impt; ideas, music, pictures and things

A gathering of the entrepreneurial community at Wharton and Penn, early every year. This year’s Founders’ Retreat is At General Assembly in New York City. The Founders’ Retreat is brought to you by a collaboration of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, the Wharton MBA Career Management Office, the Wharton Entrepreneurial Club, and General Assembly! 

The Founders’ Retreat schedule is below (subject to change): 9:30 - 9.50am: Breakfast & Arrivals 

10 - 10.20am: Intro to the day, & welcome with Jake Schwartz, General Assembly founder, WG ‘08 10:20 - 10.45am: Entrepreneurship at Wharton: Overview of the different paths MBAs choose to pursue and the resources to leverage along the way 

10.50 - 11.40am: Start it Up at Wharton: Perspectives from founders in Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program and other incubators and those who have launched business from Wharton’s Business Plan Competition. Featuring 
- Cherif Habib and Stephan Jacobs- co-founders of Kembrel.com and WG’11 
- Joseph Cohen - CEO and founder of Coursekit 
- Rohan Deuskar- CEO and co-founder of Stylitics, 
- Andrew Ward, founder of Pandaly currently in DreamIt Ventures 11.40am - 12.20pm: 1st Year class introductions 

12.30 - 12.55pm: Student Founders (VIP, WVA, DreamIT) founders introduced to their 1st year teams for strategy session. 12.55 - 2.10pm: Lunch + Strategy session within VIP/WVA teams. 

2:20 - 3:05pm: Recruiting at startups- perspectives from MBAs and the startups that hire them.Featuring: 
- Roberto Medri- SquareSpace’s head of business development and WG’11, 
- Shafqat Islam- NewsCred Founder and CEO and Penn Engineering ‘03, 
- Arlyn Davich- PayPerks Founder and CEO, 
- Harry Kargman- Kargo Founder and CEO 3:05 - 3:15pm: Break 

3:15 - 3:45pm: Perspectives on MBA ideas/businesses, with Kartik Hosanagar - co-founder of Yodle Inc., Wharton Professor of Entrepreneurship & Operations and Information Management, and Angel Investor. 3.45 - 4.15pm: Founder’s story with Corey Pierson - CEO and co-founder of Custora and WG’10 

4:15 - 4:25pm: Break 4.25 - 5:20pm: Mixed panel and perspectives on fundraising and today’s ecosystem from founders and investors. Featuring 
- Jake Schwartz- General Assembly founder and WG’08, 
- Saadiq Rogers-King- co-founder of Hot Potato, 
- Michael Geer- co-founder of Badoo, 
- David Mars - principal of White Owl Capital and WG’ 07 

5:30 - 7pm: Happy hour & mixer

Lets get started:

Use the #UXday hashtag for all your comments on twitter (and please tweet a lot!).

Enter your ideas into the following google spreadsheets for each product

PennStudySpaces

Kembrel

Groupsfinder

Squid.by

RendezWho

Thats it. Lets have some fun

ayo

First of all - thanks to everyone who registered to attend. We have over 75 people coming, most of whom are startup founders with active products (at the end of this post I’ll outline as many of the startups represented as I can).

Second - we need your help; tell all your design friends to come! Right now the number of startups and users/spectators coming far outstrips the number of actual designers. Signups are still open here

Third; I’m posting our proposed format for Design Day here, so that folks can comment on it and suggest additions or changes needed. Anything we havent thought of, please add here. Think of this as a way to compress several hours of user testing/feedback, into 5 minutes. 

Huntsman Hall, room 350, 1pm - 3pm.

• I’ll be in there from Noon onward, so if you’re on campus and looking for stuff to do, come hang out
• Bring your laptops - you’ll need them to give feedback.
• We’ll serve some light beverages so no one gets parched.
• The event will be in 2 parts; an Open UX Session, and a breakout.
• Open UX Session
  • 1pm - 2pm
  • Each startup gets a completely unfamiliar user to do a 5 minute walk through, with the founder asking questions
  • 2 projection screens will be up, so the crowd can follow. On the first screen will be the actual walk-through. The 2nd screen will be split between a public, open googledoc, and a twitter feed following #uxday. The googledoc will be for everyone in the room to make suggestions tactical suggestions that the founder can take away with them. The twitter feed will enable those not present to follow, as well as serve as a general comment stream we can possibly use for improvements for the next UX day.
• Breakouts
  • 2.15pm - 3pm.
  • We’ll break out into small groups of 3 - 5, and each featured startup will get a few designers and people in the crowd to give them detailed feedback on their product.

If you wanted your startup featured and it’s not below, please leave a message in the comments below, and I’ll add you later on in the week. Every featured startup will recieve an email from me later this week about the order they’re going in. 

Startups coming so far:

www.coursekit.com(Joe Cohen)

www.kembrel.com (Cherif Habib, Stephan Jacob, and Aymeric de Hemptinne)

www.rendezwho.com (Matt Stephenson)

www.careercup.com (Gayle Laakman Mcdowell)

pennstudyspaces.com (Alexey Komissarouk

www.squid.by (Marty Brown and Bill Kang)

 baskskin.com (Alex Rattray)

www.contexttravel.com (Paul Bennett)

I wrote this article along with Davis, @cherif, and @stephanjacob for the April 3, 2011 edition of the Wharton Journal. We wanted to spotlight some of the entrepreneurial activity on campus. It’s pretty inspiring to watch student founders build new businesses all around us, out of whole cloth, and this is the story we wanted to tell.

