Yale Entrepreneur by Aaron Lewis

the yale entrepreneur magazine is back. For those of you who don’t know us, we first

published in the spring of 2004 and had a fairly large presence on campus throughout the mid 00’s. The YE Magazine has been dormant since the spring of 2012, but this issue marks our return. We’re excited to bring you the new and improved version of the magazine. In the years since the YE last appeared in print, a lot of exciting things have happened in the Yale entrepreneurial scene. The Center for Engineering Innovation and Design—the birthplace of many new Yale startups—opened in the spring of 2012. The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute has expanded its programs and held “Start Something” workshops to help students learn how to start their own companies. And Yale’s new president Peter Salovey has gone out of his way to promote a culture of entrepreneurship on campus. For our re-launch, we wanted to shine a light on the many innovative projects and companies that Yale students and alumni are working on. Yale isn’t traditionally known for its startup scene, but that’s changing quickly. We believe these creative students and ideas deserve attention. This issue of the YE would not be possible without the Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES), which has provided crucial support throughout the publication process. For that, we wish to thank Peter Cohen and Brian Lei, the presidents of YES, and the rest of the YES staff for their support. Thanks are also in order for our advisors Michael Lei, Harold Cooke and Jeff Hong, all of whom have been incredibly helpful in getting the magazine off the ground. Finally, I’d like to thank the entire YE staff, who have devoted countless hours this year to reviving the YE. Enjoy the issue.

Sincerely, Aaron Z. Lewis editor-in-chief

editor-in-chief Aaron Z. Lewis

director of operations Nicole Clark

director of marketing Anny Dow

treasurer

Jimmy Fitzcharles

managing editors Jeff Qiu Iwona Chalus Marek Ramilo

design

Layouts · Vincent Accettola Layouts · Nicole Clark Layouts · Aaron Z. Lewis Cover · Sherril Wang

writers

Aaron Z. Lewis Anny Dow Daniel Bozik Grace Gelmman Jeff Qiu Jesse Ebner Lucia Herrmann Michelle Kelrikh Nicole Clark Ryan Manucha

advisors Harold Cooke Jeff Hong Michael Lei

CONTENTS PROFILES

Lucas Sin’s Entrepreneurial Entree · by Jesse Ebner

Refraction Capital · by Ryan Manucha

How one Yale junior is running a thriving restaurant business out of Davenport’s basement. Can a group of Yale undergrads successfully launch a hedge fund from their dorms?

109 Design Takes on Scoliosis · by Anny Dow

Stylish Science · by Michelle Kelrikh

An artist, mechanical engineer, and political scientist are re-inventing scoliosis treatment.

The story behind YEI-backed LabCandy’s push to attract girls to STEM.

INTERVIEWS

14 22 24

Annotating Human Culture · by Aaron Z. Lewis An interview with the creators of Rap Genius.

SOM Professor Talks Entrepreneurship · by Lucia Herrmann David Cromwell offers advice for aspiring entreperneurs.

Furniture for the Future · by Anny Dow

Zach Rotholz tells the story behind Chairigami.

ESSAYS

4 18 20

Yale Takes Printing to New Dimensions · by Dan Bozik

An undergraduate club called Y3PO is bringing 3D printing to Yale.

YHackers · by Nicole Clark

The YE went behind the scenes at Yale’s first big hackathon.

Framing Effects · by Jeff Qiu

Jeff Qiu spent a day with the founders Warby Parker— one of NYC’s fastest growing startups.

“We are leading the next industrial revolution.” YALE TAKES PRINTING TO NEW DIMENSIONS By Dan Bozik

“We believe passionately that we are leading the next industrial revolution.” Such was the vision set forth by Jennifer Lawton, CEO of 3-D printing company Makerbot, in a recent CEID-sponsored visit to campus. Speaking to a packed Becton Auditorium, Lawton suggested that 3-D printing technology will enable entrepreneurs to “move much faster and less expensively” in their push to drive innovation and create value. She also sees potential for a “Thingiverse” — an online marketplace for CAD files (Computer Aided Design; electronicDI blueprints of sorts) akin to iTunes or Amazon — to become accessible to the general public. Through partnerships with Local Motors, NASA, and Ford, this “incredibly disruptive technology” is bolstering production (in an eco-friendly way, no less) and kicking off the next industrial revolution. Makerbot was founded in 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach Smith at a time when, according to Lawton, most 3-D printers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Its ability to make

affordable printers has been a critical factor in Makerbot’s place at the forefront of the rapid innovation that has taken place within the industry: having already sold 30,000 units, the company plans to release a fifth-generation model this spring at less than $1,500. Lawton maintains that the progress signaled by the rise of the 3-D printer is unprecedented. “This industrial revolution is setting free entrepreneurs and changing the way manufacturing works,” Lawton said. “It allows engineers to design and iterate and get to the final design much faster and cheaper.” Thanks to industrious Yalies like Brandon Araki TC ’14, the 3-D printing scene in New Haven is starting to gain momentum as well. In the fall of his junior year, Araki, a mechanical engineering major, was looking to start an engineering-design club with a suitemate. When the CEID first opened, he knew that the creation of a 3-D printing organization was next. As a result, he founded the Yale 3-D Printing Organization (Y3PO) in winter 2012. The club focuses

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on a series of projects, such as constructing 3-D printers themselves and assembling devices to reduce wasted material at the CEID on behalf of YSEC, while doing its part to promote the technology on campus. Though Y3PO’s project summaries might seem intimidating to the untrained eye (think Lyman extruders and Quadcopters), Araki says that the process is accessible to non-STEM students. “It sounds complicated at first glance, but it’s really not too bad,” Araki said, reassuringly. These printers use CAD files to construct the product using molten plastic in layers “kind of like a CAT scan,” according to Lawton. The result is an object that has been printed out seemingly as simply as if it had been a piece of paper.

“The result is an object that has been printed out seemingly as sim ply as if it had been a piece of paper.”

The movement has spread beyond Y3PO, however, as Yale professors in a range of disciplines are utilizing the process in the classroom and in research: from design and architecture courses to protein models in biology, the speed and productivity of 3-D printing are making a variety of projects more feasible.

