked hard to prepare the new co-presidents, Kosslyn and Tommy R. Li ’10, for their leadership roles. The establishment of an executive board, a wide variety of sponsored events, and a developing comp process indicate that HCEF should be well-equipped to sustain its existence.
“Our main bases for the club have been a lot of experienced entrepreneurs, or people who have ideas or have started developing ideas, says Yifan Zhang ’10. “But we’d really like to have people who are interested and really get them interested in learning about entrepreneurship, then participating in their own projects.” Zhang, who was recently elected vice president of communities for HCEF, is currently responsible for the impending comp process and increasing recruitment efforts for the organization. She says that one primary goal is to increase participation from freshmen who may lack prior exposure to entrepreneurship.
Another student entrepreneurship organization on campus is the more established Harvard Student Agencies, which has been in existence for 51 years and was originally founded to provide students with tuition aid through business experience. Unlike HCEF, HSA provides concrete opportunities to practice entrepreneurship by running the existing agencies with the freedom to maintain traditional practices or move the agencies in a new direction. “A lot of the time people think entrepreneurship is just starting new businesses, and it’s not,” says Jim McKellar, the CEO and general manager of HSA. “Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, you’re doing things differently. You are making things more efficient or better or faster, or you’re providing something new within an existing environment.”
Within Harvard’s administration is a third entrepreneurial organization, the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. TECH was founded in 1999 by Paul B. Bottino, who currently serves as executive director. In addition to advising students on their various entrepreneurial projects, TECH “works to create additional resources for student entrepreneurs ... and make them available to students and student groups,” Bottino wrote in an e-mail. The TECH Web site includes a database listing potential funding sources and entrepreneurial courses available at the College, graduate schools, and MIT, as well as links to business plan tips, funding advice, and other informational sites.
The three organizations, HCEF, HSA, and TECH, have recently formed a closely-knit and collaborative relationship with one another. Together they manage the annual I^3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge on campus, in which students develop innovative ideas as individuals or in teams and submit business plans. Winners receive grants to fund their projects as well as other resources and services. They are also currently working on developing a communal workspace for entrepreneurs within the HSA building on Mt. Auburn Street.
Although these three groups may be the most prominent entrepreneurship groups at Harvard, there is a growing market for similar student organizations. One such group is the newly formed Harvard chapter of Kairos. Chapter president Vishal Lugani ’11 describes the group as “an intercollegiate and intracollegiate organization that’s aimed at fostering social ties between entrepreneurs.” Unlike some other longstanding organizations, Kairos requires its members to already have some level of involvement in an entrepreneurial venture.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR DUMMIES
While TECH may provide a deep information bank of entrepreneurship resources, many aspiring student entrepreneurs on campus feel that practical training is simply unavailable for undergraduates at Harvard. With the notable exceptions of ES 147, Sociology 159, and Engineering Sciences 139: “Innovation in Science and Engineering,” the College does not offer any classes in professional business skills. Undergraduates are also largely excluded from classes across the river at Harvard Business School, which would otherwise be applicable to their business pursuits. Most students seeking this sort of training, such as accounting or strategic decision making, flock to MIT for classes like the popular Corporate Financial Accounting. Since Harvard allows students to cross-register for these classes already, many students wonder why the opportunity for similar classes isn’t readily available on their own campus.
“Most students who want to learn about accounting go to MIT and students transfer credits for it here at Harvard, but because we don’t see that as being consistent with liberal arts we don’t offer that course to our students,” says David L. Ager, who teaches Sociology 159. Jeffrey A. Miron, the director for undergraduate studies in the Economics Department, was able to give a more practical explanation of the considerations involved. “Why don’t we have the business type of courses in economics? The simple reason is you can’t do everything with finite resources and we don’t have the resources to do those in addition to doing the ones we currently do,” he says.
According to Miron, there are not enough faculty members available to teach classes such as accounting. Even if there were, says Miron, it is unlikely that any Harvard professor would want to teach the class because it would not be seen as valuable within the liberal arts philosophy of education, especially given the relative ease with which factual business information can be learned. “You can spend an afternoon reading ‘Accounting for Dummies’ and learn the accounting if you’ve first taken Ec 10 and 1010 from us,” says Miron. “And so it’s a much better use of your time from every perspective, from both the pre-professional’s perspective and an intellectual’s perspective, to study the courses that we do offer, not the strictly business-oriented courses.”
“You can spend an afternoon reading ‘Accounting for Dummies’ and learn the accounting if you’ve first taken Ec 10 and 1010 from us,” says Miron. “And so it’s a much better use of your time from every perspective, from both the pre-professional’s perspective and an intellectual’s perspective, to study the courses that we do offer, not the strictly business-oriented courses.” Student entrepreneurs know that they can benefit from a liberal arts education rather than a strictly pre-professional one. “I know there’s a lot of talk about how Harvard doesn’t necessarily do more technical things, like finance, accounting, things like that,” says Li. “But I definitely think there’s something to be said for these broad, more liberal arts-based tools that you get, like writing, that’s really important, being able to communicate effectively to people you’re trying to sell your idea to.”
PULLING A BILL GATES
Since the prominent success stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both involve a premature termination of their college careers, it sometimes seems impossible to balance a rigorous Harvard academic schedule with running a company. Many student entrepreneurs face a unique dual lifestyle that forces them to reevaluate their priorities.