Here on campus, the 3 of us have been a part of the Venture Initiation Program, which has been instrumental in giving structure to our respective launches. As I write this post from a workstation in the VIP co-working space in Vance hall, the Kembrel team literally has dozens of people here packing up T-shirts for the Japan fundraiser (buy your tshirt here).  

It’s been great to watch other business schools elevate their entrepreneurial profiles (@startuptribe at HBS, @SSELabs at Stanford). This is great for business schools in general, and I personally hope tons more entrepreneurs apply to business school, and energize the community even more.

One more thing; we cant mention everyone’s name, and we dont know everyone involved, but if you are on campus and you’re launching a company, whether you’re at another school at Penn, in Engineering, at Wharton, or undergrad or graduate, tell us! Leave a note in the comments, email me at ayo [at] flicsy, or fill out the log that professor Mollick put together here. The more of us that know each other, the more we can draw on each other for support.

Ayo

(article text below, somewhat adapted)

Entrepreneurship at Wharton is thriving. In the last year, we’ve seen several successful exits of student-launched companies, including AdMob (GOOG), Invite Media (GOOG), Milo.com (EBAY) and Diapers.com (AMZN). On the other side of the table, Wharton alums Fred Wilson (USV), Aydin Senkut (Felicis), Yuri Milner (DST), Josh Kopelman (First Round), and Michael Aronson (MentorTech) have stayed busy investing in the next generation of great companies. Closer to home, the class of 2010 is having a strong run with Warby Parker, PayDivvy and Clipik doing exceptionally well, and Hector Beverages recently receiving a $1m angel investment from the founder of Infosys.

Student entrepreneurs at Wharton have benefited immensely from the resources here. The folks at Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, the Weiss Tech House, the Venture Initiation Program, Founders’ Club, e-Club, Tech Club, classmates, faculty, and alumni have all helped tremendously. But we still have a lot of work to do, to strengthen the startup community at Wharton and Penn. Here’s how you can help:

1. Use the products: Give feedback - nothing is more valuable to an entrepreneur than users and buyers of a product.

2. Tell your friends: Your word is better than any advertising we could do. If you like what we’re doing, email your friends, or better yet, share on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Introduce us: You probably know venture and angel investors, advisors, and industry and product experts. We’d love to meet them.

4. Help us directly: You could help shape the product, craft the message or model the business - your skills and time make a huge difference.

5. Give back as an alum: When a student entrepreneur reaches out, please take the call.

Many of our classmates and our accomplished undergrad friends are working hard to launch real products, generate revenues, attract top tier press coverage, and raise venture capital. This sample is by no means comprehensive - please do what you can to help Wharton’s wonderful startups:

• www.audiocatch.com - custom audio for film, tv, video, gaming & events (Alex Jarzebinski & Kyn Chaturvedi - WG ‘11)

• Careercup.com - Career prep for tech jobs (Gayle Laakman - WG ‘11)

• Catapulter.com - Door to door ground travel search (Adam Waaramaa & Jenny Cheng - WG ‘11)

• Coursekit.com - Changing the way you interact with your classes (Joseph Cohen & Dan Getelman - W ‘13, W’12)

• Gamma Basics - Radiation safety compliance software (Mike Kijewski - WG ‘12)

• Hunting Hill Capital - global equities arbitrage hedge fund (Adam Guren - WG ‘11)

• Madero Grill - Argentine style wood burning Grill (Max Holdo - WG ‘11)

• Meeteor.com - Taking the work out of networking (Philip De Cortes & Chris Lee - WG ‘11)

• Mooblue - Real-time bidding for mobile ads (Nimit Maru & Roberto Sanchez Garvin - WG ‘12)

• Osus Athletics - Weight lifting you can wear (Steve Dong & Corey Lerch - W ‘12)

• PoverUP – Student microfinance lending network (Charlie Javice – W ‘14)

• Rendezwho.com - Make new friends in your city, over dinner (Matt Stephenson - WG ‘11)

• Squid.by - Make videos with your friends (Bill Kang & Marty Brown - WG ‘11)

• Stylitics.com - Analytics for fashion brands (Rohan Deuskar - WG ‘11)

• TerViva BioEnergy – Low cost, environmentally responsible biodiesel production (Sudhir Rani – WG ‘11)

• www.thinktell.com - location based thought broadcasting (Fatima Abdulla - WG ‘11)

• Waterminds - bottled spring water in the Middle East and North Africa (Alain Saade & Fadi Frem - WG ‘11)

• Big Refunds - automated rebates (Deb Bardhan & Abhishek Gattani - WG - ‘11)

You can find out more at vip.wharton.upenn.edu or by following @WhartonEntrep & @wfounders on twitter.

Lastly, we urge you to launch a startup, or help one. If you have an idea, get in touch and we’ll help you launch. If you don’t, then help a startup - you never know what it might become.

Davis Smith (davis@baby.com.br) is the founder of baby.com.br, an e-commerce site focused on the baby space in Brasil. Cherif Habib (cherif @kembrel.com) and Stephan Jacob (stephan@kembrel.com) are co-founders ofKembrel.com, a private shopping community for students. Ayo Omojola (ayo@flicsy.com) is the founder of flicsy.com, a service for sharing photos with groups.

Following on from my previous Tools for Founders post a few months ago, I wanted to write a couple more; about what courses and profs that entrepreneurs should take at Penn/Wharton, as recommended by entrepreneurs in my class and in the various clubs and programs here (VIP, Founders Club, Weiss Tech House etc).

After writing for a little bit though, I figured this would be better done as a living document, so here’s a google doc listing the courses, who recommended them and why. If you’re a current or prospective student interested in entrepreneurship, this is a good resource for courses to take, and if you’ve taken some good courses that are either new/under the radar or for some reason not on there, please add them!