Entrepreneurial spirit is budding on campuses

In between classes, working out at the gym and volunteering as a reserve police officer, Lance Larson spent five to six hours each night on his Web hosting business in his college dorm room.

By Kendra Locke
Associated Press

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595081700,00.html

He started the business with money out of his own pocket — $10,000 in savings from high school computer repair and paper delivery jobs — and refused to accept any outside funding offers.

Now, Larson says OC Hosting Inc. serves 3,500 clients and generates revenues of $1 million a year.

"I knew one day it would pay off, and sure enough it is," said Larson, who graduated from San Diego State University this spring with a degree in information systems. He plans on getting a master’s degree in homeland security as he continues to operate OC Hosting.

Today’s college students are well aware of the dot-com busts of the late 1990s. But they are still eager as ever to take a stab at entrepreneurship — if not for the potential riches made by billionaires like Michael Dell or Bill Gates, then for the satisfaction of self-employment and invaluable business experience.

Though mixing academics with business can be tricky, college may actually be the ideal time to pursue entrepreneurship. Because students are often free from "real-world" concerns like finding a job or buying a house, many say they are able to take greater risks and spend more time developing a business.

"School work is not nine to five — you can kind of push it around," said Anthony Casalena, a senior at the University of Maryland and owner of a Web publishing service, Squarespace.com.

Tometria Bean, a 23-year-old single mother and student at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, said a busy schedule did not stop her from establishing her own entertainment agency.

"It all comes down to time management," Bean said. "People that know me know I live by a calendar."

Bean, who plans on pursuing her business after she graduates next year, said she’s spending 60 hours a week running the agency this summer.

Nobody knows exactly how many college entrepreneurs are out there, but anecdotal evidence shows their numbers are growing, said Gerry Hills, director of the Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which Hills founded five years ago, has grown into a network of 120 chapters and 14,000 members nationwide.

In response to burgeoning interest, entrepreneurial education has also expanded significantly since the 1980s. And in the last five or six years, colleges and universities have added more substantial programs — including entrepreneurial majors, minors and business plan competitions.

According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurship, at least 1,500 colleges and universities provide training for young entrepreneurs.

"In the past 10 years, it’s gone from being something schools wouldn’t admit to having, to something that they won’t admit that they don’t have," said Phil Weilerstein, executive director of the National Collegiate Investors and Innovators Association.

Weilerstein noted that, several years after the dot-com bubble burst, a certain cynicism still exists around tech-based ventures in particular. However, added caution is not necessarily a bad thing, he said.

"There is an expectation of rigor that didn’t exist during the days of the boom," Weilerstein said. "And that’s the norm rather than any kind of backlash."

Many entrepreneurs admit that in addition to strict budgeting and hard work, luck and timing have also played key roles in their success.

Craig Powell said he thought he was actually lucky for starting his online business, ConnectEdu, at a time when venture capital was drying up. Even after an investor made a substantial offer of cash, Powell said he only accepted a small portion.

"It’s like if your parents gave you a $25 allowance rather than a $250 allowance — you’re a lot more thoughtful," he said.

The kind of advice small business owners should follow also applies to young entrepreneurs, said Andrew Zacharakis, acting director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. For example, they should concentrate on the needs of their customers and save up enough money to sustain their businesses for the coming months.

College entrepreneurs should also focus on profits, Zacharakis added, rather than on less significant details such as the number of hits on their Web site — a common mistake made by dot-com era college business owners.

"Today, I think everybody realizes with all the failures that happened during that time frame that entrepreneurship just isn’t about a good idea," he said.

Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, 2001 graduates of Stanford University, said they built the "classic Internet startup," called netElement, in 1999. Although netElement never took off, the experience they got helped them successfully establish their current company, Plaxo Inc.

Masonis and Ring said one of the most important lessons they learned was that the ultimate goal of a business cannot simply be getting funding.

"You have to be doing it for the right reason," Masonis said. "You have to genuinely want to build something."

And, some of the most successful business ventures were preceded by a number of failures, said Stanley Mandel, director of the Angell Center for Entrepreneurship at Wake Forest University.

"In the U.S., it is sometimes the prevalent philosophy that until you have experienced failure and what it’s like, you really don’t know much," Mandel said.