Photo credit: Bre Pettis Lawton was particularly impressed with the use of 3-D printing by the architecture department. “We love the School of Architecture at Yale,” Lawton said. “3-D printing is clearly a part of the curriculum and a part of the way architecture is taught here.” With three Makerbots and Bre Pettis somePhoto morecredit: expensive models (around $50,000) that use pricier material, Yale has invested in op-

portunities for students to design and create with the machines. Though all undergraduates are eligible to use the 3-D printers, the CEID hosts special workshops and training sessions for those registered in its program. If this is the beginning of a new industrial revolution, then it looks like Yalies at the CEID are part of the vanguard.

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LUCAS SIN’S ENTREPRENEURIAL ENTREE BY JESSE EBNER

Photo credit: nom

orn in an Ontario town called Kitchener, it’s almost as if Lucas Sin ’15 was destined to love food. Though Lucas and his family relocated to Hong Kong when he was young, his attraction to the kitchen remained. By the time he was 16 years old, he had already opened his first restaurant. “Most families in Hong Kong have Filipino maids, and I wanted

to take Western gourmet food and make it cheap and accessible to the maids of Hong Kong,” he said. Lucas had a friend who owned a private club with a semi-professional kitchen. Together, the two of them grew Lucas’s little idea into a fullblown business. He decided to name the restaurant Bo Zai, which means “clay pot” in Cantonese. It’s a nod to his signature dish: clay pot rice. The

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budding restauranteur served “reinvented Hong Kong cuisine” and taught friends how to hold plates, cook, and discuss wine. Customers paid between $30 to $45 per person for a 13-course meal served at the one table in the establishment. For the two summers that he ran Bo Zai, Lucas would visit the market in the morning to sort out exactly what he wanted for the menu that night. At around 2 or 3 in the af-

ternoon, he’d pick up the food from the market and spend the rest of the night preparing the meal. But like any good entrepreneur, Lucas is a risk-taker. Instead of continuing to rent out space for Bo Zai, he transformed it into a “pop-up” restaurant and ran the business without a license or a marketing strategy. It became what he called a “laundry basket operation.” Lucas carried the ingredients and equipment in a laundry basket and catered in other people’s kitchens. He cooked for teachers and friends of friends. “Part of the excitement,” he said, “was the possibility that you might get shut down by the cops one night.” This thrill-seeking chef was clearly in it for more than the food, but he also did not keep any of his hardearned money. Half of the profits were spent on the ingredients, while the other half went to charity. Lucas has since passed on the operation and only runs it when he is back in Hong Kong. When he arrived at Yale, he was unsure whether he wanted to use his cooking skills for anything outside of treating friends to meals in his room. Last year in Biology, however, Kay Teo ’16 struck up a conversation with him, and, after learning of his passion for food, pushed him to start a restaurant. Together they established Yale Pop-Up, a project that opens a new restaurant each

semester. Kay is the owner, or as Lucas puts it, “she does everything not related to food. The idea is that I have all the time in the world to concentrate on food.” The project kicked off with the Underground Noodle Collective run out of the Davenport Dive last year. “It was much more of an assembly operation,” said Lucas. “I spent all of Thursday and Friday assembling everything for Friday night. ‘nom.’ [this semester’s popup restaurant] is more execution based. I trained a team to cook for a month, and there’s much more collaboration. This year I am much more of a teacher because I am the only one with restaurant experience.” They serve small $3 plates with the idea that customers order several and pass them around family-style. “We serve Asian drunk food. It’s a controlled chaos. Refined messy food.” The dishes are usually accompanied by indie music and smiles, all of which contributes to the fun ambience of the Dive on Friday nights that Lucas, Kay, and company have created. Lucas loves cooking because he’s able to express his creativity through the dishes he creates. “Last year with the Underground Noodle Collective,” he said, “it was about putting together tasty food for people who enjoy it. At this point it’s about building my own brand of food, my own cuisine, figuring out

“It’s about building my own brand of food, my own cuisine, figuring out what sort of food I want to put out as a representation of myself.”

Photo credit: nom

what sort of food I want to put out as a representation of myself.” From a 16-year-old experimenting with Hong Kong cuisine in an abandoned warehouse to a chef defining himself in a college basement, Lucas has maintained his passion for the kitchen. Working the line at a restaurant, he said, is one of few things he loves most in life. As a chef, he writes the menu, comes up with the flavor profiles, and determines the recipes; but the adrenaline rush while working fuels him through the night. He admitted, “I spend all of Friday cooking, and by the end I am exhausted and never want to cook again. But by Thursday I’m ready to go.” Lucas knows that a cook’s life is difficult, which is why he is not necessarily looking to go straight to the kitchen after graduation. He is convinced that he “can apply the privilege of [his] education to cuisine in a way that can be impactful and meaningful.” Although nom. has closed for the year, we can all look forward to tasting Lucas’s love for food in next semester’s Yale Pop-Up restaurant.

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Photo credit: Refraction Capital

Undergrads launch high-flying hedge fund

BY RYAN MANUCHA

ost college start-ups do not post eight percent returns within their first nine months of existence. But Refraction Capital is no ordinary entrepreneurial venture. In January of 2013, a group of Yale College students passionate about investing came together to form an asset management firm. Formally incorporated as a limited liability company (LLC) in the state of Connecticut, Refraction Capital LLC manages a little over $20,000 in start-up capital. Almost two dozen members invest their own money into the open-end fund, which is managed by the members themselves. Those who are hired by the executive board must contribute a sum of cash to the fund, and each contributor is allocated returns on the basis of their proportional stake. Returns are typically reinvested within the company rather than paid out to unit holders. The executive board elected to pursue this strategy to maximize the size of the pool that they were investing so as to maximize the experience dealing with money. It’s possible to leave the organization and withdraw funds, but this process takes time

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because the company wants to keep as much cash in the market as possible. As with any entrepreneurial venture, the team had to identify what differentiated them in the market of money managers. “As college students, we focus on what we know best. We take advantage of our ground-level knowledge of demand for products such as energy drinks and fast casual dining,” said Matthew Rajcok (BR ‘16) and President of Refraction Capital. The company’s investment principles guide it to existence as a long-short macro fund, with the risk-adjusted return on investments being of primary importance. The team’s decision making early on was very emotionally charged. Eugene Yi (TD ’15), the portfolio manager on the executive board, saw that the team often lost confidence in their positions despite all the research that went into the trades they made. “We’d suddenly see, for example, an unexpected surge in the tire market and immediately begin to question a decision made in the past,” Yi said. Over time, the team has learned to stick with its convictions and avoid exiting prematurely.

