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YEI welcomes new Lead Venture Mentor, Wes Bray ‘74
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Inaugural LVM Victor Budnick ’71 joins YEI’s Operating Board
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The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute is excited to welcome Wes Bray (YC ’74) as our Lead Venture Mentor, taking over from inaugural LVM, Victor Budnick (YC ’71). Wes’s domain expertise is in marketing – with past experience at both Kraft Foods and Pepsico, Wes founded several marketing-related startups including Market Growth Resources (sold to True North Communications in 1995), SmartDemo (a retail sampling company which was purchased by Time Warner), Bray Hood Associates, and a wireless marketing company called HipCricket in 2004, which went public in 2007 on the London Stock Exchange (AIM). Wes returned to retail and brand consulting with Wes Bray & Associates before being recruited to join Retail Optimization, Inc., initially as a consultant and then full time as COO, transitioning into CEO & President in 2009. As Lead Venture Mentor, Wes will lead YEI’s growing mentor network, matching student entrepreneurs with volunteer mentors who can share their proven experience and skills to help increase the probability of a startup's success.
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On March 31st, Encendia Biochar, founded by 2010 YEI Summer Fellows, won the 2011 Sabin Environmental Venture Prize, which recognizes students and/or faculty looking to start an environmentally oriented for-profit business. Encendia is an organic waste upcycling company that creates biochar, which locks carbon in the soil, improving the efficiency of water and fertilizer, and can increase crop production yields. Other finalists this year included eco-oriented ventures like Unicornics, an energy-efficient and eco-friendly linear resonating compressor for refrigeration and air-conditioning, and Tree Water, a natural resource-based beverage company. The $25,000 Sabin Prize is an initiative managed by the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and created with the support of the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation.
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Hadapt (YEI ’10, formerly known as “HadoopDB”), founded by Justin Borgman (SOM ’11), has closed an initial round of financing and publically announced patent-pending innovations for high performance analytics across structured and unstructured data in the cloud. One of the first student-led companies to receive a license to commercialize a Yale University technology, Hadapt’s product approach is a full integration of the open source parallel data processing framework, Apache Hadoop™. Expanding the Hadoop architecture, the company offers a more complete SQL interface, a hybrid storage engine to handle structured as well as unstructured data in a single platform, and a patent-pending Adaptive Query Execution™ capability that dynamically load balances queries in virtualized environments and allows analytical workloads to be automatically split between relational database engines and Hadoop to get the best possible performance out of the system. “If you’re looking for gold in your mountains of data, you need Hadapt,” says Justin.
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This week, one thousand eager admitted freshman flooded Yale’s campus for “Bulldog Days,” a three-day smorgasbord of campus tours, receptions, sample classes, and most importantly, over 300 events organized by current students. Event-aggregating startup Roammeo, part of YEI’s 2011 summer fellowship, was tapped by the Yale Admissions Office to create a custom web and mobile application for the event to help pre-frosh sort through their event options by time, subject matter, and even whether or not food will be served. “Roammeo is the solution to always knowing that there is something great going on, but not having a way to tell what that ‘something’ might be,” says founder Jessica Cole (YC ’12). “It is a website and app that aggregates events, places those events on a map, categorizes them, and allows them to be shown at any chosen time.” With the pilot under their belt, the Roammeo team is looking forward to dedicating the summer to the venture in the 2011 fellowship. See coverage in the Yale Daily News for more.
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BookSavr.com (YEI '11), founded by Greg Hausheer (YC '12) and Chris Murphy (YC '12), is a collaborative online platform that helps universities and students work together to comply with revisions to the Higher Education Opportunity Act, by providing a way for professors to create online lists display ISBN's (a requirement), while helping students find and purchase the most affordable textbooks on the web. As young entrepreneurs, they are seeking advice from Yale’s entrepreneurial community:
What’s the best method to appear like a professional business to more experienced entrepreneurs, clients and investors when you’re only a college startup? How can the “college startup” stigma work to your advantage? Please give them feedback here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W2SVBH7
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This month's mentoring corner features insights from YEI's inaugural Lead Venture Mentor, Victor Budnick. Victor has been working with teams for the past year and now offers advice for those looking to mentor student entrepreneurs.
People, who themselves have successfully launched or led their own businesses, frequently bring a wealth of contacts, leadership skills and expertise to guiding novice entrepreneurs. However, a key strength shared by experienced entrepreneurs--a bias to action—is exactly the kind of mindset which can undermine the ability to mentor.
I recall a newly minted leader of a recently created unit within a large nonprofit organization. This leader was assigned a “mentor” who had successfully navigated every level of the organization and after retirement had returned as a consultant to help in the transformation of the organization. The “mentor” was an accomplished leader and brilliant professional, but he was unable to envision his new role as a “cultivator” of talent rather than as a “driver” or “doer”. So, finally the new leader in frustration confronted the “mentor” by saying that while everyone in the organization knew that he could run an organization, the question was: could he mentor someone else to lead? The “mentor” had allowed his bias to action (and a need to control) to overcome his considerable skills to guide and support. He was infuriated, and the mentoring relationship was not repaired.
Many of us may have experienced something similar, as we have developed our own careers. At any rate, this situation stuck with me, as I worked this past year with the YEI team to develop the mentoring program. As mentors, it never hurts to remind ourselves that we are there as resources, guides, facilitators—to learn as much as to teach and not to act even when driven by impatience with new leaders who need time, support and space to learn entrepreneurial and team-building skills.
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