Late last year, Jabara and an associate, a 25-year-old MBA candidate and entrepreneurship instructor at WSU named Verne Harnish, concluded that a national organization for student entrepreneurs would be valuable as an informational clearing-house for what the two perceived to be an increasing number of entrepreneurially minded students across the nation.
"We'd seen studies indicating that even two years ago there wasn't enough interest to start entrepreneurship groups," Harnish recalls. "But when we actually got out to the schools, we found the organizations springing up all over. Everybody I talked to said, 'Oh, we were just talking about the same thing the other night in the dorm.' " Students at the University of Michigan, in fact, were about to launch their own national effort when they heard that Harnish and Jabara had beaten them to the punch. "It's just amazing how all of this came together at once," Harnish mused, addressing several hundred entrepreneurship-club organizers at the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs's (ACE) first convention, held this past spring at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jimmy Enriquez was in the crowd. Like many others at the ACE meeting, he had organized his school's entrepreneurship club -- the University Entrepreneurial Association (UEA) -- primarily to suit his own needs. "It hit me that out of 10,000 business students on the UT campus, I'd only met maybe four or five people who were entrepreneurially minded." He smacks himself between the eyes with the palm of his hand. "I thought, Gosh, I've just got to meet some more before I graduate!" Why? "Contacts! People to share ideas with."
Enriquez and several like-minded buddies set up a booth in a busy hallway of the business administration building, hoping to coax a couple dozen more of their fellow undergraduate students "out of the wood-work" and into the newly formed organization. Within days, he and his friends had signed up half of what is now a 260-member association -- the largest club in the UT business department, and one of the largest on the entire campus.
"It was a great thing to watch," Enriquez recalls. "People would glance at us as they walked by, and their eyes would pop. Then they'd stop over, real energetic-like and say, 'Hey, that's me -- one of the dreamers, the lonely types, the weirdos!" Dreamers who, like Enriquez, doodle sales projections for as-yet-uninvented products in the margins of their notebooks. Loners who spend their free time casing businesses of all descriptions -- just to see where people are spending their money. Self-dubbed "weirdos" who do better rattling off a list of the nation's top 10 venture capitalists than naming the two teams that played in last year's Super Bowl. Enriquez found all of the anecdotes comfortingly familiar. " Sheesh, what a relief! I was beginning to think I had a problem or something . . . ."
What brings students to the meetings is the chance to discuss ventures, to hear what others are doing, and perhaps to offer some help. When, for example, two graduate students at the University of Michigan who had developed a human-powered vehicle called Pegasus (which has attracted considerable attention both in the United States and abroad) needed technical advice on starting a business, they went to, among other places, the Entrepreneurship Club. But the high point of each agenda is the time that most groups set aside for the impromptu airing of ideas -- no matter how half-baked or off-the-wall. The critiques are speedy and straightforward. Many a would-be entrepreneur's better mousetrap has been greeted with boos, groans, and raspberries -- although approval is often registered almost as boisterously. At Wichita State's ACE meetings, you know your notion is a hit when you have to talk louder to be heard over the dozens of snapping fingers. Attend a few of these free-for-alls, says WSU's Harnish, "and you learn real fast how to separate the dealmakers from the flakes."
Not everybody in these organizations runs a company, or even plans to do so in the near future. Only about 30% of Enriquez's cohorts in the UEA, for example, are in business for themselves. Another 10% are "sort of between companies," as Enriquez wryly puts it. The rest are simply testing the waters -- trying to find out if an entrepreneurial lifestyle feels right for them. Some will write business plans; others will not. But most say that, no matter what their path will be, they hope to carry with them certain values that they identify as part and parcel of being an entrepreneur.
To students like Jeff Mulligan, the Babson disco operator; or Scott Mize, a Harvard University student who took a leave from school to launch his own software company, entrepreneurship is a reflection of both personal and societal goals. "I hope I'm part of a new wave of entrepreneurs," says Mize. "One that is as concerned with human values as the bottom line." Muligan agrees, adding, "To me, money's only important as a way of keeping score. I'm just as proud of the money I've been able to pay other students as I am of the money I've made myself." In the five years he has been in business -- first in custom bumper stickers, then in furniture storage, and now in entertainment -- Mulligan has paid out $10,000 in student wages.