Most of Refraction Capital’s executive team was originally a part of the Yale Student Investment Group (YSIG). After several months in YSIG, the founders of Refraction realized that they wanted an investment group where they’d have more creative control. Josh Faber (BR ‘16) Refraction Capital’s director of development, was a member of the Industrials division in YSIG. “To a large extent, having your own money at stake in the fund makes you more invested in its success,” said Faber. The structure of the organization gives it considerable flexibility with regards to decision-making and investment execution. For example, in the wake of the government shutdown, the company was able to quickly decide on a plan of action to insulate itself from the ongoing instability and potential default. Of particular benefit to them is their close proximity to one another on campus, which allows for impromptu meetings at any time. From the beginning, the company had to navigate the confusing and extensive regulations of the Security and Exchange Commission. Rajcok took it upon himself to compose the forty-page operating manual, and the operating agreement of the company was reviewed by two lawyers. As a student-run enterprise with a professional objective, Refraction Capital faces unique challenges. Almost all undergraduate organizations at Yale do not have to think twice about their recruitment methods. Refraction Capital, however, must follow SEC regulations, which make it illegal to solicit individuals at random to join the company. Campus corkboards and email pan-lists

are off-limits for Refraction Capital; they must instead think up new strategies for bringing in new members. They send talent search emails to prospective members who are recommended by their existing partners. Members of Refraction Capital also encounter challenges that most professionals within the investment industry don’t ever come across. Members constantly balance course work and other extra-curricular commitments on top of their responsibilities at Refraction. Harry Wilson (MC ‘16) Senior Vice President of Investments at Refraction Capital, says that necessity drives the team to maximize the effective use of their time. The business model for Refraction Capital is still evolving. In the beginning, they thought that every member would be expected to contribute ideas for potential investments. However, the board members reneged on this strategy in August after deciding that more experienced members would be the ones to determine the investment opportunities. Junior members would assist with research and analysis. The executive board has not been without conflict. “Tensions between the operational side of the company have often conflicted with its investment interests,” said Wilson. There had initially been a strong desire to make short-term returns to recover costs. Over time, however, the five key decision makers in the company have learned more about one another and about investing as a whole. Solutions have become easier to find, and thought processes have begun to harmonize. Since its inception, a network of

advisors has rallied around the creators of the company. Two members of the executive board, Kai Chen (TD ‘14) and Yi, also function as mentors for the younger members of the group. A larger advisory board has been created at the initiative of the executives. An integral component of this is Stephen Blum, a resident fellow of Branford College, an Association of Yale Alumni leader who has worked with KPMG and Burnham Financial Group. Faber said that “[Blum] was very receptive to the idea of giving advice on how to run a company. He’s given us a lot of support and connected us with people he’s met throughout his career.” The Yale Graduate Consulting group also provides aid to the executives of Refraction Capital. Even though there is a broad support network, members must learn independently and maintain commitment if the company is to remain viable. For now, the future of Refraction Capital LLC remains up in the air. The board members want to eventually enter the world of venture capital. Their ambition is to invest in start-ups and early-growth companies founded by students at accessible universities. Rajcok believes that Refraction Capital will have a competitive advantage in this market because they too are entrepreneurs. The company’s continuity strategy has not yet been solidified. Younger students may eventually replace the founding members, or current leaders may remain in charge of the company after graduating. If Refraction Capital wants to be successful, they must assemble a team of individuals who wish to marry their interest in investing with entrepreneurial ambitions.

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109 DESIGN TAKES ON SCOLIOSIS BY ANNY DOW

Visit room M109 in the Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design and you will probably run into Ellen Su (Art, TD’ 13), Levi DeLuke (Mechanical Engineering, PC ’14), and Sebastian Monzon (Political Science, PC ’14). It’s the room where—after months of researching, planning, designing, and discussing—their startup 109 Design was born. The 109 Design team got their start through the CEID’s summer fellowship—a program that gives students two thousand dollars to work on a project that they are passionate about. Su, DeLuke, and Monzon decided to create a brace monitoring device that measures and reports compliance data to patients and their physicians. “One of the biggest problems with scoliosis braces is that they aren’t worn as often as they should or as tightly as they should,” DeLuke said. “Our device can collect data on how the brace is being worn.” Su and DeLuke first met when the two of them 10 Yale Undergraduate Entrepreneur Magazine

cofounded Yale’s chapter of Design for America—a national network of students united by their desire to create local and social impact through design. DeLuke pitched his idea to participate in the VCP to Su and Monzon, his freshman year roommate. “We were all interested in design and making an impact,” Su said. “As part of DFA, we had been mentoring people, talking about design, but I hadn’t really had a good chance to go forward and really dig my hands into a project.” DeLuke found an opportunity for them to do just that. He himself struggled with scoliosis as a

child; it was an experience that motivated him to choose scoliosis treatment as the perfect domain for a research project. “What we had in mind was to solve a problem related to scoliosis treatment because we knew based on Levi’s experiences that there was relatively little innovation,” Monzon said. The team’s detailed design process was broken down into several parts. First, they spent two weeks conducting research on all aspects of scoliosis, reading as many scientific papers and articles as they could. Next, they synthesized the information from the research, identifying problem areas and issues in treatment. With that information, they rephrased their insights into “how can we” statements, focusing in on specific areas where they could make an impact.

Photo Credit: 109 Design

“We tried to identify areas we could improve on and come up with ideas to tackle those issues,” DeLuke said. Narrowing in on the right project was no easy task. “About a month into the summer fellowship, we were convinced that we were going to do a mobile scoliosis mini van,” Su said. “We were all prepared to get a van set up and drive around the country for a year, screening.” The team decided to create a device to increase the effectiveness of braces by monitoring the quality of the brace and the amount of time that patient’s wear it. Tracking how tightly the brace is being worn is crucial to the proper application of a brace for scoliosis treatment.

