Student Uprising

Drawing encouragement from his undergraduate entrepreneurship class, Sikes started taking his camera to community events in his small college town of Conway, Ark., located about 25 miles northwest of Little Rock. After snapping crowd shots at local picnics and ball games, Sikes would rush back to his college's darkroom and develop the pictures, then offer them for sale at the next community gathering. By graduation day Sikes had saved enough money to open a small photographic studio specializing in children's portraits. "I did 23 ball teams Saturday morning," the ebullient Sikes reports while sitting after hours in his now well-equipped studio amid the din of an incessantly ringing telephone.

When Sikes recently considered opening another studio, in a nearby town, he went back to college to talk the idea over with his old entrepreneurship professor, Don Bradley, who quickly dispatched a student team -- like one Sikes had been on years earlier -- to conduct a market study.

Similarly, when Wilton E. Blake II, 28, returned home to Cincinnati after earning his law degree at Howard University, he immediately went to visit his old entrepreneurship professor, Charles Matthews, at the University of Cincinnati, where Blake, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, had earned his undergraduate degree. Despite having landed a job at one of Cincinnati's most prestigious law firms, the young lawyer, who'd served as editor of his law school's student newspaper, The Barrister, wasn't satisfied. "I wanted to create something of my own," he explained over breakfast in a downtown Cincinnati diner.

When Blake's friend, lawyer Eric Kearney, 32, approached him with the idea of taking over and reviving NIP, or News, Information, and Pictures, a venerable but struggling news and features magazine targeted toward African American readers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, Blake took the idea to Matthews, who agreed to put several student teams to work hammering out the business strategy.

"The students who help us have contributed a great deal," says Kearney, now NIP's publisher. "They bring fresh approaches and new ideas." The student teams recruited by NIP have worked on such key marketing issues as determining who reads the magazine and what editorial features are the most appealing. "I'm often surprised by what they teach us," Blake notes. He was startled, for example, to discover that the homespun recipes included in each issue mainly as an afterthought were actually one of the most popular parts of their product. "I never would have guessed that," he says. Armed with the marketing data, NIP's owners and editors have beefed up their food section and recruited advertisers interested in those readers. Since Kearney and Blake took over the publication, last year, paid circulation has tripled, to more than 10,000, allowing the magazine to hire some full-time staffers.

If there is a mother lode for student entrepreneurs, it is the burgeoning market for Internet-related products. Noting the odd generational reversal of fortune taking place on the Internet, Williams College economics professor Dick Sabot smiles when he says, "If you have a Web venture and you don't have young people prominently involved, most investors will likely figure you don't know what you're talking about."

An extreme recent example is Yahoo!, the popular Internet directory started by two graduate students at Stanford and currently located in Sunnyvale, Calif. Both Jerry Yang, now 27, and David Filo, 30, ironically credit procrastination as the most critical factor in their success. The students figured that one good way to burn time and avoid studying would be to compile a computerized list of their favorite on-line destinations, which they later shared with fellow students. Although they didn't advertise the list, the number of digital visitors accessing their engineering-department student workstation doubled in the first month and kept right on doubling every month thereafter. Finally, Stanford administrators had seen enough. "They told us we were crashing their system and that we'd have to move the thing off campus," Yang recalls. Not surprisingly, the partners soon found a venture capitalist who sensed a commercial value in an on-line enterprise that was already attracting a million visitors each week. The students dropped out of school, accepted an initial $1-million investment, spurned lucrative takeover offers from the likes of America Online and Netscape Communications, and set their sights on becoming titans of the new media. The heady success of Filo and Yang does leave them perched on the far end of the student entrepreneurial bell curve -- at the initial public offering price of $13 on April 12, 1996, the Yahoo! founders' shares were valued at $132 million each.

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