“At the end of the day at this point we’re students first and entrepreneurs second. As time goes on maybe that will shift and if it weren’t true then we’d pull a Bill Gates and get out of here, but this is what we’re doing right now,” says Silverman. Although dropping out of college completely is not a common end result of student startups, many students do take time away from their college careers to pursue their enterprises at prime opportunities.
May, for example, took a leave of absence to avoid facing the daunting task of juggling academics with his business. “I try to balance them both at the same time,” he says. “I haven’t been inclined to sacrifice one. Part of this is why I took a leave of absence.” While leaves of absence can be beneficial for taking advantage of a company’s growth phase, Ramaswamy says that should always consider returning to college. “These things are so volatile,” he says. “You may think it’s going to be the next biggest thing, and then the factors change. Google launches a new product, and you’re out of business.”
While some students admit that academics can be a barrier to business success, most agree that dropping out of college would be an extreme measure. “I would not drop out of school for a startup,” says Hanger. “But I understand that sometimes you have an idea that’s so amazing that you need to commit full time to it, and your academics might get in the way.” Ramaswamy elaborates further about the benefits of being in school while pursuing a business venture. “Personally speaking, I love the college environment,” he says. “I’ve grown to appreciate that over the past semester, especially being out there in the real world and coming back here, it’s such a luxury to be a student, and you have great people to interact with on a daily basis.”
Ramaswamy does admit, however, that exceptions do exist. “I could see the other side of it,” he says. “If an entrepreneur felt that really, their thing was the next thing, the next Facebook or the next Microsoft, then I could see the justification for dropping out there also.” Kosslyn says that students should consider how Harvard can fit into their lifelong objectives. “It’s not like Harvard is something worth avoiding, but I mean it depends on why you come to Harvard in the first place. If you come to Harvard to sort of learn about the world, it’s an awesome thing, some of that can also be done elsewhere,” says Kosslyn.
IS HARVARD IN THE WAY?
Harvard’s support for entrepreneurship on campus is a relatively recent development. It has been rumored that Harvard College once had a loose and often unenforced rule that students were prohibited from running businesses out of their dorm rooms. However, the current FAS Handbook for Students vaguely states that students are allowed to partake in “modest levels of business activities on campus,” provided that they do not violate other College rules regarding residential life or use of Harvard’s name and resources.
“I used to hear that Harvard was a little more protective of its students in not entering entrepreneurship. They wanted them to shy away from it,” says Ramaswamy. “But I think that culture has really changed.”
While Harvard may be more encouraging of student startups today, there are still some improvements that could be made. As an Anthropology concentrator, Silverman says she feels that the information about entrepreneurship on campus is not always readily available to her. However, she is unsure about whether or not this is a pressing issue that the college needs to address. “I don’t feel like that’s been a barrier,” she says. “I feel like it’s just the way things have worked out.”
Some students agree that entrepreneurship is not adequately presented on campus as a viable career option. While May says that he is satisfied with the level of support he receives from the College, he admits that more resources regarding entrepreneurship would be beneficial to students in general. “Maybe if career services made a push for start-ups being an alternative line of work, besides the standard consulting and i-banking,” says May. “I think that could be beneficial to standardize it as something people think about as their career track.”
While undergraduates might appreciate their liberal arts education, Ager says that students may be unprepared to enter the workforce due to the lack of business classes at Harvard. “It’s very foolish to think that anybody could start any sort of enterprise without having some basic knowledge of accounting and finance,” he says. “Can you learn? Eventually you can. But I think that you’re at a significant disadvantage to these other students from these others schools who have these backgrounds because they understand finance, they understand how to develop a financial model for their organizations, they understand the different between a balance sheet and a cash-flow statement, which is really quite advantageous for someone starting out.”
THE NEXT STEP TO SUCCESS
Students and faculty alike agree that the college should encourage students’ business pursuits, although many are unsure of what specific approaches Harvard should take to be most helpful. Ramaswamy says he believes that Harvard should promote entrepreneurship as a potential road to success for students. Furthermore, Ramaswamy notes that running a business has been an education in and of itself. “It’s the most valuable learning experience I’ve had and I think I ever will have in any part of my academic life. There are some things that really can’t be taught in the classroom,” he says.
Others believe that care should be taken to avoid excessive encouragement of entrepreneurship on campus, arguing that it could potentially suppress the drive and spirit necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. “Is entrepreneurship something that you should shove down people’s throats? Should I have been pursued as a key future entrepreneur? No,” says Silverman. “That’s something that I had to look out for myself, I chose not to, until the time came along when I was more interested in that.”
Ager expresses a similar sentiment. “I get worried when adults interfere too much in student life and if we’re providing all these different resources for the students in a way it all of the sudden no longer makes it entrepreneurial,” he says. “I don’t think that the college should feel this obligation to provide resources to students. I think that we should make sure that we don’t create an environment where it’s not possible for students to go and access the resources that they need.”
Regardless of how much or how little the college endorses and supports its students’ entrepreneurial endeavors, it is inevitable that some undergraduates will find some way to pursue their business ventures. As Ager says, “Students are capable, I believe, of managing their time and they can, very effectively. There’s nothing this institution can do to stop them from pursuing that.”