“We were talking to a lot of patients, doctors, really anyone in the area of scoliosis who could provide insight into the problems and potential ways to solve them,” Monzon said. “Basically we realized that compliance is singlehandedly the largest issue behind scoliosis treatment because noncompliance leads to several thousand surgeries a year. They’re very painful and very costly.” 109 Design’s device provides important information that they hope will allow doctors to treat patients more effectively and reduce the number of surgeries. With existing technologies, doctors cannot tell if the patient has been wearing the brace correctly, which can have a huge impact on treatment when patients are only seeing their doctors once every four to six months. After fleshing out their idea, the team went full steam ahead making prototypes in the CEID. They utilized a variety of tools, from 3D printers and electric sawdusters to electric mills and sewing machines in their hands-on approach to protoyping. “It’s definitely been a work in progress,” Su said. “We had a device that sort of worked at the end of the summer, but we’ve been working really hard to shrink the size. Now it’s about six times smaller than when we first started out.” The team is collaborating with two physicians at the Yale School of Medicine and hopes to get a clinical study up and running. They have also been working with the YEI and will continue their work on 109 Design as part of the YEI summer fellowship. “We have received great mentorship and support from the Yale Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design, and the Yale Entrepreneurial Insitute,” DeLuke said. “Both have made our work possible by bridging the gap between the classroom and real-world application.” The team is in the process of developing their market strategy for the scoliosis compliance device. However, once the first device is launched, the group hopes to potentially expand into other medical devices in similar and related fields. Yale Undergraduate Entrepreneur Magazine 11

Annotating Human Culture: A Q&A With Rap Genius BY AARON Z. LEWIS

In the startup world, everyone is looking for the next big thing. Yale grads Mahbod Moghadam (’04), Tom Lehman (’06), and Ilan Zechory (’06) think they’ve found it in Rap Genius—a website where thousands of users publicly annotate everything from Emerson to Eminem. Each line in a Rap Genius entry is a clickable link that reveals information about the many allusions and metaphors hidden beneath the surface of a text. With 1.4 million site visitors per day and $15 million in venture capital funds from Andreessen Horowitz, Rap Genius has expanded to include annotations of political speeches, poetry, legalese, and even art. The YE sat down with Mahbod, and Dan Berger (‘05) in a Brooklyn café to hear about Rap Genius’ wild ride.

At what point did Rap Genius go from being a side project to a full-blown company? Mahbod: About six months in, we applied to Y Combinator [a startup incubator] and we got rejected. That made us more hungry and more emotional. I was running out of money and I had been fired. So I had nothing else to work on, and I’d be working on Rap Genius all day. Tom had a crazy hedge fund job, and he reduced it to one day a week to work on the site.

whole day with Jay Z. Jay Z basically told us, I will get a verified account and explain my own lyrics if you give me 50% of the company. I was like, “get ... out of here.” He’s a goon. He thinks money will make him happy, but he doesn’t realize what he really wants is to be handsome.What really sealed the deal is when we went to Ben Horowitz’s [a prominent Silicon Valley investor] house. We got mad drunk with him three times. And those three times sealed the deal.

What was the hardest part about starting a company in the beginning? M: Nothing was hard; we were just doing it for fun. No pressure. If we had the pressure of thinking that we’re trying to build a business, we would’ve been constipated. Nothing would’ve ever come out.

T: Investment decisions are not decisions made on paper with calculus or excel. It’s really how you feel about the people underlying it. It’s the most fun thing; you can never complain because you’re living your dream. But it’s also very a hard thing—a burden on you. To constantly be pushing when things don’t look great. It also sucks because you have to change your goals. In the beginning, if you had told me we would get to this size, I’d be like “Oh my God that’s amazing!” But now, it’s like we have to get 100x as big as we are now. The goalpost keeps moving.

How do you go about raising money? What has the fundraising process been like? M: Nas was our first investor; we kick it with him all the time. He was the first verified artist on Rap Genius. The first time he saw it, we didn’t even explain anything to him, and he said, “This sh–t’s gonna be bigger than Twitter.” Our co-founder Illan kicked it the

How many people work for Rap Genius now? M: Five hundred thousand people

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have written explanations. Five or six thousand put it as their job on Facebook. We pay thirty, twenty-five of which are in New York. One is in Paris, running Rap Genius France. One is running Rap Genius Germany. What’s your approach to managing this startup? T: It’s based on two things: crowds and decetralization. The website itself is very decentralized. The main thrust of the product development is very centralized. We have to pick our priorities. We can’t just let people do whatever. It’s a mixed model. M: We’re corporate. But we try to be corporate thugs. There are seven developers. So those are the crown jewels of the employees. That’s who’s building the site. And they all report to Tom. And then there are fifteen non-developers and they all report to Illan. I’m just kind of the Peter Pan. I do whatever I want. I work a lot with the people who aren’t getting paid. Community development. So you really want to annotate everything? M: Yeah. By annotate we mean open a dialogue. People have conversations about stuff they’re interested

in. The famous people chime in with their fans listening to them via the verified accounts. Everyone’s just f––in’ around. It’s meant to be playful. It’s meant to get you to read closely. What have you been working on over the past year? Dan: The biggest over the past year project is that we launched different channels. In April, we launched News Genius, Rock Genius, Poetry Genius. And what are you most excited about going forward? M: Fashion Genius, Rap App, Art Genius. Art Genius is going to be built in 6 months from now and it’s going to let you annotate different parts of the canvas. T: iOS. That’s the whole thing. The whole website is a prototype—that’s what people don’t understand. The real thing is an app on your phone. 52% of traffic is mobile. 60% of that is iPhone. It’s going to be one of the biggest apps in the world. M: For an app to sell one million downloads is crazy. It’s like going platinum. And for us one million downloads is gonna be cakewalk. So it’s going to be the first time that in the tech community, people are going to go “holy sh–t.” Nobody believes us about our traffic. They think we’re lying or we’re gaming it somehow. But then the one million downloads is going to completely change the game. It’s going to make us the biggest deal in the world. It’s a guide to human culture—whether it’s music, poetry, speeches, current events—in your pocket, broken down. It’s an incredible idea.

Are you focusing at all on revenue? M: Not until we become one of the ten biggest websites. Right now, we’re the 93rd biggest website. When we’re in the ten biggest websites, we’ll worry about revenue. Eventually we want Nike to pay $20 million to have its own verified account. And they explain the Nike references in songs. And they pay us to feature it. The other idea we have is Enterprise Genius— to build closed versions of Rap Genius for the CIA to use, for Procter & Gamble to use. Then the most important thing that’s going to happen in the site’s

Do you feel your Yale education has been relevant? T: It gave us good taste. You hang out with different people. You understand the world better. Anyone can learn to program, as long as you’re fast on the computer. You don’t need to learn that in college. What you need to do in college is hang out with friends. Understand the trail of political Islam. I think Yale is very relevant — it’s just an illustration that you can’t go straight towards the goal in life. You have to take the winding road. M: Yale is close reading. At Princeton, they teach you to

“This is the thing you have to understand about the magnitude of the opportunity here: we can be the web site people visit to understand all of human culture.” life is about a year away. It’s when you can do annotations on other websites. You go to the New York Times and you can annotate any line, and it’s powered by Rap Genius. What was the entrepreneurial culture at Yale like when you were around? T: When the YES came out, everyone gave it a lot of props. But by entrepreneur, they meant start your own hedge fund. Now, everyone wants to do their own app. In our day, finance was insanely huge. They’d have these info sessions at the Omni Hotel. And everyone would be there with their leather-bound things. Consulting, finance, law school, done. Now, I think it’s changed.

dress boat shoes and country club. At Harvard, they teach you to be powerful. At Yale, all you learn is how to read a text closely and take it apart line by line. Yale is intellectual. Harvard is corporate. Princeton is corporate. And that’s why we haven’t built a corporation. We’re corporate thugs. We’ve built a society of intellectuals. [Rap Genius] is more like a university. What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? T: Worse is better. A lot of people think, “Oh I’ve got to come out this perfect jewel. I have to protect it until it’s perfect and then release it. Otherwise, I’ll be embarrassed.” If you’re not embarrassed, you waited too long. Get it out there.

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STYLISH SCIENCE:

HOW ONE YALE STARTUP IS DRAWING GIRLS TO STEM By Michelle Kelrikh it all began when Olivia Pav- ial Institute. Those receiving the fel- venture was one of eight chosen in a co-Giaccia ’16 was a junior in high school. While doing research in a neurobiology lab, she documented her experience in a blog entitled “LabCandy: A Girl’s Guide to Some Seriously Sweet Science.” One day, Pavco-Giaccia posted a picture of her own homemade, bedazzled goggles in order to get people’s attention. The result was unexpected—hundreds of young girls from all around the country commented on the post, asking about the goggles. It was at this moment that Pavco-Giaccia recognized the opportunity to get other girls interested in science. Something as simple as fun, exciting lab gear could make a difference. “Throughout both elementary and high school, I was very lucky to have a series of female science teachers and mentors who encouraged my interest in STEM,” Pavco-Giaccia says. She knew other girls were not so lucky, and hoped she could do something to change that. The idea was intriguing, but at the time, Pavco-Giaccia did not have the means to make it a legitimate operation. When her freshman year at Yale rolled around, she found her answer on a flyer that would change everything. The flyer advertised summer fellowships at the Yale Entrepreneur-

lowships would receive the funding and advising resources necessary to make their ideas a reality. Confident that she was onto something with her fabulous lab gear, Pavco-Giaccia made an appointment with Alena Gribskov, YEI’s Program Director, to pitch her idea for the venture she named LabCandy. Despite the fact that Pavco-Giaccia only had a general idea of LabCandy’s path to launch, Gribskov, along with YEI’s Lead Venture Mentor Wes Bray, were “wonderful resources” and encouraged Pavco-Giaccia to refine her ideas and apply. The process turned out to be a lengthy one. Pavco-Giaccia submitted the formal application, which asked for a description of her business model, the scale of potential demand, and other information that would allow the YEI selection committee to assess the strength and maturity of the venture concept. After LabCandy passed the preliminary round of consideration, she then participated in an interview with 10-15 YEI advisors, mentors and business leaders. “This interview was tough, with questions regarding business models and the viability of my venture, but it was also filled with a lot of supportive energy and enthusiasm,” she says. Eventually, she would find out that her

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competitive pool of 42 applications. When asked on her thoughts as to why LabCandy was chosen, Pavco-Giaccia says “girl-centric, STEM-related products and activities are now proving to be hot consumer picks in the current market” and beyond that, her venture differentiated itself in that it was one of the few that was not technology-oriented. “I also strongly believe that LabCandy’s mission of stoking young girls’ interest in science resonates with many folks in Yale’s business and academic communities,” she adds. Pavco-Giaccia partnered with May Li Wall Lynch from the Savannah College of Art and Design to come up with a more cohesive vision for LabCandy. After working with the program’s mentors and fellow entrepreneurs, Pavco-Giaccia and Wall Lynch decided to expand their product line. Their big move during the fellowship was introducing the “Combo Pack,” which consists of a fashionable lab coat, a storybook, and the bedazzled lab goggles that started it all. Girls buy Combo Packs based on the LabCandy character that they identify with the most. The four “Candy Chicks” range from Alexis, a girly-girl who loves pink and dressup, to Zoe, a rocker girl. This allows

Photo Credit: LabCandy

for girls of all different personalities to get excited about science because they can find someone to connect to. The “Candy Chicks” appear in storybooks that recount an adventure where they work together to solve a crucial problem using science. At the end of each story, there are instructions for a DIY science experiment/demonstration that mirrors the science in the story line and that each girl scientist can try at home, all while wearing the same colorful and fun lab gear that the “Candy Chicks” are wearing in the storybook. She emphasizes the importance of getting girls interested while they are young and gears the storybooks towards kids in kindergarten through third grade. “By the time they are in middle school or high school, girls have already beginning to lose interest. They already have the stereotypical image of what a scientist is ingrained in their mind. And unfortunately, it’s not a female,” she says. LabCandy’s current operations

are funded mainly by founders’ friends and friends-of-friends, but Pavco-Giaccia is working toward launching a crowd funding campaign this summer that will enable the venture to move into fuller scale production phase. She is optimistic that LabCandy has a big future, because she is confident in her business model and these girl-centered STEM products are so hot right now. She hopes LabCandy will eventually be a large, nation-wide company. But for the time being, she wants to make sure that all small problems are worked out before distribution on a grand-scale begins. Regardless, Pavco-Giaccia says that there are far more preorders than can currently be filled. Pavco-Giaccia is currently working with a Yale School of Art student on improving the graphic design of the storybook characters, along with two organizations who are helping her spread the word: the National Girl’s Collaborative Project (NGCP) and the National

Academy of Sciences (NAS). NGCP reaches out to teachers and community organizations across the U.S. to encourage them to get girls involved with science. NAS also has its own book series for girls in middle school, and they have been strongly supportive of LabCandy’s storybooks. Eventually, Pavco-Giaccia hopes to leverage the connections between Lab Candy’s storybook series and NAS’s series. Pavco-Giaccia’s passion for getting girls involved in male-dominated STEM is admirable. She is focused on LabCandy spreading a message and creating a close community. One day she hopes the initiative will be one that spans from the simplest “combo packs” to educational programs in a variety of media. LabCandy hopes to change the statistic that only 24% of STEM jobs, which tend to be higher-paying, are held by women. Even at a place like Yale, 57% of STEM majors are male. LabCandy is not just a company; it’s a movement.

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YHACK BEHIND THE SCENES By Nicole Clark On November 8, over 800 people from across the continent flooded to Yale’s West Campus for YHack, Yale’s own hackathon. Though the competition didn’t start until 5:30 p.m., the scramble to secure a good spot began immediately. Competitors knew they would be there until 5 p.m. the next day—programming for 20 hours straight. Office spaces and chairs became rare commodities as teams set up their working spaces and discussed strategies for their projects. Computer programmers like the ones at YHack have saved “hacking” from its old, sinister connotations. Once associated with dark rooms and illicit activities, the word has undergone a rebranding. Now, it signifies witty problem solving and playful cleverness. The focus isn’t just on the act of programming itself; hackers aim to achieve excellence and explore the limits of what’s possible. At hackathons, teams of coders must take an idea from concept to reality in less than a day. The bottom floor of the hackathon space was filled with booths from the competition’s main sponsors. Team members could take breaks from coding in order to learn more about companies they were interested in working

for. Many of the booths gave out free items with the hope that students would integrate them into their software programs. Teams received a number of computer controlled LED light and promised to program apps that would control their color patterns. The variety of programming languages and combinations with application programming interfaces (APIs) allowed for an infinite number of possibilities. (APIs specify how software components interact with each other, enabling apps to be connected to popular websites like Facebook). I heard a large range of ideas from a file sharing system that linked multiple Dropbox accounts to a multiplayer video game, but the program that really caught my eye aimed to solve a problem felt by college students across the nation—the removal and replacement of red solo cups. I shadowed Yale Students Apurv Suman, Jason Brooks, Kevin Abbot, and Pranav Maddi in the beginning five hours of their coding process. A seemingly silly idea quickly became a serious endeavor. After they downloaded OpenCV, a library of programming functions that processes images, they began tackling the issue of how the

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THEY DIDN’T JUST LEARN IN THE CLASSROOM, BUT USED THEIR OWN INTEREST TO FUEL THEIR CREATIONS.

cups would be recognized in the program. Once color became the method of recognition, the team had to wrangle with differentiating between the red of a solo cup, and the red in other parts of the image. Then came the task of replacing the image with their agreed substitute—a Coca Cola can—and integrating overlapping items in the final picture. It was fascinating to watch as the team switched their approach in response to problems that arose. Much of it involved specialization of labor. All of it involved innovation. I met the directors of HackNY, PennApps, HackPSU, and HackMIT, all of whom had become friends through hacking. First, they attended each other’s hackathons

as competitors, and then eventually became directors after being recognized for their successes. The Hack MIT directors, Zain Shah and Ishaan Gulrajani, were the winners of Penn Apps in 2012, created an app called Mosaic that allowed pictures to be viewed panoramically across the screens of several Apple products. Despite their diversity of backgrounds and experiences, these leaders all seemed to think along the same lines. They learned everything they knew about programming from learning on their own and going to hackathons. Not all of them were computer science majors. They told me that they felt they were adapting to a rapidly evolving field by learning as they created. They didn’t just learn in

the classroom, but used their own interests to fuel their creations. It was invigorating, as a student who is usually shunned out from these types of events, to be invited— even persuaded—to take part in the next hackathon. I was surprised to learn that YHack is just in its second year. Charles Jin, the Director of YHack, described to me the process of coordinating such a large event. The biggest challenge, he explained, was getting sponsors to take the hackathon seriously since Yale isn’t yet recognized as having such a strong presence in the computer science community. Thanks to YHack and the innovators that participated in it, that image is evolving.

Photo credit: Yale

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A DAY WITH THE FOUNDERS OF WARBY PARKER By Jeﬀ Qiu It’s a warm fall morning when we reach the headquarters of Warby Parker on 6th Avenue, right on the edge of Hudson Square in downtown Manhattan. There are eleven of us from the Yale Entrepreneurial Society here to meet Neil Blumenthal, one of the company’s founders and CEOs. Blumenthal is sitting across from me at a round table. He’s excited to talk about Warby Parker and the story of how he got there. Of course, he’s sporting a sharp pair of glasses. Blumenthal and his cohorts at Warby Parker have turned a simple idea into a fullblown business. By selling designer glasses directly to consumers at much lower prices than the competition, they’ve eliminated the middleman and attracted a loyal online following with their elegant designs. This took them from a small e-commerce site to a company with 5 physical branches and nearly 200 employees. According to New York Magazine, they were valued in the neighborhood of $300 million earlier this year. The founders of Warby Parker have certainly come a long way since they began running makeshift showrooms out of the founders’ apartments in downtown Manhattan. With a relatively small slice of the $16 billion optical industry, they also have a lot of potential to expand. One of the employees comes over and welcomes us into their headquarters and showroom on the second floor. It looked exactly as you might imagine a startup would

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look like—broad windows letting the sun in on a massive open work area, the central hub of activity. Bare floor that felt vaguely industrial. Rows of simple, sleek workstations on long desks that seemed elegant in a casually put-together way. The setup seemed ephemeral, as if it could have been put up or taken down in a day. As we would later hear from Blumenthal, branding matters. People’s perceptions of the brands they use are linked to their identities. For these entrepreneurial millennials in their sleek, new-age warehouse, everything they use is a metaphor for who they are. Following the economic crisis of 2008, the startup landscape changed as investors became far more risk-averse. It was harder for a promising idea to become a successful business. But for Warby Parker, the idea was there from the start. It just took some time, entrepreneurial spirit, and the epiphany that brought it all together. After graduating from college with an interest in public policy, Blumenthal joined VisionSpring, an organization that distributes affordable eyeglasses to people in developing countries. “Because I was working for a smaller organization that covered a lot of regions, they gave me a lot more responsibility early on,” says Blumenthal. He talks about his work in India, and how he had to manage his employees. The owners hired a local to deliver the shipments of glasses, but he was slow to

respond and didn’t do his job properly. Blumenthal tried to work with him, but ultimately had to fire him. Those early, formative experiences in the developing world planted the seeds of an idea that would grow into something much larger he could’ve ever expected. In 2008, Neil was just getting started at the Wharton School as an MBA student. Beyond the networking and the recruiting meetings, he found a close circle of friends early on during his first semester. The idea of selling eyeglasses came to him within weeks, and his friends thought it was a promising lead. They spent a lot of time understanding and researching the optical industry so they could best position their own company for success. Soon, their efforts began to attract attention. Warby Parker offered a novel service: an interested customer could sample the lenses from the comfort of his or her own home. Neil and his friends would send out the designs that the customers wanted to try (5 pairs at a time) and allow them to send back the ones they didn’t want. This turned out to be immensely popular, and they quickly ran out of eyeglass samples. In a world where marketers push customers to buy things as soon as possible, their plan to slow the pace of sales was a radical one. Oddly enough, this didn’t deter the dedicated shoppers, who emailed them about stopping by their physical showroom. Their enthusiasm surprised Neil. “We didn’t have a showroom, just the living room of our apartment, so we set up a stand on the table for people to look at. We found that the intimate setting helped people open up about what they thought. They told us what they wanted and how they wanted it. And we listened!”

After being featured in Vogue and GQ, the dramatic increase in publicity helped the company truly take off and gain a greater number of followers in what was, at the time, a unlikely enterprise. True to its VisionSpring roots, Warby Parker donates a pair of glasses for every pair that they sell. For Neil, it’s more than just doing business. “It’s about showing people that you can build profitable and scalable businesses while doing good.” As one of the most prominent new businesses in the post-recession era, Warby Parker has been a success story in an inauspicious entrepreneurial landscape. Says Neil, “Everyone knows that the vast majority of companies don’t make it. But as an entrepreneur, I tend to be irrationally optimistic.” It is a fitting kind of entrepreneurial spirit for a company who is literally changing how we see the world.

“IT’S ABOUT SHOWING PEOPLE THAT YOU CAN BUILD PROFITABLE AND SCALABLE BUSINESSES WHILE DOING GOOD.”

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/kilgub

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SOM Professor Talks Entrepreneurship By Lucia Herrmann Though David Cromwell is a self-proclaimed Type B personality, he was once the President and CEO of J.P. Morgan & Co. In 1996, Cromwell—an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Management (SOM)—left Wall Street after growing tired of its impossible hours and money-hungry youngsters. Cromwell decided to take the knowledge he gathered on Wall Street and transform it into a classroom experience here on campus. Since coming to Yale, Cromwell has won the “Teacher of the Year” award four times and teaches courses that have grown to be some of the most popular on campus. Cromwell began teaching at Yale by mere coincidence. With a house in New Jersey and a farm in Maine, New Haven is the perfect halfway point between the two. When Cromwell retired from JP Morgan at age 51 and decided he wanted to try his hand at teaching. A friend introduced him to Yale’s School of Management, and he was able to fill a gap in the school’s curriculum at the time. They were lacking a private equity class—an area that was quickly becoming one of intense interest. “I was hired on the spot,” he recalls, and began his first semester teaching “Venture Capital and Private Equity Investments.” After a year of teaching the class, Cromwell won his first “Teacher of the Year” award as a write-in candidate. The widespread appraise of his class prompted SOM to encourage Cromwell to teach another course. “I figured I could probably teach the other side of private equity,” he says, alluding to his “Entrepreneurial Business Planning” course. Both these classes, Cromwell emphasizes, are about learning the soft skills necessary in the business world. 22 Yale Undergraduate Entrepreneur Magazine

“The number one skill,” he says, “is that you have to have people trust you.” Whether teachers, clients, peers, customers, or coworkers, it’s impossible to get very far without widespread trust. Cromwell’s classes are unique in the amount of feedback students receive. He says that all his students praise the amount of feedback as “the most they’ve ever received in any of their classes ever.” Cromwell uses music lessons as a metaphor to explain his teaching style. He says that when trying to teach a complicated subject, it’s important to demonstrate a little and then allow students to try for themselves. Cromwell doesn’t use any teaching assistants in evaluating the assigned group projects. Instead, teaching assistants assist only in filtering through the students’ peer reviews on each other’s strengths and weaknesses— a process that adds to the already extensive feedback they receive from Cromwell himself. This, he hopes, can best prepare them for the startup world. “Startups are a very risky business and sometimes they crash and you’re left with nothing,” he says. Most startups according to Cromwell fail, and when they do, fail quickly. An entrepreneur’s job, he insists, is to take that failure, learn from it, and start again with just as much enthusiasm and a little more savvy the second (or seventh) time around. It’s not necessarily the idea, but rather the execution. To try and avoid the crashand-burn, “you need the right people,” he says. Two, preferably three people is optimal to make a startup work. If it’s just two people, it needs to be “you and someone that’s totally different from you,” to make sure as many bases as possible are covered.

Photo credit: Jeff Mauorone

A techie needs a salesperson and a salesperson always needs something to sell, so this sort of paring works to any startup’s advantage. The founders’ ages are also important: Cromwell notes that most people start at around age thirty, when they have completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at business schools like SOM. In order to succeed, young founders must have an exceptionally strong team or an even bigger idea. Even with the right team, the right idea, and the right implementation, Cromwell is quick to note that a startup’s success is very much tied to the economic climate. If the economy is doing well, people are more likely to start their own companies and therefore more likely to have something take off. Cromwell notes that most jobs are in startups and thinks that around half of all billionaires have, at one point or another, started their own companies. America has always had pioneers pushing the boundaries, moving west, and resisting the mundane.

“Entrepreneurship is at the heart of the American spirit,” he says, and it only makes sense that entrepreneurship has and continues to thrive. As we wrap up our conversation, Cromwell tells me with a huge smile, “Boy is it fun when it does work! The difference between Wall Street and startups is that even when Wall Street does work it isn’t fun.” Startups give the chance for new companies, new jobs, the means to make people happy, make money. Cromwell really gets excited talking about the possibilities of entrepreneurship and how he has seen first-hand the entrepreneurial spirit change the surrounding New Haven start-up scene. Cromwell notes that the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute has become a formidable presence on campus and some small-scale hedge funds have begun to make their mark in the entrepreneurial investment scene. “Creating a new business,” Cromwell says, “is rewarding as well as enriching.” Yale Undergraduate Entrepreneur Magazine 23

Photo credit: Chairigami

FURNITURE FOR THE FUTURE By Anny Dow

Zach Rotholz (MC ‘11) is no ordinary origami hobbyist. Using his mechanical engineering knowhow, Rotholz is building a successful business, one cardboard chair at a time. Rotholz started Chairigami, an eco-friendly cardboard furniture store, in 2011 shortly after graduating from Yale. With an innovative idea and a ton of cardboard, Rotholz has created a brand of unique furniture that is lightweight, flat-packing, and recyclable. The YE sat down with Rotholz to discuss the inspiration behind Chairigami, the development of his business, and his advice for budding entrepreneurs.

a really cool internship at this place called Adaptive Design, it’s a nonprofit, and work with children with disabilities and make custom adaptive equipment to support them in school and at home. They do it primarily with cardboard because it’s very easy to customize, it’s really low cost, and you don’t need a lot of heavy-duty machinery to manufacture it. So basically, you could easily customize pieces low cost, and you don’t need a lot of heavy-duty machinery to manufacture it. So basically, you could easily customize pieces of furniture for these kids. I did an internship there, totally loved it, fell in love with How did you come up with the idea the idea of corrugated as a strucfor the company? tural material, and then brought I started my junior summer. I did that back as a senior project.

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As a mechanical engineering major, I was designing a modular furniture system, and the central question I was targeting was how can we create flat-packing, lightweight, reconfigurable furniture for college students that’s also inexpensive. Then my friend suggested that I go to the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. So I did a summer fellowship at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute the year after my graduation and learned a lot about business, got some really good mentors, made a lot of really good connections at Yale. One of the best connections I made was at the final presentation for the summer fellowship, where I met the head of Yale real estate, who opened up the opportunity for me to have a retail space in New Haven. It was such a great trial just to see the product not just as a design project but also as being used by people. So I developed the idea and obviously expanded beyond just chairs, and tables and everything from beds to bunk beds to sofas to shelves, all sorts of projects germinated and it grew from a really small business to something that completely supports me.

Do you have any advice for student entrepreneurs? If you have an idea or something you want to start, don’t have any sort of preconceptions about how you might start the business. Going organically, just testing on the small scale. Let’s say you’re a food guy, and you want to do some really cool new restaurant. Start really small, maybe by cooking for your friends, or do a food cart, selling food locally. Start testing your ideas really, really early and often, because the more repetitions the easier it’s going to be. Don’t have this concept that you need to raise a bunch of money so that you can launch it all at once. Just grow with your idea. Because then you learn early what you like and don’t like about it, and how it works. Don’t be scared to try it. Even if it’s not fully fleshed out, if you have an idea for a planter or pot, make it out of cardboard or coat hangers and test it in your room and see if it works. Don’t think you have to make it perfectly.

Also, have a really good support network of friends that you trust, that you can bounce ideas off of. Sometimes it’s a little lonely being an entrepreneur. You can What do you think is the biggest challenge you’ve faced always learn a lot of stuff on your own, you can always so far, either with design or getting the company started? do the research, but it’s a lot easier if you just ask peoI would say for me, it’s balancing the workload—de- ple. Reach out, you don’t have to be totally indepenciding how much I want to take on myself and how dent. Asking a lot of questions, reaching out to people, much do I want other people to do. I kind of like hav- that’s part of forming a really good support network ing my hands in everything so I’m a bit of a lone rang- for yourself. er here, doing things by myself. But I’m always asking, “Should I hire somebody, should I keep it small? How do I want to develop the business so it’s doing what I want it to do, but I’m also supporting myself and it’s not too much for me to handle?” I don’t want to be the guy who’s just handling the logistics of mass-scale production. I still want to be an idea guy. What are your thoughts on the entrepreneurship culI can spend all day here and never go home ever like I ture at Yale? did last year and get burned out. It’s really important The Yale entrepreneurship program is really strong. to just take time and take a breather, get inspired, meet I feel like it’s grown a lot since I’ve been at Yale. The new people, get new ideas. I try to make it as simple final presentations at YEI keep on getting better and as possible. I guess it’s about figuring out how to take better; there’s more people there, there’s definitely a something that you see every day and keep looking at culture. I think Yale’s been really supportive. The busiit a new way. How to not get bored of myself. You have ness school is also reaching out, and there’s a lot more to really re-imagine it every single day to keep it inter- integration of different disciplines. We have business esting and keep new ideas coming. school students meeting with undergrads, engineers

“JUST GROW WITH YOUR IDEA ... DON’T BE SCARED TO TRY IT.”

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meeting with other people—a lot of different disciplines getting together. That’s what I would like to see more of, these sort of cross-disciplinary teams working together. If there was some campus-wide competition where you had an engineer, a business school student, a forestry student and they worked on a business together, I think that’d be really cool.

“YOU HAVE TO REALLY RE-IMAGINE IT EVERY SINGLE DAY TO KEEP IT INTERESTING AND KEEP NEW IDEAS COMING.”

Where do you see Chairigami going in the future? I have no idea where I see Chairigami going. I live by the seat of my pants. I’m just kind of along for the ride. No, I definitely see Chairigami going more in the consulting route, where I’m a custom designer doing one-offs for people and solving design problems versus being a manufacturer and a retailer. So definitely focusing more on ideas and problem solving. Any last advice? Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Go out there and build stuff.

Photo credit: Chairigami

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“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” —Alan Kay

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